From the April 15th Boston Globe:
By Bob Hohler, Globe
Staff | April 15,
2009
A wise old woman, her cheeks wet with
tears, warned Luis Tiant how much it would hurt to go home.
One of the most endearing folk heroes in
the history of New England sports, the Red Sox great was poised to defy the
governments of the United States and Cuba and sneak back to his boyhood home in
Havana after 46 years in exile. He would make the journey on his 67th birthday,
searching for a missing piece of his soul.
"There's such misery there," the woman, a
Cuban refugee in Miami, cautioned Tiant on the eve of his journey. "Even if you
don't want to cry, tears will come out of your eyes."
In an intimate social history that evokes
the heartache millions have endured when politics or war have separated them
from their native lands and the ones they love, El Tiante's cathartic journey
home - he painfully discovers the truth of the woman's prophecy - is chronicled
in a new film documentary, "The Lost Son of Havana."
The movie, scheduled to premiere at the
Tribeca Film Festival in New York April 23 and to open in New England at the
Independent Film Festival Boston April 25, is a story of love and death, hope
and desperation, glory and despair, all seen through Tiant's crying eyes as he
confronts his stolen past and enters the winter of his life. The debut
documentary of Sox diehards Bobby and Peter Farrelly, the film provides the
deepest look yet at the private turmoil Tiant suffered as a child of the
Cuban-American Cold War.
"We knew it was going to be a moving
story," Bobby Farrelly said, "because Luis had so much burning inside of
him."
Five years in the making, the documentary
tracks Tiant from his spacious suburban home in Southborough - he retired from
Major League Baseball in 1982 after a 19-year pitching career that compares
favorably to those of several Hall of Famers - to the desolate streets of
Havana, where he is jolted by the anguish and sorrow of the impoverished family
and friends he last saw in 1961 after Fidel Castro's violent rise to
power.
"I have to go to Cuba before I die," he
says as the movie opens. "That is going to complete my life."
Tearful partings
Though many young Red Sox fans
know him as little more than the cigar-puffing inspiration for Cuban sandwiches
at Fenway Park, Tiant long ago built a boyhood dream into an indelible baseball
legacy. The only child of Lefty Tiant, a former Negro leagues star who once
struck out Babe Ruth, Tiant was 20 when he departed Cuba in 1961 to play
baseball in Mexico and caught the eye of a scout for the Cleveland Indians. By
the time he retired, he had won 229 games, pitched in three All-Star Games, and
emerged as a star of the classic 1975 World Series between the Sox and
Cincinnati Reds.
Along the way, Tiant captured the hearts
of New Englanders with his indomitable spirit. No Sox pitcher has since matched
the 163 pitches he threw to defeat the Big Red Machine in a complete-game, 5-4
victory in Game 4 of the '75 Series (he also shut out the Reds, 6-0, in Game
1).
"I actually cried" when Tiant left the
Sox after the '78 season, Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski says in the
documentary. "He was the heart and soul of the pitching staff."
To Castro, though, he was a deserter.
Barred from returning to Cuba unless he agreed to join the Socialist revolution
and play as an amateur, Tiant for decades was visible to the family and friends
he left behind only as a fuzzy image of an American baseball player on the few
television screens available to them in the isolated nation.
The only concession Castro made to Tiant
was granting a written request from Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke,
delivered by South Dakota Senator George McGovern, to allow Tiant's aging
parents, Luis and Isabel, to leave the island in 1975. They lived with Tiant for
15 months, cheering him in the '75 Series and the '76 All-Star Game, before they
died.
The elder Tiant succumbed to cancer in a
Boston hospital.
"I'm going," he told Isabel on his
deathbed, Tiant recalls in the film. "Are you coming with me or are you staying
here?"
"I'm going with you," Isabel told
him.
The next day, soon after her husband
passed on, Isabel Tiant died in her son's home, apparently of a ruptured
aorta.
"They killed me," Tiant says tearfully of
their deaths. "The two of them buried me alive."
An idea is hatched
Every attempt Tiant made to
return to Havana before and after their deaths was thwarted by US and Cuban
officials. Then he met Kris Meyer, of Quincy, an associate of the Farrelly
brothers, when the Farrellys were filming their Sox-inspired romantic comedy,
"Fever Pitch," at Fenway Park in 2004. Tiant shared with Meyer his desire to
return to Cuba and agreed to allow a film crew to accompany him if the producers
helped him enter the country.
"We tried to go through the proper
channels, but that didn't work," Meyer said. "So we found out about a goodwill
baseball team that was going."
The San Diego Black Sox agreed to add
Tiant and the film crew to their traveling roster. The only hitch: Tiant and the
filmmakers would need to pass themselves off in Cuba as players and
coaches.
It wasn't pretty, as Meyer went down
swinging against a Cuban pitcher, and the film's writer and director, Jonathan
Hock, eked out a single but paid a physical price.
"I set an international record," Hock
said, "by pulling two hamstrings in three innings."
The ruse cleared the way for Tiant to
return to his childhood streets. He found his boyhood home in Havana, visited
the park where his father helped teach him to pitch, and found old friends and
relatives. He was greeted warmly by all but one, a destitute man named Fermin,
who seemed to speak for many on the island who achingly wondered how their lives
might have changed had they, rather than Tiant, reached America.
Fermin and Tiant had played baseball
together as youths.
"I've been hurt and angry with you
[because] we were both right there as players," Fermin tells Tiant in the film,
angrily wagging his finger in Tiant's face. "Damn, Luisito, I'm [mad] as
hell!"
Taken aback at first, Tiant then embraced
his childhood friend, who wept on Tiant's shoulder.
For three days, the film crew crowded
into a 10-foot-square room in Havana as Tiant and his relatives tried to piece
together all they had lost. Long known as one of baseball's most gregarious and
devilish cutups, Tiant turned tender and wistful as he discovered how much his
family had struggled to survive in Cuba while he thrived in America. He learned
his relatives needed to peddle cigarettes on the streets to try to make ends
meet.
"We're doing badly," a cousin whispers to
Tiant in the film, trying to shield herself from the camera. "We are left
needing a lot."
Tiant realizes his parents suffered the
same fate before they left the island. His father, who was barred from playing
in Major League Baseball because of his skin color, lived his final years in
Cuba as a gas station attendant.
If only Tiant could have found a way to
help, he tells his relatives, grappling with misplaced guilt. If only he had
returned sooner.
"So much time has passed that I shouldn't
have let go by," he says, crying. "I thought I wouldn't be able to see you
again."
Yet even as his relatives struggle to
subsist, they comfort him in the generous spirit of an impoverished
people.
"Don't worry about it, cousin," a woman
tells him. "What we want is for you to be happy."
Renewed in return
The documentary, narrated by
Oscar winner Chris Cooper, captures the essential Tiant: his signature Fu Manchu
mustache, now white at the handlebars; the smoke swirling from his homemade
cigars; his big smile and sad eyes; his painful inner conflict born from a
political standoff he was powerless to resolve.
By the end, on an island where freedom is
scarce, Tiant is personally liberated by the kindness of the family he has
rediscovered.
"The gift that Louie's family gave him in
their humble way was helping him understand that you can't undo the things that
go wrong in your life, but you can make peace with what you have lost," Hock
said. "They let him know that they have never stopped loving him, which is what
he needed as he looked toward the final chapter of his life."
Nourished by the sights, scents, and
sounds of the Havana he once called home - and renewed by his lost family's love
- El Tiante headed back to New England a richer man.
"My heart is better, my head is better,"
he says in the film as he prepares to depart Cuba. "I can say, 'When I die, I
die happy.' I'm a free man now."
