The telegram reads “Jane and I leaving via air tomorrow Sunday morning. Expect arrive Sunday evening.” The note reads, “The Brooklyn ball club had to hold spring training in Cuba because of having Jackie Robinson on their team.” Lucasville Area Historical Society.
“You could not possibly train a baseball squad in Havana. The distractions are too great. … The after-dark program down there would kill a team before it ever had a chance to appear in National League competitions … There are too many women, there is too much drinking, there is too much gambling, and the climate is much too hot.”
– Baseball legend John McGraw – (MLB) player and manager for almost thirty years of the New York Giants – when asked why he never took his New York Giants to Cuba, though he often vacationed there himself
The ’47 season was unique for Brooklyn Dodger President Branch Rickey and his club. The signing of Jackie Robinson marked the official integration of the major leagues. Not only that, but the Dodgers became the first team in baseball history to have their manager suspended before the season had even begun.
Jackie Robinson looks over a Brooklyn Dodgers roster on Feb. 28, 1947 in Havana, Cuba, where he was training with the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers' farm club.
Writing for the Society For American Baseball Research, author Irv Goldfarb shares this background …
“Controversial and outspoken Leo Durocher had became fodder for the New York tabloids during the previous year by indulging in violent altercations with umpires, hitting a fan, and allowing actor George Raft to borrow his apartment and conduct a dice game in his living room. Leo added to the chaos when he wed divorced actress Laraine Day, an event that caused the Brooklyn chapter of the Catholic Youth Organization to withdraw its support of the famed Dodgers Knothole Gang.
“Durocher then capped it off when he accused New York Yankees president and co-owner Larry MacPhail of entertaining two alleged gamblers at an exhibition game between the clubs. Pointing to MacPhail’s private box, Durocher chided: 'If that was my box I’d be barred from baseball.'
“The two gamblers, Connie Immerman and Memphis Engelberg, were actually in the box behind the Yankees executive’s, but the incident was the proverbial straw and it forced Commissioner Albert ”Happy” Chandler to call for two hearings between the parties. On April 9, just before the season began, Chandler suspended Durocher for the season for 'conduct detrimental to baseball.' Leo and his team were stunned.”
(Irv Goldfarb. “1947 Dodgers: Spring Training in Havana." 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers. 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers essays. https://sabr.org/journals/1947-brooklyn-dodgers-essays/.)
The private box in question was located at Gran Stadium in Havana, Cuba, the site chosen by Rickey for his team to train that spring.
The Dodgers had used Havana as their spring training site in 1941 and 1942 before Rickey arrived from St. Louis. Wartime travel restrictions, however, ended that experiment. And as early as 1943, Rickey had shown interest in having heralded Cuban Leaguer Silvio Garcia become the first player to test major league baseball’s color barrier.
But that thought ended when Rickey went to Cuba and asked Garcia: “What would you do if a white American slapped your face?”
Garcia simply declared, “I kill him.”
Robinson? Goldfarb writes that when Jackie Robinson trained with the Montreal Royals in Daytona Beach in the spring of 1946, Rickey began to witness some of the racial confrontations he had feared. Thinking of preparing Robinson for the majors, Rickey cited Cuba’s passion for baseball and its easy access from the mainland as two good reasons to hold training camp there in 1947.
Another valid reason was the fact that blacks had been playing baseball in Cuba since the turn of the century – since Havana had already seen Black stars like Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige, it looked to be safe from any social upheaval.
One could say Rickey was “under-the-radar” in Cuba so to speak. The Dodgers took over Gran Stadium – a good facility with a major-league-quality field and lighting. And, the players were housed at the best resort – the Hotel Nacional complete with swimming pools, fine restaurants. At the Nacional, they werequartered with visiting diplomats and international businessmen. There Triple A Royals were housed at an equally opulent prep school nearby.
However …
The black members of both squads, however, stayed at neither of these locations. Robinson and the Royals’ other black players like Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe were taken instead to the Hotel Boston in “old” Havana described by the New York Sun as a "musty, third-rate hotel" that "looked like a movie version of a waterfront hostelry in Singapore."
(Cesar Brioso. Jackie Robinson's groundbreaking moment didn't start in the US; it began in Cuba. USA TODAY. February 04, 2022.)
"It was a fleabag hotel where we slept on heavy spreads that we used for mattresses," said reporter Sam Lacy, who died in 2003. "The springs were coming up – pressing into our bodies – which shows you just the type of hotel we were in."
– Sam Lacy, the Afro-American newspaper
Jackie was irate. “I thought we left Florida … so we could get away from Jim Crow,” he complained to the Dodgers’ traveling secretary, Harold Parrott.
Cuba's professional winter baseball league had been integrated since 1900. And, Parrott said though the Hotel Nacional was fully integrated, Rickey didn’t want to take the chance of any incidents while his team was staying there. “I’ll go along with Mr. Rickey’s judgment,” Jackie finally said. “He’s been right so far.”
Historical Note:
The Afro-American newspaper put sports editor Sam Lacy on a new beat: covering Jackie Robinson’s rookie year with the Brooklyn Dodgers. There was no bigger sports assignment in 1947 and Lacy, who was breaking another color line as a baseball writer, faced his own challenges and racism. Along with the Pittsburgh Courier's Wendell Smith, Lacy was embedded with Robinson at the Hotel Boston throughout spring training.
Even as Robinson was taking the field, Lacy was often not allowed to sit alongside his white peers and forbidden from using “whites-only” restrooms at ballparks—once directed to a tree 35 yards past the right field foul pole. He was forced to cover one early game from the roof of the press box and others from the Dodgers dugout. One night, before an exhibition game in Macon, Georgia, a cross was burned on the lawn of the boarding house where he stayed with several Black writers and ballplayers.
Lacy had waged a decade-long campaign to integrate baseball as he chronicled the exploits of Negro League stars like Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, and Robinson’s future Hall of Famer teammate, Baltimore Elite Giants catcher Roy Campanella, but now finally watching Robinson play proved stressful, too.
“I felt a lump in my throat each time a ball was hit in his direction those first few days,” Lacy recalled in the Afro. “I was constantly in fear of his muffing an easy roller under the stress of things. And I uttered a silent prayer of thanks as, with eyes closed, I heard the solid whack of Robinson’s bat against the ball.”
(Ron Cassie. “Writing Wrongs: ‘Afro-American’ Sportswriter Sam Lacy is in the Baseball Hall of Fame.” Baltimore Magazine. January 2022.)
Where the team stayed made no difference to a number of white Dodgers who were nonetheless offended by Robinson’s presence. Led by Dixie Walker, the de facto leader of the team, the group included Hugh Casey, Carl Furillo, and Bobby Bragan and it started a petition to keep Jackie off the club. During a trip to Panama for a three-game series against the Royals, Durocher, still the Dodgers’ manager, caught wind of the uprising and exploded.
“I told them what they could do with their petition, and I don’t think I got much back talk on it,” Durocher said years later. “I told the players that Robinson was going to open the season with us come hell or high water, and if they didn’t like it they could leave now and we’d trade them or get rid of them some other way. Nobody moved.” Actually, he reportedly told the team: “I don’t care if a guy is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a (bleepin’) zebra. I’m the manager of this team, and I say he plays.”
(Joe Posnanski. “A baseball story.” NBC Sports. March 30, 2015.)
Rickey confronted his mutinous players in his hotel room and reiterated that anybody that wanted to leave the team would be accommodated. The petition got no further. Though some tension undoubtedly remained into the regular season, there were no more internal flare-ups in Cuba.
(Maury Allen with Susan Walker, Dixie Walker of the Dodgers: The People’s Choice. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. 2010)
"That damn hotel was full of cockroaches. It was so hot, you couldn’t sleep … One day, I stirred up a bowl of vegetable soup, and a big cockroach came out. I puked up my insides. This was the hotel coffee shop. I never ate there again. Nor did I eat very much more the next three or four days."
– MLB player Don Newcombe
Historical Note:
Dixie Walker denied starting an actual written petition. Some have said that shortstop Pee Wee Reese and second baseman Eddie Stanky were moderately involved. Walker would say he never led any sort of revolt at all.
When Branch Rickey addressed the player, he talked them in a personal way. He asked Carl Furillo how he could possibly be against a man trying to make something of himself after he had seen his own father struggle for work after coming from Italy (Furillo reportedly broke down and apologized and promised he would give Robinson a chance). Kirby Higbe, described as “a good old boy from South Carolina and a hell-raiser all his life,” was defiant. He wanted, demanded, to be traded. Two weeks into the season, he and four others were sent to Pittsburgh for Al Gionfriddo and cash.
Rickey was about to trade Dixie Walker to Pittsburgh as well … but he just couldn’t do it. Walker was a critical part of the Dodgers success. And Rickey wanted to believe – maybe even NEEDED to believe – that Walker loved the game and winning too much to miss the obvious. This was the core of Rickey’s proselytizing, that if ballplayers could only see Robinson as a teammate they would stop seeing him as a Black man.
Then there was Bobby Bragan, who would confess that he was willing to give up his career to make this stand. In later years, he explained: He saw blacks as inferior to whites. He did not know how to tell his family and friends that he was playing baseball with a black person. He did not see this as hateful or even objectionable; it was simply his view of the world. Bragan asked to be traded.
The Dodgers didn’t really need him. He was a backup catcher only good for a few dozen at-bats. He was popular in the clubhouse, and he was one of those players who makes the season more enjoyable for everyone. Such players are not exactly disposable. But they certainly are not essential. There seemed no reason for Rickey to deal with Bragan’s mutiny.
Branch Rickey was many things, some of them admirable, some of them less so. But, above all, he was shrewd. And that day, he saw something in Bobby Bragan that Bragan did not see in himself.
“If Jackie Robinson can play the position better than another player,” Rickey said after summoning Bragan, “then regardless of the color of his skin Jackie Robinson is going to play. You understand that Bobby?”
“Yes sir,” Bragan said. “If it’s all the same with you, Mr. Rickey, I’d like to be traded to another team,” Bragan said.
And then, as Bragan would remember, Branch Rickey leaned back and asked Bobby Bragan a question.
“If we call Jackie Robinson up,” Rickey asked, “will you change the way you play for me?”
And here, at last, Bobby Bragan was forced to confront what kind of man he was. “No sir,” Bragan said. “I’d still play my best.”
That was what Rickey wanted and needed to hear. He dismissed Bragan and made a note in his mind: Bobby Bragan would be OK. Bobby Bragan had it in him to change.
Of course, Bragan didn’t think so. He went into the season bitter.
But he began to watch Robinson from a distance. There wasn’t an overnight conversion.”I learned,” Bragan would say. “Not fast. But I learned.” The more he watched Robinson, the more he felt – despite himself – something like grudging respect. The guy could play ball; Bragan thought he was the Dodgers’ best player more or less from his first day. Robinson kept his head down. He did not try to engage teammates in conversation. He ignored the persistent taunts from the crowds and the opposing benches. Bragan at first avoided Robinson on the train, but soon he found himself drawn as if magnetized. He would sit two rows away. He would sit one row away.
And then he sat next to Jackie Robinson. They didn’t talk much, and they didn’t talk about anything, in particular — just baseball stuff. Something about a pitcher. Something about a play. Maybe Bragan told a little joke. Maybe Robinson smiled. Maybe Bragan – again, in spite of himself – felt good that he could break Robinson’s hard exterior.
Then, they would sit next to each other again on the train. And again. Robinson joined a card game Bragan was playing. Few things can connect people quite like playing cards. Bragan would find himself sitting next to Robinson in the dugout, and they would talk, and when Bragan heard his family and friends and others discount Jackie Robinson, heard them call him less than a man, Bragan found dissent welling up inside him. “Wait a minute,” he would think. “You don’t know him.” And, to his surprise, he found himself saying that out loud.
The Dodgers in 1947 were superb, Dixie Walker hit .300 again, Eddie Stanky walked 100 times, and the group that soon would become known as the Boys of Summer – Robinson, Reese, Furillo, Gil Hodges, Duke Snider – began to come together. The Dodgers won the pennant. As Bragan would say, players of all racial viewpoints lined up with Jackie Robinson to collect their World Series checks.
(And Bragan? He got a big double in Game 6 of the 1947 World Series, and he stuck around for a few games the following year, but he was done as a player. Bragan knew that managing was his only way to stay in the game. He went to Fort Worth, where he served as a player-manager. Then to Hollywood for a couple of years. In 1955, he was hired to manage the Pittsburgh Pirates. He was hired by a man named Branch Rickey.)
(Joe Posnanski. “A baseball story.” NBC Sports. March 30, 2015.)
Please, read Posnanski's entire article. Just click here: https://sportsworld.nbcsports.com/a-baseball-story/.
The Havana experiment lasted only a single spring. The club’s training camp costs that year were reported as being the highest in the majors.
But Then …
In 2016, the wife and daughter of the late Jackie Robinson were among the guests President Barack Obama brought with him to Cuba for a goodwill trip and an exhibition game featuring the Tampa Bay Rays. The First Family sat in the front row behind home plate with Cuban president Raúl Castro.
The Obamas were greeted by a number of MLB ambassadors, including Derek Jeter, Joe Torre, Dave Winfield, including Robinson’s wife Rachel and her daughter Sharon, who traveled to Cuba with the First Family on Air Force One.
President Barack Obama said his trip to Cuba is an "historic opportunity to engage with the Cuban people." As President Obama clarified in an interview, Robinson's impact was about the power of baseball to change attitudes in ways that a politician could not. He spoke to a few dozen embassy staff and families at a Havana hotel in his first stop after arriving in Cuba. He says it's wonderful to be in Cuba and is noting that an American president hasn't stepped foot in Cuba in nearly 90 years.
President Barack Obama and Rachel Robinson, left, widow of baseball hall-of-famer Jackie Robinson, attend the exhibition game between the MLB Tampa Bay Rays and the Cuban National team, in Havana, Cuba, March 22, 2016.
Doug Glanville, ESPN MLB analyst, had this to say …
“When I sat down in Havana, Cuba, with Rachel Robinson, the widow of Jackie Robinson, I knew I was in for an education. Her elegance was obvious, but it was the deep wisdom of time itself that stood out. We are almost 70 years from Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in Major League Baseball, and my experience in Cuba underscored that the color line barred players who were not just from the United States, but from all over the world, and Cuban players were particularly affected.
“It was this trip to Cuba in March that first showed me Jackie Robinson's impact was truly international …
“By 1947, many Cubans were paying close attention to this color line and many major league players, from having played in Havana, knew these black Cubans could play in the big leagues had the line not been there. They had seen the likes of Torriente, Dihigo, and Mendez succeed against the best during these spring exhibitions.
“Robinson breaking the color line also made him a Cuban hero because his success in spring training in Havana (and in exhibition games in Panama that year) earned him a spot on the Dodgers. It was a spot that was truly shared with those talented players with dark skin worldwide. The Cuban players knew this was also their opportunity. If Robinson was successful, those with the talents the caliber of Torriente, Dihigo and others would be able to reach what was considered the highest level of baseball because of their skills and not denied because of their color.”
(Doug Glanville. “International inspiration: Jackie Robinson's impact on Cuba.” https://www.espn.com.au/mlb/story/_/id/15211117/mlb-jackie-robinson-inspiration-cuba. ESPN. April 15, 2016.)
When Rachel Robinson was asked what she thought Jackie would say to the idea that 70 years before he would change baseball and open a front in the Civil Rights battle in the United States, she said …
“He would be just thrilled that we have an African-American president in the United States visiting Cuba. He'd be so proud. I don't know he could ever have anticipated that that could happen, none of us did."
It was not just the United States that benefited from Robinson's steadfast determination. The door also opened for many talented Cuban baseball players whose skin was too dark for the baseball establishment and our country.
(Doug Glanville. “International inspiration: Jackie Robinson's impact on Cuba.” https://www.espn.com.au/mlb/story/_/id/15211117/mlb-jackie-robinson-inspiration-cuba. ESPN. April 15, 2016.)
Jackie Robinson signing autographs for fans in Cuba, spring training 1947. pbs.twimg.com/media.
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