El Duque and María Julia met on the bus on the way to a ball game. “There was a bus that left from the hospital for the stadium,” she said. “I saw this man with a little caramel-colored hat and a gold tooth and I asked who he was. They said, ‘That’s El Duque. He’s come here to play baseball.’ He got my attention. We became friends. We fell in love. Before you know it we were married and we had two sons.” The marriage didn’t last long, though. El Duque played around. He drank. The provincial league serves as a kind of minor-league system for the National Series, and El Duque moved up. By then, Arnaldo and Orlando rarely saw their father. He was everywhere and he was nowhere. But when he played downtown at Estadio Latinoamericano, María Julia invariably would gather up the boys. Her marriage was over, her husband was gone, but she figured that it was still important that they see their father play. So she dragged them down to the bus stop in Wajay -- Arnaldo strapped to one hip, Orlando to the other -- and waited to make the hour-long journey into downtown Havana to see her ex-husband, the absent father of two boys, play baseball.

"Marriage is one thing," she told Sanchez and me years later. "Baseball is another."

It was now around noon at the Hotel Las Tunas. El Duque was saying that he played seventeen seasons in the National Series. Cuba's official baseball guide shows that he played nine. It shows that he compiled a 26-24 record with a 2.52 ERA as a pitcher. As a hitter, he batted .238 with 6 homers in 1,087 at-bats. By all accounts, those numbers do not nearly reflect his ability. Pedro Chavez, a postrevolutionary star, hit off El Duque dozens of times. "He had a tremendous curveball." he said. "And if he didn't beat you with his arm he beat you with his bat." The statistics probably do reflect the way El Duque squandered his talent. As he grew older, he hit the bottle more frequently. After his career ended, he drifted around the country, working at times as a pitching coach or an assistant. When he was around his son Orlando, who rarely drank, he would steal off for a nip, and Orlando would chase him down and chastise him. To friends and relatives, it was as if their roles were reversed. "Orlando was taking care of him," said Minosito.

El Duque lit another Aroma, which smelled as if someone had pitched a tire into a burning fireplace. "Don't tell Orlando that I'm smoking." he said.

People were starting to gather around the pool, not guests but dozens of privileged Cubans with dollars sent by their families in the States or earned in the tourist sector or perhaps on the black market. The plastic cups kept coming. El Duque was slurring his words. He argued with the waitresses, hurled insults at the young women in their bathing suits and their makeup. He told me that Marlon was like my nephew now, that I would be his agent in the States when Marlon negotiated his contract with the major leagues. Marlon had gone off to take a swim, and when he got back we helped his father stand up, threw his arms around our shoulders and helped him across the deck of the pool under the bright, blistering sun, through the hotel and into a cab. El Duque wanted to stop at a friend's house along the way, but Marlon talked him out of it. By the time we got him home, the interview was clearly over for the day.

The subject of El Duque came up one day during an interview with Euclides Rojas, Cuba's all-time saves leader. Rojas left the island on a crowded boat in 1994 and drifted at sea for five days before the U.S. Coast Guard rescued him and his family. He once roomed with the young El Duque and knew the father as well. He said matter-of-factly that there were a lot of men like El Duque in Cuba. "They were successful ballplayers once, but they didn't have the time to get an education and now they have nothing to do," he said. "They have no way of making a living. So they drink and they die."

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