US swingers and singers invade Havana

Forget the Bay of Pigs battle - and four decades of unrelenting political enmity.

For one historic weekend, the bitterness between Cuba and the United States will be upstaged in Havana with an unprecedented display of smiles and harmony by baseball and music from both countries.

The Baltimore Orioles will become the first US Major League team to visit the Caribbean island since shortly after the 1959 revolution. The Orioles fly into Havana tonight for a goodwill game against a Cuban all-star squad tomorrow.

After the game, scores of US musicians, including Gladys Knight and James Taylor, will take the stage with leading Cuban artists in the finale to the largest such cultural exchange since president Fidel Castro took power.

The two events coincide by chance.

The Cuban government has given a low profile to both events, although Castro (72), a keen baseball player in his youth, is thought certain to attend the Orioles game.

US interest, however, is high. Hundreds of journalists are flying in for the game in the biggest surge of US media interest in Cuba since Pope John Paul II's visit in January 1998. Organisers and participants of both events have eschewed all talk of politics.

"This is only about music people loving music and each other," enthused Alan Roy Scott, whose Los Angeles group Music Bridge has assembled nearly 100 US and Cuban musicians for a week of song-writing which culminates in tomorrow's concert.

The Orioles, who finally won US State Department permission in January to bring off their three-year-old dream of playing Cuba, also insist the exhibition match is a purely sporting affair with no political overtones.

But of course it's proving impossible to keep politics completely out.

Protests against the Orioles' trip have already come from hardline Cuban exile groups in Florida, who say it is an ill-timed publicity gift for Castro given recent measures against dissidents opposed to his one-party system.

One Miami-based Orioles player has pulled out of the game, saying he does not want to offend his neighbours.

Inside baseball-loving Cuba, some fans are disgruntled for other reasons: tickets for the game at the 50,000-capacity Estadio Latinoamericano are by invitation only.

Government officials say the bulk of the tickets will be distributed to Cubans via workers', students' and other mass organisations affiliated with the government party.

The weekend's high-profile exchanges come at a time when US-Cuban political relations have hit another low.

Recent Washington adjustments to the long-standing economic embargo elicited a furious response from Havana, which condemned them as a cynical attempt to disguise further subversive "attacks".

All that, however, will be at least briefly forgotten when the Orioles walk on to the field tomorrow, and musical stars from both nations play together at Havana's Karl Marx theatre that night.