HAVANA -- All the background details of Sunday's groundbreaking baseball game between the Baltimore Orioles and a squad of top Cubans had been painstakingly negotiated beforehand, but advance work takes you only so far. No one knew just how it would be when each team paraded out onto the infield at Havana's Estadio Latinoamerica before the game, U.S. and Cuban flags lifted high in the air before them.

That sense of suspense, and the 40 years that had passed since a major-league team played in Cuba, helped explain the sense of gravity and wonder. A crowd of 50,000 mostly hand-picked Cubans stood reverently for the playing of the Cuban national anthem and then remained ramrod still for the Star Spangled Banner, that world-famous symbol of the historic enemy to the north. This was true even of Cuban President Fidel Castro, decked out in his usual fatigues, there in the front row flanked by baseball commissioner Bud Selig -- himself the embattled leader of an institution in need of modernization and reform -- and Orioles owner Peter Angelos, who has wrangled with Selig in the past.

Castro "stood very straight and paid his respects, as I did during the Cuban anthem," Angelos said just in front of his waiting limousine after the Orioles had come back to win the game, 3-2, in 11 innings. "That was great, it made the trip worth it right there. That's what we were looking for, that sort of camaraderie."

Major League Baseball may need Cuba almost as much as Cuba needed Major League Baseball. The new emphasis on internationalizing the game is no idle impulse. This year's baseball season opens next Sunday with a game in Monterrey, Mexico, between the Colorado Rockies and the San Diego Padres. Baseball knows that it can't sit back after one comeback season, the glorious summer of McGwire and Sosa. It knows that arrogance and complacency are what got it into trouble in the first place, and it knows more labor troubles could be on the way after the 2001 season. So it has to do everything it can to nourish itself by taking chances and trying to find new fans.

The game in Cuba was a step in the right direction, for baseball and for Cuba. As much as the Orioles players who were whisked into town for less than a day talked about this being "just a ballgame," there was no denying the emotion during pregame ceremonies. The U.S. national anthem has played in Havana before, of course, during visits of college teams and at amateur events. But since no major-league ballclub had played in Havana in so long, Sunday's gathering on a steamy afternoon had an air of potential significance that was lost on no one.

I have covered far too many sporting events in the United States during which the anthem is a meaningless ritual, and I thought I'd never again feel that gulp-back-the-emotion disorientation I felt as a kid visiting the Baltimore fort where Francis Scott Key penned the song. But standing only a few dozen rows behind Castro and his green fatigue cap and listening to the ballpark's ancient speakers ringing with what sounded like a recording of a recording of a recording, it felt good to be thrilled to hear a celebration of America, even on a day when fighting in the Balkans was escalating half a world away. (Poor Cuba -- it has been pushed off the international stage twice in 15 months, once when the Monica Lewinsky story broke the week of the pope's visit, and now, with war in the Balkans taking top billing in international news.) But even Cubans used to railing against American imperialism sounded hopeful about the future.

"We showed we can play at the same level as the best teams," said Cuban third baseman Omar Linares. He's the biggest star in Cuban baseball, and a darling of Castro's regime, and it was as if the game was following a Communist Party script when Linares rolled a two-out single through the left side to tie the game 2-2 in the eighth, cranking up the suspense until Harold Baines finally put the Orioles ahead with a run-scoring single in the top of the 11th.

"Our baseball is strong," Linares said. "I think this game might help our two nations have a better understanding of each other. We need this game to occur every year. We can beat them when we play them again."

The game was nothing like the rollicking explosion of mad love that erupted in the stadium each of the two previous nights for the first two games of Cuba's version of the World Series. Both those games between Industriales (the Yankees of Cuba) and Santiago (from the city where dictator Fulgencio Batista surrendered to Castro) were attended by die-hard fans, the kind who know a routine fly ball the second it's hit; fans who treat baseball as a delirious, sensual celebration of the game and of the style Cubans bring to playing it. Sunday was much different. Admittance was invitation-only, so the crowd was much more likely to lapse into numb quiet. It was also much whiter, and much more confused about the game of baseball: During one embarrassing sequence, the fans erupted ecstatically twice in a row on routine ground balls, rather than making that low buzzing sound crowds make when they see a team stranding a runner at third base.

But you have to expect that for a massive, internationally televised gathering with Castro himself front and center. The commandante appears strong for a man in his early 70s, but there's no question a cloudy look has begun to creep into the once-fierce gaze. Talks with regular Cubans during several days in Havana left little doubt that more and more Cubans feel political change coming, some month or some year soon, and are ready to assert themselves, if only marginally.

"The time will come when the two governments will have to come together," said Javier Velasquez, a 45-year-old mechanical engineer. "This game may make the difference. I saw the Berlin Wall fall with my own eyes. Now I ... see a U.S. team play in Havana.

"This is a town that lives sad and it shouldn't. We've lost our fear. The things I'm telling you I would never have said 10 years ago. We want Cuba to open to the world, and the world to open to Cuba. Fidel doesn't have to go, because I think he is the man who has done the most for Cuba. We just want an equal chance."

Castro gained valuable exposure in the United States with Sunday's game, especially since the ESPN cameras brought real-time proof that Angelos and Selig were enjoying Castro's company -- not shrinking away from him as a monster or international outcast, but instead laughing at his jokes. "It was very enjoyable," said Angelos, famous in baseball for his stubborn independence of mind. "He was very generous, and very hospitable. He's a very charming man."

Charm only goes so far, but currents have been set in motion. At least that's the view of no less shrewd a figure than former Oakland A's president Sandy Alderson, now in charge of the game's internationalization as baseball's No. 3 official. He played a key role in setting up Sunday's game, visiting Cuba twice before this weekend, and he too emerged from meeting Castro at a Saturday night reception with a different perspective. "I was impressed by his command of detail," Alderson told me before the game. "He seemed to know a lot about the development of baseball in the United States and other countries."

That comment should be seen as a much lower-profile version of Margaret Thatcher's famous pronouncement that Mikhail Gorbachev was someone the West could do business with. Castro is no Gorbachev. He's the opposite of a reformer, dead-set against change. But many in the know about Cuba believe that nothing has helped Castro retain power more than the embargo, which gives him an excuse for the privation his people suffer. And the argument for ending the embargo could gain force in Washington if momentum toward closer ties builds through cultural events like Sunday's game, or the musical festival Sunday night at the Karl Marx Theater in Havana, which featured the Indigo Girls, Jimmy Buffett and Peter Frampton (still alive!), among others.

"My whole point of view is that this is recognition of a cultural bond that exists between the two countries," Alderson said. "It doesn't speak to our economic systems. It doesn't speak to our political systems. It speaks to what we have in common. It's a testimony to the kind of cooperation that can exist. I'm happy we've been able to establish this contact. I think it will be increasingly important as baseball expands its international scope."

At the very least, the event may have punctured one myth about Cuba -- that Castro was a left-handed pitching prospect with an excellent curveball. Alderson said he discussed the point with Castro and came away convinced that was a myth. "He said he was perhaps a better basketball player than a baseball player," Alderson said. "That was illuminating."

If Castro overplayed his baseball past for propaganda value, who could blame him? Soccer was Cuba's most popular sport up until the 1930s, but baseball has long since taken over as the national sport. Driving through La Habana Vieja or El Vedado or any other part of the capital, you can count on seeing baseball games played in countless alleys, streets, parks and abandoned lots.

Havana has become a hot tourist spot for Europeans not restricted from Cuban travel by their governments, the way Americans are, and Sunday's game is sure to inspire more true baseball fans to make the trip from the United States via third countries. Countless American writers have lovingly recalled playing stickball as youths in Brooklyn or Manhattan, a tradition that seems lost. But watching Cuban kids lined up in an alley to swat a ball made of tape-over-string-over-tape-over-crumpled paper, it feels as if that old primordial love of the game isn't gone, it's just welled up somewhere else.

"I've lived here my whole life, 30 years," Niurea Hopuy explained as she watched her 5-year-old son, Hector, take his turn at bat in an alley in Casa Blanca, over on the far side of Havana Harbor. "That whole time, nothing has changed. Every day, there is a baseball game here."

The passion that characterizes Cubans' approach to the game explains why they took Sunday's game so seriously. The fans at the ballpark greeted the arrival of the Orioles on the field with childlike wonder, and as soon as Albert Belle took his turn in batting practice, the mood lifted another notch or two.

Belle has tended to be overlooked in recent years, especially with Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa putting on such a show last summer, but he could easily be considered the most dangerous hitter in baseball. Since 1991 he leads the majors in homers, RBIs and extra-base hits, among other offensive categories, and now that he has signed with the Orioles as a free agent, he could finally have a chance to make a mark with people paying attention.

They were paying attention on Sunday, all right. Belle settled into his angry-looking, corkscrew batter's stance and on his first turn in the cage, drilled three consecutive homers to left. As Orioles manager Ray Miller noted after the game, power is the one area in which Cuban players are lacking, which helps explain why Belle's hitting show made such an impression. A buzz took over the stands, as countless people turned to each other and asked the Spanish version of "Did you see that?"

When Belle stepped out to let someone else take a turn, the applause grew into a sustained roar, and he turned to the fans, smiled and gave them a wave. Belle, a private, intelligent man, has often been portrayed by American sportswriters as a sociopath, but he has sides to his character the press does not understand. He was moved by the warm reception in Havana, and obviously felt a certain kinship with the Cuban fans. Even the way they pronounce his name -- all one word: Albertbelllllllll -- somehow gets across the man's constant threat to explode at the plate.

"I guess they're used to controversy here," he joked as he walked away.

Belle went 0-for-5 in the game, and didn't look especially good, but when Cubans look back on the game, foremost in many minds will be their discovery of the man's savage power and his appreciation of their appreciation.

Sunday's unforgettable game in Havana was a fitting kickoff for the coming season. It served as a reminder that the player to watch this year is almost certainly Belle, a man who doesn't mind being disliked, so long as he gets to keep taking out his frustration on the baseball. And combined with next week's season opener in Mexico, it helped underscore that baseball's future is increasingly Latin. The Cubans' tough showing -- fighting the Orioles to lose 3-2 in the 11th inning -- has many looking forward to their rematch in Baltimore on May 3.