A wise old woman, her cheeks wet with tears, warned Luis Tiant how much it would hurt to go home.
One of the most endearing folk heroes in the history of New England sports, the Red Sox great was poised to defy the governments of the United States and Cuba and sneak back to his boyhood home in Havana after 46 years in exile. He would make the journey on his 67th birthday, searching for a missing piece of his soul.
"There's such misery there," the woman, a Cuban refugee in Miami, cautioned Tiant on the eve of his journey. "Even if you don't want to cry, tears will come out of your eyes."
In an intimate social history that evokes the heartache millions have endured when politics or war have separated them from their native lands and the ones they love, El Tiante's cathartic journey home - he painfully discovers the truth of the woman's prophecy - is chronicled in a new film documentary, "The Lost Son of Havana."
The movie, scheduled to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York April 23 and to open in New England at the Independent Film Festival Boston April 25, is a story of love and death, hope and desperation, glory and despair, all seen through Tiant's crying eyes as he confronts his stolen past and enters the winter of his life. The debut documentary of Sox diehards Bobby and Peter Farrelly, the film provides the deepest look yet at the private turmoil Tiant suffered as a child of the Cuban-American Cold War.
"We knew it was going to be a moving story," Bobby Farrelly said, "because Luis had so much burning inside of him."
Five years in the making, the documentary tracks Tiant from his spacious suburban home in Southborough - he retired from Major League Baseball in 1982 after a 19-year pitching career that compares favorably to those of several Hall of Famers - to the desolate streets of Havana, where he is jolted by the anguish and sorrow of the impoverished family and friends he last saw in 1961 after Fidel Castro's violent rise to power.
"I have to go to Cuba before I die," he says as the movie opens. "That is going to complete my life."
Tearful partings
Though many young Red Sox fans know him as little more than the cigar-puffing inspiration for Cuban sandwiches at Fenway Park, Tiant long ago built a boyhood dream into an indelible baseball legacy. The only child of Lefty Tiant, a former Negro leagues star who once struck out Babe Ruth, Tiant was 20 when he departed Cuba in 1961 to play baseball in Mexico and caught the eye of a scout for the Cleveland Indians. By the time he retired, he had won 229 games, pitched in three All-Star Games, and emerged as a star of the classic 1975 World Series between the Sox and Cincinnati Reds.