The ruse cleared the way for Tiant to return to his childhood streets. He found his boyhood home in Havana, visited the park where his father helped teach him to pitch, and found old friends and relatives. He was greeted warmly by all but one, a destitute man named Fermin, who seemed to speak for many on the island who achingly wondered how their lives might have changed had they, rather than Tiant, reached America.
Fermin and Tiant had played baseball together as youths.
"I've been hurt and angry with you [because] we were both right there as players," Fermin tells Tiant in the film, angrily wagging his finger in Tiant's face. "Damn, Luisito, I'm [mad] as hell!"
Taken aback at first, Tiant then embraced his childhood friend, who wept on Tiant's shoulder.
For three days, the film crew crowded into a 10-foot-square room in Havana as Tiant and his relatives tried to piece together all they had lost. Long known as one of baseball's most gregarious and devilish cutups, Tiant turned tender and wistful as he discovered how much his family had struggled to survive in Cuba while he thrived in America. He learned his relatives needed to peddle cigarettes on the streets to try to make ends meet.
"We're doing badly," a cousin whispers to Tiant in the film, trying to shield herself from the camera. "We are left needing a lot."
Tiant realizes his parents suffered the same fate before they left the island. His father, who was barred from playing in Major League Baseball because of his skin color, lived his final years in Cuba as a gas station attendant.
If only Tiant could have found a way to help, he tells his relatives, grappling with misplaced guilt. If only he had returned sooner.
"So much time has passed that I shouldn't have let go by," he says, crying. "I thought I wouldn't be able to see you again."
Yet even as his relatives struggle to subsist, they comfort him in the generous spirit of an impoverished people.
"Don't worry about it, cousin," a woman tells him. "What we want is for you to be happy."
Renewed in return
The documentary, narrated by Oscar winner Chris Cooper, captures the essential Tiant: his signature Fu Manchu mustache, now white at the handlebars; the smoke swirling from his homemade cigars; his big smile and sad eyes; his painful inner conflict born from a political standoff he was powerless to resolve.
By the end, on an island where freedom is scarce, Tiant is personally liberated by the kindness of the family he has rediscovered.
"The gift that Louie's family gave him in their humble way was helping him understand that you can't undo the things that go wrong in your life, but you can make peace with what you have lost," Hock said. "They let him know that they have never stopped loving him, which is what he needed as he looked toward the final chapter of his life."
Nourished by the sights, scents, and sounds of the Havana he once called home - and renewed by his lost family's love - El Tiante headed back to New England a richer man.
"My heart is better, my head is better," he says in the film as he prepares to depart Cuba. "I can say, 'When I die, I die happy.' I'm a free man now."
Bob Hohler can be reached at hohler@globe.com.