While the Rays travel to Havana to play the Cuban National Team and most of the focus is appropriately on the warming of relations between the US and Cuba, Paul Guzzo of the Tampa Tribune wrote a great article that looked internally at the baseball connection between Cuba and Tampa.
From the earliest days of Tampa baseball in the 1890s to the 1950s, baseball teams traveled from Tampa to Cuba and back. These games drew thousands in both cities. When the Castro government took over, baseball between Tampa and Cuba ended.
While stories about the game and explorations of Havana are important, this was the type of article I was hoping to see. As I have mentioned in a previous post, "some zip codes in Tampa are nearly 20% Cuban. and according to Wikipedia, over 80,000 Cubans live in Tampa. That’s 2.8% of the Tampa Bay population of 2.8 million".
Check out Paul Guzzo's article "Tampa, Cuba have a history that was forged on baseball diamond" for a great insight into history.