The remarkably generous David Skinner has gone back over tapes of his interview with Cuban baseball historian Severo Nieto. It turns out that, while Nieto definitely denied that Muñoz of the Long Branch Cubans was Joseito, he didn’t suggest Francisco Muñoz as an alternative—instead, David says, he distinctly said “Fausto Muñoz,” a name that doesn’t in readily available reference books, and that I haven’t seen so far in any contemporary Cuban sources.
So it would seem that for now, the possibility of a third Muñoz, Fausto, goes to the top of the pile. On Nieto’s authority, that will be my default assumption. It could be, of course, that Nieto was misremembering Francisco’s name--or maybe Fausto is Paco Muñoz’s real name, and Francisco is somebody else’s mistake; in any case, as David says, we definitely need more research on this. If anything new emerges, I’ll post it here.
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