The Domino Diaries Read online

  But that wasn’t the issue. His mother had just died back on the island and he was forbidden to attend the funeral. He was told if he set foot back on the island he’d be arrested on sight. Back in Cuba, the eighteen months Fidel had taken boxing away from his life forged an overwhelming bitterness in his heart, but he would describe the voyage on a crowded smuggler’s boat to Cancún—surrounded by thirty other terrified human cargo—as the most traumatic event of his life. The boats capsized, smugglers threw their cargo overboard, people were held hostage at gunpoint until a ransom was paid. I didn’t have to pull back all that far to see that a badly wounded canary in the coal mine for Castro’s Cuba had emerged on the opposite side of the Florida Straits.

  Boxers have a notoriously limited shelf life and Rigondeaux was making up for lost time, of which he had little left to cash in on his talents. Rigondeaux’s only path to success was to hurtle toward the American Dream like a runaway ambulance through traffic. I spent the next three years chasing my own version behind the hurtling ambulance of his life.

  The first fight of his I witnessed was in Tijuana. His manager wanted publicity and had invited me down there for an interview and offered to let me inside the dressing room and enter the ring with Rigondeaux to soak up the atmosphere. The promise of total access at the ground floor of Rigondeaux’s professional career in the States, on the way to a world championship, was the bait. But gangsters had threatened the manager about entering Tijuana, where they had connections to the mafia. They could arrange police planting drugs, hire a hit man, or just have us kidnapped. For as little as fifty dollars, any of the three were at their disposal. So these were the risks and rewards about heading down across the border. Rigondeaux’s manager, Gary Hyde, got on a plane after leaving an entire family in tears begging him not to. My wife was too angry about my recklessness and stupidity to muster any tears when we said good-bye.

  I was going to turn the offer down when my old trainer Ronnie Wilson found a pretty miraculous way to give me one final push out of my own way. I received a letter several months after I’d published a story about how Ronnie had helped me and others clarify our paths, while succumbing to his own addiction.

  Hello Brin,

  I’m not at all sure where to begin with this. I am Ronnie Wilson’s daughter. He did also have a son, my older brother Dean. Silly as it sounds, I Google my father’s name from time to time, looking for stories such as yours … yearning to know more about him. Your article touched my heart. He was such a kindhearted man, who would give the shirt off his back to anyone in need. However, drugs and alcohol are horrible friends to keep. They turned him into an ugly person … he was a totally different person when under the influence. I want you to know his family loved him to death and I personally time and time again tried to help him. I took him to rehabs and attended AA meetings with him, pulled him out of bars and got him home safe to get some sleep and food. I could go on and on. I’m still so saddened by his disease and refusal of any help. My husband and I have even offered him to come live with us on many occasions, but he has always declined.

  I have three beautiful children, Ronnie’s grandchildren. It’s heartbreaking to know they will never get to know the wonderful man he used to be. I was always daddy’s girl and still feel that way at age thirty-four. He was my hero and I’ll forever wonder what I could have done to save him from this horrible addiction. I appreciate the time you took in describing the kind, selfless, gentle man he once was. Those are memories I cling to and choose to share with my children. If you do have any other memories you might have of my father I’d be extremely grateful if you shared them with me. I have very few articles and photos left of his boxing career. At one point when he began to clean up a bit, he asked me to send him what I had because someone was writing a biography about him. He soon ended up back on skid row in downtown Vancouver, so I don’t know what became of it all. I still have a couple of Ring magazines and some old black-and-white photos. Thank you for sharing such kind words about my dad.

  Warm regards,

  Jennifer

  Jennifer lived in San Diego with her family, back where Ronnie began his professional career as a teenager. I tend to conflate a spiritual need for destiny with what’s on offer in horoscopes and numerology and other spiritual junkie track marks, but I’m a Gypsy mother’s son. I had watched my mother, whom all my friends told me was crazy, make a living for thirty years trying to heal people through means I could never accept for my own wounds, the ones that healed her. Jennifer’s message in a bottle—and the fact that she lived ten minutes from the border I was meant to cross—was enough of a karmic tap on my shoulder for me to push my chips in and agree to head down to Tijuana for Rigondeaux’s fight.

  I wrote Jennifer back and she suggested we meet in Old Town the night before I crossed the border. I showed up in the spooky little neighborhood and quickly spotted the tall “slightly awkward” blonde she’d warned me she was. But the first thing I noticed about Jennifer from a distance was how she shared her father’s disarming confidence, the kind that reminds you that anyone who doesn’t feel safe in some essential sense could never be generous even if they wanted to. As she got closer, Jennifer had her dad’s same shy, caring eyes. I was so distracted, I didn’t even register that she was carrying a pair of her dad’s brown Everlast trunks in one hand and a folder of clippings in the other, until she held them up for me to see.

  21

  WRITING IN THE SCRAPBOOK OF A TYRANT

  I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan.

  —George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

  FOR THE NEXT THREE YEARS I dropped down the rabbit hole, following Rigondeaux around the world for each of his fights while spending the rest of my life chasing down everyone I could find in journalism, film, boxing, academia, and publishing who contributed definitive work on Cuba. I bumped into Leon Gast, director of When We Were Kings, filming a Manny Pacquiao documentary while Rigondeaux was on his undercard. Leon said he hadn’t seen footwork like Rigondeaux’s since Muhammad Ali.

  Ann Louise Bardach had interviewed Fidel Castro for Vanity Fair and written Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana. “Maybe the most corrosive legacy that Fidel Castro will leave behind is that of the broken family,” Bardach told me.

  Larry Merchant, a former boxing writer and longtime HBO boxing commentator, invited me over to his home in Santa Monica. “Boxing is every man for himself in and out of the ring.” Merchant laughed. “It’s a slightly more civilized version of the jungle. It itself symbolizes the rawest form of free enterprise. You’re on your own. To come here just to be a fighter and not be able to go back to the ground where you came from is something relatively new and strange. Of course in America where the streets are paved with gold…”

  Carlos Eire, author of the National Book Award–winning memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana and Learning to Die in Miami, had his office at Yale. Eire had left Cuba, along with fourteen thousand other children, during the Operation Peter Pan exodus of 1960–1962. He said when he’d heard the first reports of Elián González’s arrival in Miami, he “lost his mind” reliving his own childhood trauma. “There are many, many people who admire Fidel Castro and who think his revolution was a good thing. Including just about every professor down my hallway.” I was fascinated that such a confession in no way gave this man pause toward his convictions for even a second.

  Steve Fainaru, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of The Duke of Havana, was in Oakland. “It’s just such a difficult choice. I think the fact that people are forced to make that choice—that there’s this either/or—it says so much about the Cuban government and their political situation. And it says so much about the United States government, frankly, and our continuing ridiculously anachronistic views toward this small island. It
’s really sad.”

  His partner on the book, Ray Sánchez, the only U.S. newspaper reporter based in Havana at the time of Rigondeaux’s defection, now lived five blocks up the street from me in New York. He had a child of his own in Havana. “If the Cuba story is about anything,” Sanchez began, echoing Bardach, “it’s about the separation of families. For the last fifty years we’ve seen this tug-of-war that has just torn families apart and plays out every day, in virtually every Cuban household.”

  Several months later Leon Gast mentioned that Don King, who’d offered tens of millions to Félix Savón and Teófilo Stevenson to defect, was passing through Brooklyn and offered me an introduction. King repeated the same lines from a script he’d said at a press conference for one of Rigondeaux’s fights several months before: “Rigondeaux is Cuba libre, and that’s fighting for freedom from Cuba. He had to get on the boats, the rafts, and brave the hazards of the ocean and the shark-infested waters to seek freedom. Where did he seek that freedom? Old Glory right here.” King pointed down to an American flag button on his jean jacket. “This is the only country in the world that people try to break in rather than to break out.”

  Enrique Encinosa, the Cuban American author, radio host, and boxing historian, lived in Miami. Before I flew out to interview Encinosa, he told me over the phone that the greatest pleasure he could ever experience in his life would be putting a gun to Fidel’s head and pulling the trigger.

  Just over a decade since I’d read his book on my first flight over to Cuba, journalist and author S. L. Price passed through New York City and we arranged to meet at his hotel room, across the street from Madison Square Garden, at two in the morning. I’d brought along a bottle of some vile coffee-infused tequila. Price looks like Jimmy Stewart and sounds like he narrated The Wonder Years. He had spent four years working for the Miami Herald and traveled to Cuba repeatedly to work on his book Pitching Around Fidel from 1991 until he was told he could never return, shortly before I first arrived in 2000.

  “Cuba—” I laughed a little nervously, setting a glass before Price and reaching over for the tequila to fill it for him. There wasn’t another chair in the room so I flipped over his hotel wastebasket and sat on that. Before I could hit record on my tape recorder, Price was off and running.

  “I moved to Miami in 1990. I grew up in Connecticut, went to school in North Carolina, I lived in New Mexico, lived in Memphis, lived in San Francisco and Northern California, and then I moved to Miami and it was literally like moving into a different world. There are many Americans who will say, ‘Ugh, Miami is a foreign country.’ Many Anglos from all over the country have that opinion. I actually look upon that as a great plus. I thought, ‘Fantastic!’ You know, I get to go to a place where Spanish is a majority language, where there’s an entirely different culture. It was an amazing transition. I went to work for the Miami Herald, which of course is sort of the enemy of Castro. I found it fascinating that there were plans in place for when Castro would die, what the Herald would do—the game plan for covering the story. And in some ways I realized the most important person in Miami was Fidel Castro. Not the mayor. Not the President of the United States. But Fidel Castro. What I love most about Miami is that it’s a city still in the state of becoming. So when I got down there, I suddenly realized that the second capital of Florida was Havana; that psychically Havana was in the mind of Miami almost all the time. I didn’t want to wall myself off from that. I thought it was fascinating.

  “I got the opportunity to go to Cuba for the first time in 1991 for the Pan Am Games. You have to understand, a journalist wants a story, and Miami’s one of the great news towns in the world—you can’t write a bad story about it. It’s simply too extreme and colorful and interesting and conflict-ridden.

  “So I get to Cuba for the Pan Am Games and in Miami I’m told everybody’s miserable in Cuba. Everybody wants to get out and everybody hates Castro. Then when I get to the Pan Am Games, it’s not just that Fidel was doing the wave. His boxers are having a record-setting day against the Americans, the sworn enemy of the Castro regime. Fidel is standing up and throwing up his hands like any boozy fan in the cheap seats. But the fans are really proud. The fans, the people in the street, they’re telling me ‘This has got to change here. I don’t like it … but we kicked your ass.’ And then they’ll go on to detail to me the problems with the U.S. Congress. And of course the literacy rate there is over the top.

  “This was 1991, and I still have never been to a place like Cuba. Cuba disturbs you. It’s funny, because as a traveler you often think, ‘Well, I want to relax. I want to go on a trip and in a sense, just be.’ Cuba doesn’t let you just be. You go down there and you are heartbroken. You feel intensely both positively and negatively every single day, sometimes hour by hour, and minute by minute. By the time you leave, you’re exhausted and you never want to see the place again. And then about a month or two months go by—it depends on the last time you were there—and you start thinking about it again. I’ve never felt that way about anywhere else.

  “It’s so easy if you stay in Miami or in Havana to have a black-and-white view of the world. I happened to live in Miami and be entranced by Cuba, but I wasn’t in love with the system. It isn’t like I went down there and thought, ‘Oh, communism is great; socialism is the way of the future.’ But when I went to Cuba, it confirmed for me probably more than anything else the idea of the gray area and of living in the gray. There were people who criticized Castro, who were incredible critics of the regime. They wanted Castro to die tomorrow and they couldn’t leave. But they couldn’t bear to leave Cuba. Couldn’t even think about getting on a raft. And then there were people who left and actually believed in many of the principles in Cuba, but left because of financial reasons. They wanted to take care of their family, so they left. And when they got to Miami they said, “down with Castro.” There are people who—who just didn’t fit into any of the boxes.

  “When I met these people I thought: This is human. It’s not neat. It’s not reduced to some box where they’re bad and we’re good. And you know, there were heroes in Miami who had left behind families, children, their wives—penniless—and wouldn’t send them money. Teófilo Stevenson gave every sign to me of being a full-blown alcoholic. In some ways, even though he was mouthing pieties about the revolution, he seemed to have his soul damaged by being a flag bearer for the revolution. It wasn’t clean.

  “In Lawrence of Arabia, Jackson Bentley asks Lawrence, ‘What is it about the desert that so appeals to you?’ And Lawrence says: ‘It’s clean.’ The thing about Cuba is that it’s dirty. It’s not clean. And the relations between the families in Miami and the families in Havana aren’t clean. It’s dirty. And I don’t mean dirty like filthy or corrupt—although all that is there. I mean it’s gray. You will go there and all your preconceptions will be upset. And if you’re any kind of human being, you will allow them to be upset.

  “At the Olympics, when we competed against the Russians, they were enemies. But there was something about the Cubans that American kids that I knew thought was very, very cool. And Teófilo Stevenson was that way. I didn’t understand the politics of it. At that point I was a real kid. But there was something about that pride that was unmistakable. When we watched the Russians as kids, against the U.S., they were the enemy and they looked like the enemy. They were steroid-ridden, unhappy, blunt. The Cubans weren’t like that. They were stylish. They were proud. They carried themselves with a feeling of love—love is sort of a strange word to use—but you knew they were tough and they were proud but you could tell that they loved what they were doing and who they were. They were proud to have the Cuban flag on their chest. And that was disconcerting because they were supposed to be the enemy, to be communist and therefore deep down hateful of their country.

  “There are plenty of people in Cuba who want their system to change. I need to be as clear as possible on this. Everybody I met thought, ‘We built this thing. Castro’s gotta go. This has got
to change and I need a better life for my child.’ There’s that, too. This system is bankrupt. And then there’s also this embargo, which has got to stop. ‘You’re hurting us, you’re not hurting the guy on top,’ they say. So, it’s all very mixed. And then at the same time, there are people who say, ‘Before Castro, my father had no education, had no health care, and couldn’t read. And now he can do that. There’s something good about that.’ I’ve been trained to assume that there’s nothing good about the Cuban revolution. So I’m getting these mixed messages, and that’s thrilling. Because it confronts me with all my preconceptions and makes me throw them out the window and start again.”

  For the next four and a half hours, I didn’t move off my wastebasket until we both noticed out his window the sun had come up.

  22

  MISADVENTURES

  I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations—one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it—you will regret both.

  —Søren Kierkegaard

  “MALA SUERTE” WERE THE FIRST WORDS uttered by the formidable stepfather of a Cuban girl I’d fallen for, after casually placing his bishop to pin my queen right in front of my king. He removed the unlit Winston Churchill Romeo y Julieta cigar from his lips that he’d been chewing on since we’d begun playing an hour ago. He gulped the last of his mojito and refilled the glass with a bottle of mud-colored Havana Club. “Another zugzwang. What a feo position, but with such a sensual name it’s hard not to savor it.”