Cuban Baseball and national identity: A nation of peloteros

Book Launch and seminar,

In the parks, bars, and cafes as well as homes, schools, and stadiums across Cuba, Cubans argue about baseball. These discussions are not just about baseball but what it means to be Cuban.

In this seminar, Thomas Carter introduced his new book on how baseball has played a significant role since the nineteenth century in Cuban society and in the formation of Cuban national identity and how it continues to resonate with everyday life and politics to this day.

Its associations with nation building, independence, revolution and a myriad of other values make Cubans what they are. It serves as a form of self-expression and a means for distinguishing themselves from others while providing a forum for negotiating relationships between citizen and state in the discourse of nationalism.

This evening’s seminar provided an overview of the historical trajectories of baseball in Cuba and its inherently Cuban values associated with the playing and watching of the sport.

Dr Thomas F Carter is a cultural anthropologist who earned his doctorate in anthropology in the desert southwest of the United States at the University of New Mexico. He has taught at several institutions in the US and UK and is currently Senior Lecturer at the Chelsea School in the University of Brighton. He is part of the first generation of anthropologists to conduct detailed ethnographic fieldwork in Cuba since the 1959 Revolution and the only one that studies interrelationships between nationalism, cultural identity and Cuban baseball. His ethnographic research in Havana (30 months) and Belfast (30 months) has made him a leading expert on the interplay of sport, identity politics, transnational migration, and spectacles at the local, national, international levels.

A DVD of this seminar is available please send a cheque for £5 made payable to 'London Metropolitan Univeristy' to:

International Institute for the Study of Cuba
31 Jewry St,
London EC3N 2EY

To buy this book on Amazon: Click HERE