How visit to Cuba changed Oakland youth baseball team

Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle : Roscoe Bryant Jr. (right), who started a baseball team for youths in West Oakland in 2004, talks with a player before practice.

By Jesse Hamlin April 30, 2017|Berkeley filmmaker Eugene Corr went to Cuba in 2007 mainly to defy President George W. Bush’s tightening the travel embargo to the island. Wandering around Havana, he came upon a scene that inspired the feature documentary that would take eight years to come to fruition.

“I walked onto a ball field, and it was time travel. I went back to Richmond in the ’50s,” says Corr, who’d grown up playing on public fields in the once-booming industrial East Bay city where his father coached and guided kids of all kinds.“It was the same deal — you had black and white kids playing together. The coaches were hanging out with people. It was a joyous feeling.”