PITTSBURGH -- At El Oriental de Cuba, the popular Cuban restaurant on Centre Street in Jamaica Plain, the owner had the night off Wednesday. The TVs were tuned not to Red Sox baseball, but vintage Spanish-language travelogues describing the enticements of the island.
Ah, Juan Seoane says, but come back before lunchtime, when the fanáticos, with creased faces, gather for conversation and café con leche, and you will discover that what took place here Wednesday night in PNC Park in Pittsburgh did not pass unnoticed.
Two sons of the island, Yoenis Cespedes and Rusney Castillo, made history here. This was the first time the Red Sox have ever had two Cubans sharing the same outfield. Cespedes, who played left field, has been here since Aug. 1. Castillo, who played center field, made his major league debut and collected his first big league hit, an infield single in the fourth inning off Pirates left-hander Francisco Liriano.
"The Cuban community here is excited," Seoane said by phone from Boston. Seoane is a Boston police detective who works in the special investigations unit and came to the States from Cuba when he was 15. He is the son of an immigrant fanático who speaks fondly not only of the new class of Cuban stars, but draws on memories of their fathers and uncles and grandfathers from their days playing on the island.
"The talent runs so deep there -- from the time kids are 12, they enter a system that develops them as baseball players," said Seoane, who was working a night shift Wednesday and so did not watch Castillo play. But he has seen highlights from the minor league games in which he played earlier this month.
"He's like el gallo fino -- a fine rooster," Seoane said of the powerfully built Castillo, who is 5-foot-9 but packs 205 pounds on his ripped body. "He walks around with his chest out, showing his muscles. He definitely has the build."
Told that in Cuba Castillo was known as "La Pantera" (The Panther), Seaone chuckles. "Even better," he said.
This was the first time since the Canseco brothers, Jose and Ozzie, played one game together for the Oakland Athletics in 1990 that any team has had two Cubans in the outfield and only the second time since 1970, when the full impact of the U.S. embargo was felt.
The Canseco brothers were born in Cuba but grew up in Miami. Cespedes and Castillo are imports of a different pedigree, products of a baseball-crazy country that is rapidly being drained of a generation of talented players who are striking a new path in a foreign land.
What was a trickle is rapidly becoming -- if not a flood -- a swiftly moving current. Castillo became the ninth Cuban player this season to make his major league debut, the most ever in one season, according to Baseball-Reference.com. When Luis Tiant made his debut with the Cleveland Indians in 1964, he was one of four.
El Tiante became a legend in Boston. Not so much among the new arrivals from the island.
At the news conference in Boston in which Cespedes was introduced, Alberto Vassallo, son of the publisher of the Boston-based El Mundo newspaper, asked Cespedes what he knew of Tiant and some of the other Cuban legends of the past, such as Twins shortstop Zoilo Versalles.
"We don't talk about those guys there," Cespedes said.
Vassallo's father, also Alberto, is close friends with Tiant and shares a similar exile from their familial home. When Tiant finally relented and went back to Cuba for the filming of a documentary, he told the younger Alberto, "Don't tell your father." When the film came out, the elder Vassallo sat and watched it with his old friend. "My father cried," Vassallo said.
The Cuban community in Boston is much smaller than the Dominican community, Vassallo says. He estimates there are roughly 10,000 Cubans to roughly 100,000 Dominicans who have set down roots in Boston.
Junior Pepen, who is Dominican born, is the host of Conversando de Deportes, a sports talk show that airs nightly between six and seven on WRCA (1330 AM) in Boston. "A lot of people have called in about Castillo," Pepen said by phone Wednesday night. "Some people say he got too much money, but other people see what Jose Abreu and Yasiel Puig and Alexei Ramirez have done, and they are excited. They expect he will be good."
Seoane, the Boston detective, said he did not know much about Castillo before he signed a seven-year, $72.5 million contract with the Red Sox but has tracked the progress of many of the island's stars on websites, Spanish-language newspapers and interaction with friends who have gone back and forth from the island. He shares his father's love for baseball and has confidence that the Sox have exercised good judgment in signing Castillo.
He also tries to imagine what it must be like for Castillo and the other Cuban players to leave the deprivations of Cuba for a world previously glimpsed only in their dreams.
"Some of the Cuban players, because they have played in international tournaments, not all of this is new," Seoane said. "But still, they look at all the things they have been missing, living in a country that, in some ways, hasn't progressed since the '50s and lament what they and their families have missed.
"Think of the feeling they get coming to this country and knowing they can now provide for their family. That's an experience you can't describe."
Tony Massarotti, co-host of Felger and Mazz on the SportsHub 98.5, said there was little discussion of Castillo's debut on their show Wednesday afternoon.
"I raised it on the show," he wrote in a text message, "but there's virtually no interest in the Sox right now."
But if the Cubans are all the Red Sox expect them to be, that will change.
Late Wednesday night, Tom McLaughlin, the Red Sox clubhouse manager, was carrying a white sanitary sock. Inside was a smudged baseball, bearing a sticker placed there by an authenticator from Major League Baseball. There are authenticators in every big league stadium; in Pittsburgh, they were in the camera well next to the visitors' dugout, and they expected to be busy.
And they were. The ball that Castillo to second base and beat out for an infield hit when it glanced off the heel of Neil Walker's glove was rolled into the Sox dugout, then given to the authenticators, who marked it with a sticker. An inning later, they did the same for Bryce Brentz, who doubled for his first big league hit. McLaughlin had placed Brentz's ball in his locker.
With Castillo, he didn't want to take the chance that the player wouldn't recognize it for what it was. McLaughlin spotted Adrian Lorenzo, who translates for the Cuban players, and asked him to give it to Castillo, who had already left.
No worries. Castillo knew the value of this gift.
"I will sign it," he said, "and keep it in my house somewhere."
May it be the first of many. An island's people are counting on it.