Arnaldo Hernández, the original El Duque, wanted to do the interview at the Hotel Las Tunas, a hulking monument to socialism that looked as if it had been transplanted from Kazakhstan. He brought along Marlon, who turned out to be all of fifteen (El Duque settled on the name Marlon after reading an item about Marlon Brando in Juventud Rebelde). We decided to sit by the pool, and moved a white plastic table into the only sliver of shade to be found. It was broiling. As we were settling in, El Duque said: “You are going to find that I am a very complicated man.” The bar wasn’t open yet, but he persuaded a waitress to bring him a double shot of rum. The drink arrived neat in a clear plastic cup. It was 9:43 a.m.

El Duque opened by saying that he was one of thirty-three children. His father, Virgilio Hernández, was a lieutenant in the Batista army, the head of a military base in the city of Sancti Spíritus. Young Arnaldo was shuttled between the two sides of his family, spending much of his time with his grandmother and his uncles, who owned gaming houses in Remedio, a sugar-mill town in Villa Clara. Arnaldo had at first wanted to be a basketball player, but that changed on October 8, 1956. He was eleven. With dozens of others he came up with a dime to watch Game 5 of the World Series between the Yankees and Dodgers on “the town TV.” It turned out to be the day that Don Larsen hurled the only no-hitter in Series history, a perfect game. “You could feel the silence at Yankee Stadium through the television,” El Duque said. “Back then, the Yankees had no blacks. They had one mulato, a light-skinned right fielder. I said to myself, ‘Coño, I’ll have to paint myself white to play for the Yankees.’ But that was always my dream. Larsen was my idol, and he inspired me to go forward in baseball. Today I have a son playing for the New York Yankees. Can you imagine?”

He motioned to Marlon, who was sipping a Coke. “And Marlon will be even greater,” he predicted. “If there is a team bigger than the New York Yankees, and I doubt there is, then Marlon will play on that team.”

By the time Arnaldo Hernández was Marlon’s age, he was playing shortstop for a beer company, La Cristal, and subsisting, he said, on fifteen Pepsis a day. He then moved to the province of Matanzas to play in the Liga Pedro Betancourt, an integrated circuit created as a response to the racism of the Amateur League. With the major leagues now beginning to integrate, the Liga Pedro Betancourt became a feeder system for clubs on the lookout for nonwhite talent. Tony Pérez played there, as did Tony Taylor, a versatile infielder who amassed 2,007 hits, mostly with the Phillies. El Duque played for Pasta Gravy, a toothpaste company. He was fifteen years old and wore number 26. It was then that he picked up the nickname that, like his number, he would pass on to his sons. Then, as today, nearly every Cuban had a nickname. They ranged from Manuel “Cocaína” García, a pitcher with an uncanny ability to anesthetize hitters, to the slugger Roberto “El Tarzan” Estalella. As El Duque tells it, one of his first coaches, Chico Fuentes, first tried to call him El Conde (the Count). “I was a campesino, and whenever anyone asked for me for anything, I’d say, ‘Take it,’ ” he recalled. “ ‘Toothpaste? Take it. You need some deodorant? Take it. A piece of ham, eat it.’ So one day Chico Fuentes said, ‘What a noble young man,’ and the first name he gave me was El Conde. But it didn’t sound right: El Conde Hernández. So then he decided to call me El Duque. He said, ‘You are now El Duque Hernández.’ I think it also came from Duke Snider. And from then on my real name disappeared.

“I was a rookie with aspirations to turn pro,” said El Duque. His ultimate goal was to play for the Sugar Kings, then vault into the majors. But the Cuban revolution interceded. After Castro came to power, El Duque’s father was arrested and put on trial for his involvement with Batista. “They gave him ninety-something years,” said El Duque. “He died in prison in Cienfuegos in 1973. I visited him every week to take him food.” The revolution also began to redefine the national sport. Fidel threw out the first ball at the Sugar Kings opener in 1960, but change was already in the air. The freighter La Coubre blew up in the Havana port that March, killing eighty-one, the Soviets had begun to establish diplomatic and economic ties with Castro, and although no one knew it yet, the CIA was formulating plans for the Bay of Pigs the following year. It wasn’t until January 14, 1962, that Castro made his famous comment while kicking off the reconfigured Cuban League: “This is a triumph of free baseball over slave baseball.” But the International League saw the writing on the wall and moved the Sugar Kings to Jersey City in the middle of a road trip during the 1960 season. El Duque said he was all but oblivious to politics—he was only fourteen, after all, when the revolution occurred—but he found himself a budding young baseball star in the middle of a transformation well beyond his comprehension. It was a transition to socialism that, among other things, could not accommodate his major-league dreams. The door was slamming shut without him even knowing it.

Instead of signing with the Yankees, he was invited to play for the Havana Psychiatric Hospital. Before the revolution, the hospital, which sprawls across several acres of southwest Havana, had been a notorious insane asylum called the Cuban Hospital for the Demented. It suffered some of the worst abuses of the Batista dictatorship. When Castro’s rebels threw open the doors, they found thousands of patients roaming the halls in a kind of medieval hell. There were few beds. Some patients were sleeping in their own feces. Others were half starved. Castro put the entire complex under Eduardo B. Ordáz, a decorated comandante, a physician-guerrilla who had supervised the construction of field hospitals in the Sierra Maestra. Under Ordáz, the hospital was to become a symbol of the revolution’s enlightened health care system. The number of patients was cut in half, and the staff and facilities were dramatically improved. But the hospital still had its sinister side: In the 1980s, political dissidents began to come forward with grim stories of electroshock therapy, involuntary psychotropic drug treatments and confinement alongside the truly, dangerously ill. The dissidents said they had been detained in the hospital’s Carbo-Servia ward, where a short, paunchy man known to inmates as El Enfermero (the Nurse) administered a daily cocktail of unspeakable torment.

Amaro Gómez Boix, an opposition journalist, told interviewers that he was detained in the ward after being arrested with ten unpublished manuscripts and a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Gómez described the therapy meted out by the Nurse, later identified as Heriberto Mederos: “Almost every day, his various assistants call out loudly the names of the unfortunate chosen who will be asked to lie down on the wet cement so that the electrical current will travel better. Mederos then fastens the electrodes and the entire process is performed routinely, which often entails overlooking the placement of a rubber bit in the prisoner’s mouth. It is no surprise then that when that first jolt of power zaps the prisoner’s body, his teeth grind down on his tongue, turning his mouth into a bloodied foam.”

The Miami Herald caught up with Mederos in 1992 working at, of all places, a convalescent home in Hialeah. He was sixty-nine. He recognized many of his accusers and admitted that he had administered the electroshock treatments on the bare floor, often without anesthesia, but—no surprise here—he said he was merely following orders. “In Cuba it’s normal not to give anesthesia,” he explained. “Besides, when the shock is applied, the person loses control of his bladder and bowels. We didn’t have the facilities to do it any better. That’s why it was done on the floor.”

Ordáz’s full name was Eduardo Bernabe Ordáz Ducúnge. He was a flamboyant man who came out of the Sierra wearing a cowboy hat and a beard and kept both for the next forty years. His two great passions were music and baseball, and he sought to include both in the hospital’s rehabilitation program. One of his first moves was to form a symphonic orchestra whose exclusive engagement would be to provide music for the patients. The orchestra, which grew to 115 players, played Wagner and Beethoven, war marches and show tunes. The American journalist David Abel caught one of the twice-weekly performances during the summer of 1998, the fourth decade of the orchestra’s surreal run. He found the aging musicians playing the “Spanish Military March” to an audience of four gardeners. “Beneath a specially built portico whose sallow paint has seen brighter days, the half-absent orchestra churns out tinny tunes on old, dented instruments and follows brittle handwritten music sheets,” Abel wrote. “Some players doze off during the three-hour performance’s frequent intermissions.”

The sports component of the rehabilitation program appears to have been more successful—if not for the patients, at least for the players. Ordáz built an outdoor track and a baseball stadium that resembled a well-tended minor-league park. On the outfield fence, where the advertisements for Red Lobster and the local Elks Club would go, he placed a slogan: sport is a factor in mental rehabilitation. He recruited some of the best players in the country. El Duque didn’t do anything except play ball. It was at the Havana Psychiatric Hospital that he learned to pitch, and where he met his first wife, María Julia, who was working at the hospital as a lab technician. Almost all of María Julia’s family had worked at the hospital at one time or another. Her grandfather was a cook in the 1930s. Her mother was a nurse as were several uncles and cousins. Her son Arnaldo would learn how to cut hair there. Her son Gerardo would work as a carpenter. And her son Orlando would work as a rehabilitation therapist for 207 pesos a month after Fidel Castro banned him from baseball for life in 1996.

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