The Domino Diaries Read online

  It was the third game in a row he’d taken off me and he’d been playing for both of us every move along the way. It was an ugly feeling to be that easily toyed with, but I was a little more concerned with the interrogation about my relationship to his daughter Sofía that inevitably loomed.

  After three years of clandestinely meeting her in hotel rooms around Toronto, on my way to or from Cuba to film the queasy documentary on Rigondeaux I’d begun, it was the first time Sofía had invited me to her home. Thirty minutes earlier she had left us alone to talk while she grabbed some groceries for a meal she wanted to cook that evening. “See you soon, papi!” she hollered innocently from behind the front door. But after her stepfather and I instantly glared at the door to acknowledge her good-bye—and then even faster at each other—I assumed he was going to flip the table and start swinging at me. We both knew he was papi by rank while I knew, and he seemed to suspect, I was papi by sexual confession.

  After winning a lump sum of cash a couple weeks before in Ireland by betting on a Rigondeaux victory at twenty to one odds, I convinced Sofía to join me on my next trip to Cuba. Sofía and I were leaving the next day to visit what was left of the Havana their family had left behind ten years earlier, when she was fourteen. She’d left Cuba only a couple years younger than my mother had left communist Hungary. My mother and she had a little more in common, too. They’d both spoken up as kids in school when the Youth Communist League recruited new members to announce their belief that communism was, in fact, bullshit. In other words, they were both preternaturally stubborn and gutsy.

  Her stepfather and I were sitting fourteen hundred miles away from Havana, huddled over a chessboard in the dining room of a small apartment in a quiet Toronto suburb. While I was struggling with another zugzwang on the board, I knew from his daughter that he was still reeling from the life back in Cuba he’d chosen to abandon. We were in the same apartment where, his stepdaughter had told me, he had sent his wife, son, and her to live a year ahead of his arrival, a decade before.

  After securing a tarjeta blanca (white card) from the government to leave the island, he’d sold on the black market their beautiful Havana family home, just down the street from the Habana Libre hotel in Vedado. He’d sold the house to finance his family’s departure and look after their needs in Canada the best he could until they could gain a foothold. The plan was to give his family a head start in their new life, free of all of Cuba’s crushing restrictions, until he could join them. He had to wait a year after he’d sold the home to not raise any suspicions with the government and endanger any of their extended family. But when he arrived in Toronto the following year to reunite with his family, they weren’t the same people he’d said good-bye to at the airport twelve months before. He couldn’t recognize them from how much they’d changed adjusting to life outside Cuba. His marriage never recovered and his wife eventually left him for a man she’d met online who lived in Miami. Now his teenage son had suffered a nervous breakdown and lived with him down the street while Sofía took over the family’s old apartment after graduating university, working two jobs, and living with a roommate.

  “Do you mind if I smoke this?” He held up the cigar between his fingers. “It reminds me of nice things. Proust had his madeleines, we exiles have our cigars to retrieve the past.”

  “I don’t mind.” I smiled, tipping over my king.

  “Gracias,” the stepfather said, placing the cigar between his teeth while reaching into his pocket for an old Zippo. He made kissy-faces in my direction sucking in the flame while his eyebrows arched teasingly. “You give up so easily.”

  “It’s pretty obvious I’ve brought a knife to a gunfight.”

  “I’m not bored.” He grinned, chewing on an ice cube. “But I’ve been meaning to ask you since my daughter first mentioned you to me. Wife or mistress?”

  “Come again?” I asked.

  “Is your preference for a wife or a mistress?”

  “You went easier on me with chess.”

  “And you left the field of the battle.” He laughed. “So I’m giving chase. Sofía told me you have a wife in New York.”

  I nodded.

  He nodded back to me, absentmindedly replenishing the chessboard’s rank and file.

  “I must admit…” He laughed, flicking some ash off his cigar and resting his fist against his cheek with the smoke curling toward the ceiling. “I find your dynamic quite strange. Three years ago you met a Cuban boxer who told you he melted his Olympic gold medals into his mouth. Even if you made that up, if he didn’t say it, he should have said it. But you’ve been chasing this tortured boxer around the world and to finance this pursuit, Sofía told me you’ve maxed out four credit cards and a line of credit to do this.”

  “Maybe the wife or mistress thing is a better question for her to answer,” I suggested.

  “Last week our family—what’s left of it—watched Rigondeaux fight in Ireland on the Internet. Sofía told me you bet your last thousand dollars on him winning in the first round at twenty to one after some thugs robbed you of your camera and your footage filming him.”

  “Just before the fight I gave Rigondeaux my phone in the dressing room, with Sofía on the other end of the line. I wanted him to hear a friendly Cuban voice before he went out to fight.”

  “We were in this dining room when she spoke to him. Do you know what she told him?”

  “No,” I admitted. “But whatever it was, I’ve very rarely seen Rigondeaux smile the way he did.”

  “She asked him to win so she could see you. And now the proceeds from Rigondeaux’s victory have given you and my daughter a trial marriage in Havana for two weeks.”

  I shrugged.

  “I see,” he said. “So, wife or mistress?”

  “You first.”

  “An old communist joke has Marx, Engels, and Lenin asked their preference. Marx immediately said, ‘Wife.’ Engels countered, ‘Mistress.’ Lenin answered, ‘Both.’ Like you have chosen.”

  “Why did he choose both?” I asked.

  “Because he wanted them to know about each other. That way he’d be free to spend more time learning.”

  “One more game before Sofía gets back?”

  “Of course.” He reached over and held his pawn suspended over the board. “You’re following one of Fidel’s pawns with Rigondeaux, aren’t you? This boxer trying to escape Cuba in a smuggler’s boat and make it in professional boxing has more in common with a pawn than at first glance, doesn’t he? Pawns are the only pieces on the board that can’t go backwards.”

  “That’s true,” I agreed.

  “But they’re also the only pieces on the board that, if they can make it all the way to the final row of the enemy’s side, can transform into something more powerful. All the boxers and athletes of tomorrow must be tuned into radio bemba to see how he does. I’m sure Castro’s traitor is Cuba’s martyr for most people.”

  “He’s already won a world title and made some serious money. He might earn a million dollars within the next year or so. As his life and career keep unfolding, I’m trying to explore if leaving his whole life behind was worth it.”

  “Stories are like sexuality.” He grinned mischievously. “All that matters is the flammability. Whatever the tale is—moral or immoral, tragic or farce, ambiguous or black-and-white—the potency is all in how hot it burns. How hot does this Cuban stranger’s story burn for you?”

  “Well,” I said. “I’m bringing all the footage I’ve shot with Rigondeaux to his family so they can see him for the first time since he left. If they’ll speak to me and I’m not arrested interviewing them, I’ll take that footage back to Rigondeaux in Miami.”

  “So answer my question,” he persisted.

  “Maybe I reject the premise of the question.”

  “All the precious things we have in life are fragile. We’ll lose them all one way or another soon enough. Sometimes we’ll lose them for the right reasons, often for the wrong reasons, and occ
asionally for no reason. Whatever you intentions are, I think you appreciate how precious my daughter is.”

  “Yes.”

  “I tried to save my family from the suffering we endured in Cuba by bringing them here.” He swept a hand across the room. “In the process I unwittingly destroyed everything I had. I lost everything I cared about. This boxer you follow confronted his own Faustian bargain abandoning his family. But like a lot of writers you remind me of a bullfrog. Do you know what a bullfrog does?”

  “I don’t know what a bullfrog is,” I confessed.

  “During mating season a bullfrog finds a pond in the swamp to sing his song to lure any females who can hear his voice. And many female bullfrogs turn into groupies the moment they hear it. But nobody falls for his song more deeply than himself. So much so, in fact, that he forgets the reason why he began singing in the first place.”

  “Sofía’s a bigger romantic than I am.”

  “And romantics pretend they love the hopeless chase when really they’re addicted to suffering. The only woman who really saw me for who I am told me that I was someone who would fall in love ten thousand times. She accepted that before she gave in to being one of those ten thousand, rather than trying to force me into being someone else by stopping with her. She didn’t waste any time trying to prevent me from being who I was. I think you have the same curse and it’s much uglier to see my daughter falling for this than it ever was looking in the mirror.”

  “Maybe if you find the right girl you don’t have to fall in love with ten thousand other ones. You can just fall in love with that girl ten thousand times and you sort of fulfill the quota of the curse, no?”

  “Okay.” He slapped his forehead. He reached down and picked up his pawn and set it gently back down. “Bueno. Let’s be civil before she gets home and return to some chess. Your move.”

  23

  SLIDING DOORS

  Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that.

  —J. D. Salinger, “A Girl I Knew”

  PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING I’d lined up in Havana to complete my documentary fell apart almost immediately after we arrived. Split Decision was meant to explore all the reasons behind why Cubans remained on the island or fled, examined through the consequences endured by Cuba’s heroic boxers who turned down fortunes or, like Rigondeaux, escaped. Increasingly it became clear the only story I could tell was how I couldn’t tell that story. I wanted to interview as many notable Cubans and experts as I could find—artists, journalists, athletes, coaches—knowing meanwhile that all the interviews would have to be conducted illegally. There was no way to officially line anything up unless you knew the right officials to bribe. And everyone I spoke with assured me I’d have to bribe everyone who went on camera to get them to talk about how money had no value.

  I wanted to shoot my footage as fast as possible and remain below the radar for as long as I could. I had an ambitious list of people to interview on camera. Banned authors like Yoani Sánchez, the controversial blogger whom Time magazine had named one of the world’s most influential people in 2008 and who’d interviewed Obama not long before. Yoani’s blog was translated into more languages than The New York Times and she was quickly beginning to symbolize a controversial role as something akin to Cuba’s Anne Frank.

  I wanted Teófilo Stevenson to talk about his role in the revolution and Rigondeaux’s “betrayal,” which he’d ultimately spoken out in defense of. If Stevenson and Félix Savón represented Cuba’s past, and if Rigondeaux’s story was emblematic of its present, a young teenage boxer named Cristian Martínez caught my eye as someone representing the future. He’d starred in a documentary about elite young boxers on the island called Sons of Cuba, and many people viewed him as the next great boxer emerging to assume Rigondeaux’s abdicated role as Cuba’s dominant champion. Sons of Cuba was the first film for which foreign filmmakers were allowed into La Finca, the elite boxing academy where all of Cuba’s great champions had trained.

  Last, if at all possible, I wanted to interview Rigondeaux’s wife and children: the collateral damage. Even knocking on their front door represented crossing a Rubicon. Or worse. An American, Alan Gross, had just been imprisoned for illegally working as a covert U.S. operative supplying satellite equipment to people on the island.

  After we drove to meet Sofía’s grandparents near Playa del Este and unloaded all the supplies we’d brought, I went over to the Habana Libre to check on the status of the people I wanted to meet and discovered nearly all of them were spooked about the risks and asked that I make no effort to contact them again. At the other hotels around Havana where I’d arranged to discuss the possibility of other interviews, I was stood up by every contact I’d had lined up through journalists in New York. Cars began to drive past with strangers smirking and pointing up at the cameras hanging over the streets, heightening my paranoia. My desperation still had a step on my fear, but it was pretty evident that things were falling apart.

  “Beeeg brother eez watching, gringo,” I was warned by the people renting me the apartment in Centro Habana, where Sofía and I were staying. “Welcome to Hotel California! Leezon to Mr. Henley’s words. ‘Check owwd aanee time bhat joo can never leave.…”

  Any country takes on a sinister hue once Don Henley’s lyrics begin to carry any significance.

  I made more calls around Havana to sort out something—anything—and salvage the two months I had already committed to being there. I’d borrowed a lot of money and maxed out every credit card and line of credit I had, and the only way out of bankruptcy was getting a story.

  My attitude at that point was that my debts were an asset, because anybody else chasing after this story with a budget would steer clear. Bad cards or not, I was all in. Pretty soon the warnings I received from the people who were renting me the apartment escalated to begging on the lives of their children that I cease anything that could get their families in trouble. Everyone was petrified to talk about anything related to Rigondeaux or other defected fighters. “You’re on your own,” I was told repeatedly.

  I heard the same things over and over: Security knows everything. Taps the phone. Checks your e-mails. Talks to your neighbor. When your boxer tried to defect, Castro wrote about Rigondeaux himself. This is not a man to ask questions about. Officially he is a traitor. Surveillance had escalated since Castro had stepped down from power. Cameras were on most of the street corners now across the entire city. More uniformed police. More secret police. The CDR on every block had stepped up their vigilance. More informants. The government was clamping down on everything, especially an issue as touchy as defecting athletes. Leave this situation alone. You can leave. We cannot. We live with the consequences of your actions. If you are not careful you will not leave or ever be able to come back.

  After I went back to Playa del Este to pick Sofía up, the time with her grandparents had left her sealed off. They were two sweet people who lived in a small apartment after they’d traded in their house in Havana for two apartments in this suburb. Relatives lived in their other place. Sofía’s grandfather had been a wealthy man who managed three sugar refineries that were all seized by the rebels. A couple of strokes had left his speech very limited, but he was open to talking about the circumstances of the complete overhaul that his life and country underwent during that time. He acknowledged the many struggles and missteps of the government’s maneuvers.

  When he touched on the impact of the U.S. blockade he was nuanced and explored it from several sides. The Cuban American vote in Florida had largely been responsible for the results of both of George W. Bush’s elections, while Castro had a scapegoat for his own blunders, he said. He had no bitterness about losing his own station in life prerevolution in exchange for the improvements he saw for so many others from how life had been pre-Castro. �
�Do you really imagine the Cuban people would hand over the wheel of our country and abandon our whole socioeconomic system to a pack of bearded kids if all the greed, corruption, and unspeakable cruelty hadn’t made life in this country a living hell for millions of our citizens? Castro was created by those conditions. The new generation never saw what was before. Those who did are dying off.”

  After we left and headed back to Havana, Sofía was very quiet in the car. She stared out the window at the sea and finally shook her head. “After they’re gone I’ll never come back here. I hate returning to Havana more each time. It only reminds me I don’t belong here any more than I do where I live now. All of my beautiful memories just rot away while I’m in Toronto, but here the stench makes me sick. I’ll never ever come back after they die.”

  This was the backdrop of our trial-run honeymoon from hell.

  * * *

  While the rest of the world’s attention had turned to the struggle against dictators in Syria, Egypt, and Libya, Sofía and I landed in Havana just as the celebrations on behalf of the fiftieth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs failed invasion were picking up steam. As a tidal wave of antigovernment protests swept the Middle East, Havana was caught in some kind of bizarro Fourth of July, collectively celebrating their greatest victory against imperialism and their maximum leader outliving ten U.S. presidents and counting.

  I brought a camera along and we marched with the masses. It was a weird and convoluted mix of the deadweight of so many other things Cubans had endured along with that half-century’s opposition to the United States. But along with all the mandated hypocritical bullshit summed up on billboards proclaiming it was all ¡VAMOS BIEN!, thousands more people were lost in their pride like kites blown out of their souls scratching the sky. It was like being on the field for the Super Bowl with a hundred thousand players from one team. In between the little flags, blown whistles, and chants, I saw faces bracing all around me, struggling against an unknown future and turbulent past to create a spectrum of emotions that spanned from panic to exhaustion. The surreal spectacle was held in the Plaza de la Revolución with Russian MiG fighter jets straight out of Top Gun soaring through the clouds and scaring the hell out of a flock of vultures circling over our heads. Hundreds of thousands of habaneros took buses, hitchhiked, biked, or simply walked out their front doors and struck out across the city on foot to join the crowd in the square.