Retired car salesman turning out
baseball bats for Cuba
Sep 10, 2020 Ottawa Citizen
From his basement woodworking shop in the Ottawa Valley, former
car salesman Bill Ryan, 66, is turning out finely-crafted maple bats for Cuba's
beleaguered baseball leagues. PHOTO
BY JEAN LEVAC /Postmedia
A retired Ottawa Valley
car salesman is turning out hundreds of hand-made maple bats every year for
Cuban baseball players as part of a decade-long effort to assist the
impoverished island nation.
Bill Ryan, 66, spends 10
or 11 hours every day in his basement woodworking shop, making his now famous
“Cubacan” bats.
This year, he wants to
send 600 bats — they each cost about $50 — to Cuba, which is about to start its
national baseball series. Professional quality bats are difficult to find and
prohibitively expensive in Cuba, which remains the subject of a strict U.S.
trade embargo.
“The only way I can do
this is to do all of the steps myself,” says Ryan, who lives on a rural side
road south of Carleton Place, near Franktown.
He uses his own sawmill
to cut the rectangular “blanks” from which he crafts a baseball bat. The blanks
— rectangular blocks 36 inches long and three inches wide — are kiln-dried for
three months to reduce their moisture content and weight.
Each bat requires about
two hours of labour. Ryan uses a lathe to shape the bat, then sands it three
different ways before applying two coats of paint, decals and two coats of
varnish.
A careful record keeper,
Ryan has made 2,967 bats since he launched his “hobby” a decade ago. Almost all
of his bats are now in Cuba.
“When I made the first
bat, there was no intention of making the second or the third: It just sort of
built,” he says.
Like most Canadians,
Ryan’s first exposure to Cuba came as a sun-seeking tourist.
A deeper involvement in
the country started innocently enough when he decided to fashion a few bats as
gifts for Cuban friends. A lifelong woodworker, Ryan made trophy bats that were
more a decoration than a piece of baseball equipment.
In baseball-mad Cuba,
however, the bats attracted attention and he was asked to make more, including
bats that could be used in games. The maple bats quickly grew in popularity
among Cuban players.
He was also asked to
make bats as gifts for each of the Cuban Five — five intelligence officers who
were arrested by U.S. authorities in September 1988. “Los Cincos” spent more
than a decade in U.S. prisons after being convicted of spying. Cuba maintained
they were in South Florida to monitor extremist exiles involved in a wave of
terrorist bombings in Havana.
All of the men were
released by 2014 and welcomed home as heroes in Cuba. Ryan met and befriended
one of them, Gerardo Hernandez, and together they launched a grassroots
organization, Cubacan, dedicated to improving the lives of ordinary Cubans.
Cubacan has shipped
equipment and materials to improve bat making in Cuba. Last year, the
organization delivered more than two tonnes of sports equipment to the island.
This year, Ryan wants to
send 600 hand-crafted bats to the 16 teams competing in Cuba’s national
baseball series, a key stepping stone to the Olympic Games for the country’s
best players. The series starts next week.
Cuba is struggling to
equip its baseball teams because of economic sanctions and new restrictions
imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump. During the past four years, Trump has
reversed the thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations orchestrated by his predecessor,
Barack Obama, and tightened the sanctions that have stifled the Cuban economy
for 60 years.
Ryan says U.S. efforts
to damage Cuba even reached into the Ottawa Valley. Earlier this year, he says,
under pressure from the U.S. Treasury Department, GoFundMe closed his
fundraising account which had been created to send sports equipment to Cuba
from Canada.
The Canadian Network
on Cuba (CNC) is now leading the fundraising effort to raise
$30,000 to send the Cubacan bats to Cuba.
Ryan still travels to
Cuba once a year with his wife, Nora. It’s “incredibly satisfying,” he says, to
watch a baseball player hit a home run with one of his bats, but seeing one
break still makes him shudder.
Two years ago, Ryan
received the Cuban government’s Friendship Medal, which has
gone to people such as singer Harry Belafonte and actor Danny Glover.
“More than one million
Canadians go to Cuba every year,” he says, “so we’re trying to suggest to some
of those people to send a bat, offer a donation, give something back.”
Anyone interested in
donating to the Cubacan bat program, known as Cubacan 6060, can go to theCNC’s website or
email cubacanbats@gmail.com.
Cubacan6060 Bats for Cuba
