Opinion: Cincinnati's Cuba connection widens beyond baseball

While Cincinnati has been linked to Cuba for more than a century through the Reds, highlighted by Cuban-born Hall of Famer Tony Perez and continuing with Cuban-born pitcher Vladimir Gutierrez this year, there’s more to the connection these days than "beisbol."

The Cincinnati Ballet has two Cuban-born dancers as well as a Cuban-born rehearsal director. There’s a new Cuban-themed restaurant, The Latin House, downtown and the Blaze Cigar Bar across the Ohio River in Newport offers Cuban coffee, cocktails and food with your smokes. Several other area restaurants now have versions of the Cuban Sandwich.

"There’s a lot more than when I came here in 2008," said Miladys Perez, who owns a tax and financial services business in Fairfield and runs a Facebook group for "Cubanos in Cincinnati."

Federal Census estimates put Ohio’s Cuban population at a little more than 8,000, less than a third of the number of Cubans in Kentucky, where Louisville has a thriving Cuban population of some 9,000. Those are fractions of the 2.4 million Cubans in the United States, with the large majority in Florida.

But some prefer the banks of the Ohio to the beaches of Florida. Here they can focus on their families and their occupations in a welcoming atmosphere without the emotion-charged politics and hectic pace of Miami.

"Miami was so big and so fast …the traffic growth!" explained Rafael de Acha, a Cuban-born University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory Music alumnus. He and his fellow CCM alum wife Kimberly Daniel, from Wilmington, Ohio, also were weary of hurricanes, going through three in one season.

So they moved back to the Cincinnati area after 20 years of running the New Theatre they co-founded in the Miami area.

"Our friends in Florida thought we were nuts," Daniel said, laughing, after serving some high-octane Cuban coffee in their Madeira home. "But when they visit, they see why we love it here."

"It has a countrified village feel to it," said de Acha. "However, we can drive two blocks, get on I-71 and in 20 minutes we’re in downtown Cincinnati, for the Symphony, Music Hall, restaurants, you name it."

"There’s another kind of life here," said Perez, mother of three sons – two born in Cuba – who recounts the excitement of running outside with a camera when they saw snow for the first time. She at first worked in a friend’s restaurant – "work, work, work, and learn English" – before better utilizing her University of Havana studies to start her own business.

The Rev. Ruben Calzado, director of Latino Ministries for the First Baptist Church of Hamilton, said he has never been treated in a racist way in this area, which other friends recommended to him. They included Dr. Robert Lerer, a pediatrician who served more than four decades as Butler County’s health commissioner who returns to Cuba on medical missions.

Another Cuban-American, attorney Adolfo Olivas, served on Hamilton City Council or as mayor or vice mayor for 20 years.

Calzado said his family moved from Cuba after his son Samuel, now 14, was born as the Communist-governed island continued to struggle economically.

"I wanted to try to give him a better life," Calzado, who also works as an interpreter, said in his Fairfield Township home. "You can’t have this life in Cuba."

The long connection with the Reds doesn’t hurt. The team had Cuban players in the early 20th Century and then its 1950s affiliation with the Havana Sugar Kings helped bring later stars here.

"We grew up with an appreciation for Cincinnati," 1960s All-Star shortstop Leo Cardenas told former Enquirer sportswriter John Erardi in his 2018 book "Tony Perez: From Cuba to Cooperstown." "We couldn’t have told you where Cincinnati was on a map, just that it was in the Grandes Ligas (Big Leagues)."

Calzado calls baseball "my second religion," and when he went to his first Reds game, he got to see hard-throwing relief pitcher Aroldis Chapman. His nickname? "The Cuban Missile."

Dan Sewell, a member of The Enquirer board of contributors, was based in Miami during much of his 44-year career in daily journalism and has three Cuban-American children.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Opinion: Cincinnati's Cuba connection widens beyond baseball