Baseball and society in the Caribbean

First paragraph]The Tropic of Baseball: Baseball in the Dominican Republic. Rob Ruck. Westport CT: Meckler, 1991. x + 205 pp. (Cloth n.p.)Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba. TomMiller. New York: Atheneum, 1992. x + 338 pp. (Cloth US$ 24.00)Read Bart Giamatti's Take Time for Paradise (1989) or any of the other grand old game sentimentalists and you'11 discover that baseball somehow perfectly reflects the temperament of U.S. culture. This match, in turn, accounts for basebali's enduring and penetrating popularity in the United States. Read Ruck and Miller and you'11 learn that baseball is more popular and culturally dominant in the Dominican Republic and Cuba than it is to the north. The suppressed syllogism affirms that U.S. and Caribbean cultures hold intimate similarities. If that is true, this Caribbeanist has been out to lunch; then again, no one ever accused economists of having acute cultural sensibilities

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