I’m going to go ahead and post all the statistics for Negro League American Series in Cuba, 1904 through 1912. The Cuban X-Giants visited in both 1900 and 1903, but I haven’t found box scores for those series (yet). Starting in 1904, though, I have them all.
In 1904, the Cuban X-Giants, led by Danny McClellan, won six of eight encounters. If you’ve got Jorge Figueredo’s Cuban Baseball, he’s got all the scores correct, with one exception: the last game, held on October 30, was in fact a 12 to 0 win for Habana over the X-Giants, and a no-hitter for the great pitcher José Muñoz.
Download 1904_cuban_x_giants_in_cuba.xls
Somewhat unusually, the Cuban players switched teams quite a bit during this series—Muñoz played for three teams, for example. So in the stats I’ve also included combined totals for the Cuban players, and a tab with fielding totals by position (I usually don’t bother with this for short series). The X-Giants faced four Cuban squads: Habana, Almendares (called “Azul” in the papers), Fe (called “Carmelita”), and the old San Francisco club, apparently reconstituted for this occasion (also called “Nuevo Criollo”). San Francisco was the first all- or nearly all-black team in the Cuban league in 1900, winning the pennant that year.
If you’re reading this, you already known that the “Cuban X-Giants” (as well as the original Cuban Giants) were North American black teams, and had no Cuban players, no connection to Cuba whatsoever. There are many reasons they might have called themselves “Cuban” in a U.S. context: it might have been an attempt to bypass racial attitudes by claiming to be foreign rather than domestic, a notion bolstered by reports that early in their career the original Cuban Giants affected a kind of fake Spanish gibberish on the field. Maybe Cubanness was considered a costume of sorts, rather (ironically) like blackface for white performers, intended to lend a certain panache or style to the players’ performance.
One thing I haven’t seen at all yet: the Cuban reaction to this North American appropriation of their name. It’s possible that at least part of the marketing idea behind the X-Giants’ tours of Cuba in the 1900s was this novelty factor: come see the fake North American Cubans! But I have seen nothing in the newspapers about it so far.
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