The Domino Diaries Read online

  Next to Stevenson stood Félix Savón, Cuba’s second most famous champion, who had just returned from the recent Olympic Games with his own third Olympic gold medal in tow (which he was wearing), finally achieving what only his idol beside him and Lázló Papp of Hungary had. Just before his thirty-third birthday, Savón’s final fight representing his country at the Sydney games had been a brutal, bloody affair. But what had caught my eye more than anything about his final match was what happened when the final bell sounded. Savón’s historic career was over, having spanned fourteen years of unparalleled dominance on the international stage, and he paced back to his corner with blood dripping from one eye like a teardrop. Instead of looking for any validation from the crowd for his achievement, he instead looked out to spot the Cuban flags in the audience and hollered out through his mouth guard, “¡Gracias, Cuba!” He radiated gratitude. Back home in Havana standing in that lineup, Savón, a six-foot-six hulking heavyweight with one of the most lethal right hands in the history of the sport, wore the expression of a little boy who’d just learned how to ride a bike for the first time standing next to Stevenson, his hero, and being counted with him. Nobody in the room looked more adoringly at Stevenson than Savón, even though, after all these years as his successor, despite all his bravery, he still only managed to shyly peek.

  And down the row the next face I recognized straight away was my trainer, Héctor Vinent. Of all the heroic boxers standing in that line of champions, Vinent was the only one who seemed uneasy and double-parked in his role. His best friend, Joel Casamayor, only four years before, had become the first Cuban Olympic gold medalist to defect during the Atlanta games. Casamayor had left after being rewarded for his first gold medal with nothing more than a Chinese bicycle. For him it was the final straw. Vinent was the superior boxer with the far more marketable puncher’s style. Far more money was on the table for him to accept his friend’s pleadings to defect along with him, and he’d not only turned them down but urged Casamayor to remain in Cuba. Despite this fact, the state had punished Vinent, at the age of twenty-four, in his absolute prime, with never being able to pursue the craft he’d mastered on the island. Every fighter in that line, save Vinent, represented Cuba’s past. Vinent was the only one there who pointed both to Cuba’s troubled present and uncertain future.

  Vinent spotted Ría and me and nodded just as the crowd roared an end to the ceremony and ushered in that night’s fights with the clang of a wrench against a rusty fire extinguisher.

  Vinent walked over to us and offered his hand for me to shake hello, and kissed Ría’s cheek.

  “So did you bring me back any books?” Héctor laughed. “You can both sit with me and the Havana team and their coaches. After we can get dinner in Barrio Chino and talk.”

  “Who is the best boxer right now?”

  “La mejor?” Hector smiled. “Guillermo Rigondeaux. I have never seen anyone with his ability in my life. Savón gave him the captaincy after the Olympic Games. Fidel gave him a house near the airport. It’s more than he gave me for both my medals,” he said.

  Ría shook her head and laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Héctor asked her.

  “Maybe it’s not so funny.” Ría shrugged. “I was just thinking about the next great athlete in the crowd who is just a little boy, watching all of you with his dad. What’s going through that boy’s mind staring at all of you?”

  Héctor laughed. “It’s not going to be easy convincing this generation to follow our path. Time will tell.”

  16

  ROSETTA STONES

  But if that flower with base infection meet,

  The basest weed outbraves his dignity:

  For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;

  Lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds.

  —William Shakespeare, Sonnet 94

  SOMETIMES IT TAKES STARING for a while to really know what you’ve been looking at. It took a long time to understand that night at Chocolate and bring the blur into focus. After the fights I went with Ría and Héctor out to dinner at a restaurant in Barrio Chino. Héctor was always in a good mood going out to eat. I finally got around to asking him the question I’d wanted to ask since I first met him.

  “What was the temptation like for you with so many people outside Cuba willing to pay so much to have you fight for them?”

  Héctor turned to Ría and winked.

  “We’ve drifted away from sports and jumped into politics.” Héctor smiled, refilling his glass from a can of Hatuey beer. “But I’ll answer your question. The U.S. is like a beautiful girl who is in love with you, but you don’t like her. You have to ignore her. You have to resist and lament and live the rest of your life based on memories.”

  Boxers entered the ring in defense of their families, their neighborhoods, their society, and then—and only then—their own self-respect. Most stayed, but soon some left. The first defection took place five years after Fidel’s ban, when Enrico Blanco, at fifteen, won a gold medal at the Pan American games in Canada. Shortly after his match he snuck off and vanished. In 1993, a year after Héctor won his first Olympic gold medal in Barcelona, Giorbis Barthelemy swam eleven miles to Guantánamo Bay’s naval base. He failed to reach Gitmo and was captured and jailed on his first attempt. After he was freed from prison he made another attempt and succeeded. The following year, in 1994, five more Cuban boxers defected. Eliseo and Elieser Castillo, two brothers, watched in horror as sharks attacked their raft while they drifted for days. Diosbelys Hurtado defected during a layover in Miami. Alexis Barcelay wandered across a minefield to get to Guantánamo Bay. Mario Iribarren snuck off from a competition in Denmark. Two years after that, Héctor’s best friend and Olympic champion, Joel Casamayor, and an amateur light heavyweight champion named Ramón Garbey abandoned Cuba. As times got more desperate, the floodgates were opening. Cuba’s heroes transformed into traitors overnight and Fidel removed any trace of their legacy he could find. As much as the state could muster, they ceased to exist in their homeland.

  That night in Havana at Kid Chocolate, with Héctor and Ría beside me, was the first time I’d seen Guillermo Rigondeaux, Cuba’s next great champion, fight before his home crowd. It was obvious Rigondeaux had accepted the baton as Teófilo Stevenson and Félix Savón’s successor in Fidel’s continuum of symbolic weapons against the United States. What wasn’t so obvious was what he was going to do with it. Héctor hadn’t exaggerated his abilities. Rigondeaux wasn’t only calibrated like a five-foot-five, 118-pound Stradivarius of a fighter, he was even more impressive as an artist. He inflicted violence with balletic grace, flawless balance and timing, and an almost mournful disdain for his opponent as he fluttered across the ring barely landing on his toes while lashing lethal blows, which struck and evaporated from view as quickly as he unleashed them. He’d been a prodigy since he was a boy and now, at only twenty, this strange gargoyle-faced Cuban was Mozart with a pair of gloves. But was that going to be enough for him to resist the temptation of defecting? Castro had given him a house; for the next medal he might get a decent car. Small potatoes compared to what he could get elsewhere, but there were other factors to consider, like how much money or fame was worth losing your family forever.

  Like Héctor and many of the other great Cuban boxers, Rigondeaux came from the east, born in Santiago de Cuba on a coffee plantation with eight siblings. He grew up with no running water in his family home, so each day he walked a few miles to load up on water and transport it back to his house. He was born the same year as the Mariel boatlift. When barely in his teens, he was discovered for his potential by the Cuban industrial sports complex and sent to train in Havana at La Finca, the most elite sports academy on the island. The collapse of the Soviet Union and an end to their billion-dollar subsidies sent to Cuba led to the Special Period, during which Rigondeaux spent the remainder of his teens. And now he was Castro’s official face of boxing on the island in the turbulent time of Elián González.

 
Rigondeaux’s face, like all the other fighters’ faces that night, was obscured by headgear until he claimed victory. But even then, as soon as his coach removed the headgear, he held a photograph of Fidel aloft, which concealed his face. How token was this act of public glorification? Was he truly grateful for what the revolution had provided him, or was he simply looking after his own survival?

  I kept waiting for him to turn so I could study his face, look into his eyes, but almost immediately he was whisked out of the ring by his coaches and ushered back to the dressing room. It would take six years, another Olympic gold medal, and one of the most notorious failed defection attempts in Cuban history for me to cross paths with Rigondeaux again.

  The following summer, in June of 2001, thousands of miles away from Havana in Belfast during the World Amateur Boxing Championships, Rigondeaux would meet someone eager to support his professional dreams and set him free to claim them. Rigondeaux and several other Cuban boxers had managed to sneak away from their fortified hotel rooms to have a drink at a local Irish pub. An Irishman named Gary Hyde, who owned a few pubs but had never had a drink in his life, remembered the handful of Cuban boxers lined up at the bar “like sitting ducks.” Hyde zeroed in on Rigondeaux and warmly began to exchange words in broken Spanish. Six years later, Hyde promoted a boxing show in Cork, which his friend, Michael “Lord of the Dance” Flatley, attended by his side.

  “You’re missing a superstar in the making,” Flatley chuckled in Hyde’s ear. “Somebody we can all get a feel for, and follow through to big titles.”

  “Where you going to get one of those?” Hyde replied.

  “Maybe go to one of the poorhouses of the world.”

  Rigondeaux’s sad face instantly flashed in Hyde’s mind. “Why skip Cuba?” Hyde thought to himself.

  It was ten years in a Cuban prison for each athlete you so much as discussed defection with. And Hyde, like Rigondeaux, had his own wife and kids to potentially never see again. But Hyde crunched the risk versus reward calculus and two weeks later, in March of 2007, he was in Havana and had arranged through contacts at La Finca boxing academy to meet Rigondeaux next to the Esquina Caliente arguing baseball in Parque Central. Rigondeaux knew exactly what the meeting was about without it being told in advance. He simply asked Hyde what he was doing in Cuba. “Writing a book,” Hyde lied.

  “On what?” Rigondeaux asked.

  “Boxing.”

  “Professional boxing?”

  Not long after that meeting, Rigondeaux signed his name to a contract with Hyde as his manager, written in a language he couldn’t read. By then the joke in Havana I was told about Cuban athletes was that they signed more contracts than autographs. Only after many lawsuits filed in Miami after he’d escaped on a smuggler’s boat did Rigondeaux understand the importance of his signature on this contract. He’d traded in Castro’s spider web for another in professional boxing.

  After Hyde had signed Rigondeaux, he wandered down to the Malecón and pondered the logistics of escape. He sorted through every means imaginable: rafts, speedboats, jet skis, submarines—anything he could think of. He looked up at the moon. “This was the same moon I look at when I’m looking up in Ireland,” he told me years later. “How can I get from here to there without going through airports, without going through security. All we had to do was get them twelve miles away; once you were twelve miles off the coast of Cuba, you were in international waters. I didn’t think about the consequences after that.”

  Hyde couldn’t identify the ideal escape route so he flew home to Ireland to give it some more thought. But in the meantime he left his signed boxers with cell phones. He also left behind his daughter’s debit card, which he promised to replenish regularly once he returned home, and to send over more money hidden inside the pages of printed material via DHL.

  Every year I returned to Havana after meeting Rigondeaux that day at Chocolate, so many boxers and ordinary Cubans I’d known disappeared, or were in the desperate process of doing everything they possibly could to flee, that it was impossible to take for granted any casual good-bye anywhere, because it could mean a good-bye forever. Security cameras sprouted up all over the city, tracking millions of footsteps from above street corners, only intensifying the Cuban version of 1984 that always felt rewritten by Charles Dickens. Everywhere you looked people’s eyes looked bloodshot from how exhausting this reality made interpersonal dynamics. I saw people laugh themselves to tears or fight themselves back from sadness almost every day. People either had no time to spare to get close to life or they had to pull back so far it was like they’d fallen out of orbit with their regular lives and into some poisonous constellation of dread. Both extremes only highlighted the difference between you and them, all the while with the sinking awareness that, sooner or later, even with the lucky ones, they all had a different train to catch from yours. More than ever before Cuba began to sharpen and snap into focus as some kind of nightmarish Grand Central Station, divided with such cruelty between those with tickets and those condemned and resigned to purgatory for the remainder of their lives.

  17

  CHASING THE AMERICAN DREAM FROM A SMUGGLER’S BOAT

  I couldn’t bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn’t think about nothing else.

  —Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  THE PERVERSE IRONY with increasing numbers of Cuban boxers, ballplayers, and ordinary citizens being trafficked off the island was that the same waters had transported their ancestors on slave ships to Cuba almost five centuries before, starting around 1520. Slavery continued to flourish in Cuba for the next 366 years, until it was outlawed in 1886.

  The transatlantic slave trade tore between ten and fifteen million Africans from their homes and grimly deposited them into indentured servitude in the New World. More than two million more, shackled together in cramped, disease-ridden spaces, died making the horrific seven-week passage. Recent estimates suggest as many as one in ten voyages underwent a slave mutiny. Africans attempted suicide, tried to jump ship, or refused to eat. Slavers were known to remove the teeth of slaves so they could force-feed them. Even before any slaves entered and perished on the boats, perhaps twice as many died being marched hundreds of miles to the awaiting ships or while being held in confinement in dungeon-like conditions. In all, for every hundred slaves that reached the New World, forty perished somewhere along that excruciating journey.

  Havana’s port used to be home to one of the biggest slave markets on earth. The port was protected by El Morro, which was built by the Spanish in 1589 as a fortress to guard Havana against invasion and raids. A chain was spread out across the waters. In 1762, the British captured El Morro after they landed in Cojimar, attacked from land, and mined through a bastion to seize control. The following year England returned Cuba to Spanish control and La Cabana was built as insurance against further invaders. The lighthouse was added in the mid-nineteenth century.

  Importation of slaves was outlawed in the United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century and Spain officially did the same twelve years later in 1820, the same year the American government ruled that bringing African slaves to the United States was an act of piracy, a capital offense. However, the trade hardly slowed down. Seven years after the American ban, twice the amount of slaves arrived in Havana. The number of slaves doubled again the following year. Slaves would continue to arrive on Cuban shores, unabated, for the next fifty-six years. By the turn of the eighteenth century, nearly one in four people living in Cuba was a slave. Hundreds of thousands more slaves continued to arrive by the boatload. In 1886, Cuba’s population had exploded to nearly a million and a half people. The global demand for sugar and tobacco, and the extraordinary labor force required to produce both, contributed to the ever-growing slave class. By that time three U.S. presidents had offered to buy Cuba from the Spanish, offering a lot more money for the island than they’d offered France in 1803 for Louisiana ($15 million) or the Russians in 1867 for Alaska (
$7.2 million). In 1897, President McKinley offered Spain $300 million. No dice.

  The following year, in 1898, when war broke out between the United States and Spain after the U.S.S. Maine sunk in Havana’s harbor, the United States finally had their island. On December 10, 1898, following four months of fighting, Spain and the United States signed the Treaty of Paris. After Spain relinquished control of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico to the United States, Cuba took down the Spanish flag and raised the stars and stripes.

  “What’s a million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans?” Teófilo Stevenson famously replied to an offer of millions of dollars to leave his island. But since Castro took power in 1959, over a million Cubans had left. Castro called anyone who wanted to leave a “worm” or a “traitor,” and most of the Cubans who had escaped looked at anyone who agreed with Stevenson’s position as being brainwashed or scared for their lives to voice any dissenting opinion to the party line. What most compounded the ambiguity of this dynamic for me was watching the boxers who defected—mostly black Cubans (although, unlike African Americans, I’ve never met a Cuban who didn’t refer to himself solely as a Cuban)—proudly wearing the Cuban flag on their trunks and on their robes in the United States. I could never determine exactly which Cuba they believed they were fighting for. It was never clear if they were fighting for the Cuba before Fidel or the one they hoped would come after. And what Cuba was that supposed to be?