Pipo, Pelota And The Lessons Of A Long-ago Life

How the glow of my grandfather’s beloved game taught me to savor the small things.

- Maria Bustillos

When he was a teen in the late 1940s, my uncle Tito tells me, it cost 40 or 50 cents to go to a baseball game at El Gran Stadium in Havana, which would be like $5 or $7 now. “So what was it like?” I ask him. “What were the snacks? Did you drink beer?”

“Well ll,” he says. Tito is a handsome fellow in his 80s, and as always, every word he says sounds a little naughty. “See … when you went to the stadium, you were busy all the time. It’s not like you sit there and you have a beer and a hot dog. Forget it. You’d bet a quarter on each play! Does he get to first base, or …” 

“You were betting the whole time?” 

“Yeah. So you’d be in the game. You know what I mean?” 

That is the Cuban attitude toward baseball. One way or another, we’re in the game.

I learned about the game mostly from Tito’s dad, my grandfather Pipo, a lifelong aficionado who emigrated from Havana to California in 1958. In a very close family, I was particularly close with Pipo. He was widowed in 1970 at the age of 71 and then was looked after—“spoiled” might not be entirely the wrong word—by a large gang of adoring relatives, myself included. His children—Tito, my mother, Consuelo, and their sister, Carmen—are reminiscing with me one recent afternoon over Chinese takeaway at my mom’s house in Garden Grove.