A Cuban Boxer's Journey Read online

  While sports journalist Jimmy Cannon once called boxing “the red light district of sports,” Rafael Trejo resided in what was formerly Cuba’s most famous red light district. One of the largest funeral processions in Cuban history was for the notorious pimp Yarini Ponce de León, who was shot dead in a duel in the area. In Old Havana, the street names that predate the revolution offer a glimpse into the city’s state of mind at that time. You might have known someone who lived on the corner of Soul and Bitterness, Solitude and Hope, or Light and Avocado. When things changed in Cuba, the names were changed as well, and new signs went up. Ask for directions from a local today, though, and you’re likely to hear the old names. Those names meant something personal and not easily forgotten to the people who lived on those streets. Avocado Street was named for the avocado that grew in the garden of a convent. Hope Street was named for a door in the city wall before it was torn down. Soul Street refers to the loneliness of the street’s position in the city. Sometimes these streets lead to dead ends; others lead to the doorsteps of cathedrals constructed with the explicit intention of turning music into stone.

  While guidebooks might tell you that time collapsed here, another theory says that in Latin America, all of history coexists at once. In 1958, Graham Greene wrote: “To live in Havana was to live in a factory that turned out human beauty on a conveyor-belt.” Yet this beauty the people of Cuba unquestionably possess walks hand in hand with their pain. Whomever you might encounter in this place lacking the capacity to walk or even to stand for whatever reason will inevitably remain convinced they can dance. When Castro was put on trial in 1953 and asked who was intellectually responsible for his first attempt at insurrection, he dropped the name of the poet José Martí. From what I’d seen of it, the revolution’s hold on Cubans looked less like poetry and more like the chess term zugzwang: You’re forced to move, but the only moves you can make will put you in a worse position. Cuba had become an entire population of eleven million people with every iron in the fire doubling as a finger in a dyke.

  *

  At Trejo one afternoon, I spotted someone out of the corner of my eye while I was training with Vinent.

  “Mi madre,” Héctor whispered, dropping his hands slowly, looking in the same direction as me. “It’s him.”

  “Him?” I asked.

  “Sí,” Héctor confirmed, then repeated gravely, “El.”

  When any Cuban refers to “him” in conversation, with little to no information or context provided, it invariably refers to Fidel.

  “Mi madre,” Héctor groaned.

  “Como?” I asked. “Quien?” Who?

  Héctor remained frozen. It was one hundred degrees out that afternoon training in the open air of Rafael Treo. I nudged him, but Héctor wasn’t coming to. I looked around us as the silence took hold. All the proud coaches refused to look the problem straight on, instead staring off from the corners of their eyes at the entrance to the gym. A profoundly disturbing thing you discover very quickly traveling in Cuba is that the most dangerous person for Cubans isn’t the police or even the secret police; it’s their neighbors. Anyone can report you for anything “outside” the revolution—even if you haven’t done it yet. Héctor himself had been banned from boxing before he’d ever attempted escape.

  So what was this?

  Had Fidel died or was El paying a visit?

  “It’s him,” Héctor repeated, this time even more softly, nodding in the direction of the entrance. “This is very dangerous for us.”

  “Como?” I asked. “Who?”

  “Rigondeaux. There, hiding in the shadows.”

  All I could see was a child near the entrance.

  “That’s Rigondeaux? That child?”

  “Claro,” Héctor grunted. “That child is twenty-seven and perhaps the greatest boxer Cuba has ever produced. Fidel has said he will never fight again. He has nowhere to go. Anyone in sports can no longer be seen talking to him. We could lose our jobs. You can talk to him.”

  *

  It was as if a Cuban version of Mr. Kurtz had stepped out of his own version Heart of Darkness to pop into the gym for a visit.

  That day, back in 2007, the first time I was introduced to Guillermo Rigondeaux Ortiz in Havana, I had little way of knowing who or what I was looking at. I had seen Rigondeaux’s face not obscured by headgear only once. The trouble that evening was that his face was instead obscured by the photograph of Fidel he was holding aloft after having been declared the victor of a tournament. All I saw now was a solemn, five-foot-five-inch kid dressed in a Nike ball cap and jeans with a fake Versace shirt that had the sleeves ripped off.

  Without realizing it, I started toward Rigondeaux. As I approached him, in the shade under the bleachers of the entrance to Rafael Trejo, my first impression was that his was the saddest face I had ever seen on the island. One of the few things not in short supply in Havana is sadness. Rigondeaux’s sadness distinguished him from his countrymen nearly as much as his boxing pedigree.

  I reached out a hand and introduced myself, and he did what he could, under the strained circumstances at the gym, to muster a smile. Up close I noticed his right eye showed damage, slumping slightly from his left. Rigondeaux’s attempt at a polite smile betrayed the gold grill over his front teeth for a brief moment as he took another drag of his Popular cigarette.

  “So where did you get that gold on your teeth?” I asked him.

  Rigondeaux snickered, dropped his head, and smirked, taking a last long drag on his cigarette before flicking it on the ground and stamping it out with his sneaker. “Oh, you know, I melted down both my gold medals into my mouth. I used to fight in this place….”

  3

  Castro’s Traitor

  I had a lot of trouble getting to sleep that night. The following morning I researched everything I could on Rigondeaux at the Inglaterra, the Our Man in Havana Graham Greene–famous hotel Cubans were forbidden to visit unless to wait on tourists. It was right around this time that the soon-to-be world-famous Cuban blogger, Yoani Sánchez, was sneaking into similar hotels in disguise in order to begin her Generation Y blog detailing her take on the brutal reality in Cuba to her millions of readers. The blog has been translated into more languages than The New York Times, and she’s since become a kind of Cuban Anne Frank.

  Rigondeaux’s alleged defection attempt (he continued to deny the allegation, but of course he didn’t have any choice but to deny) at the Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro had taken place only four months before I met him at Rafael Trejo. Both Rigondeaux and his teammate Lara had denied trying to defect, first claiming they were drugged and abducted. That story quickly changed to them having “stayed away” from the games, fearing disqualification in their matches after exceeding their weight limits. Rigondeaux and Lara both pointed out that they had no foreign visas to leave in the first place and also that they never sought asylum in Brazil. The German boxing promoter Ahmet Öner refuted this, insisting he had signed Rigondeaux and Lara to five-year contracts. Also, officials at the German embassy in Brazil, when contacted by the media, claimed both Rigondeaux and Lara had sought visas. In the press, Rigondeaux called these allegations “lies.”

  Whatever actually happened, Castro seized upon the situation and assured the world in print that he would not arrest either fighter for his betrayal back in Cuba. Instead, he set them adrift in Cuban society into a state of nonexistence. All their achievements and records were erased, and athletes and former friends were forbidden to talk to them. Rigondeaux became a social pariah, essentially excommunicated from his society. Castro allowed foreign journalists to investigate. CNN, the Associated Press, and Reuters sent film crews to Rigondeaux’s house and had him and his wife pose like prisoners behind the bars of the fence leading to their house.

  Ray Sánchez, the only U.S. newspaper reporter based in Havana at that time working for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, tracked Rigondeaux down at his home for an interview the same week I’d met Rigondeaux at Trejo. Sánch
ez had co-written, along with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Steve Fainaru, The Duke of Havana, about Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez’s escape from Cuba and rise to riches and fame with the New York Yankees. Ten years after Duque’s famous escape, Sánchez was investigating the Duque’s boxing equivalent. According to Sánchez, Rigondeaux still drove his yellow-and-black Mitsubishi that the government gave him for his 2000 Olympic gold medal win in Sydney. The communist state continued to offer Rigondeaux’s wife and two children a weekly food subsidy more generous than what the majority of Cubans received.

  “I don’t know what’s happening,” Rigondeaux told Sánchez about his future. “I want to fight and win again.”

  Rigondeaux’s wife, Farah Colina, added, “We’ve been trying to talk to them [government officials] for more than a year but no one listens. We’ve had no access. This is a two-time Olympic gold medalist. Imagine ordinary people just trying to be heard.”

  Sánchez would conclude in his article for the Sun-Sentinel:

  In many ways, the problems plaguing Rigondeaux and his family—low wages, inadequate housing and unresponsive state bureaucracies—reflect the concerns of many of Cuba’s 11 million people. For more than a year, Rigondeaux and his wife said they have sought a meeting with top government officials about finding permanent housing for the family of four. Since the boxer’s return from the 2004 Athens Olympics, they have lived in a leaky, run-down apartment belonging to Cuba’s sports ministry.

  Rigondeaux told Sánchez he still wished to box at the next year’s Olympics in Beijing, yet no sports ministry officials or his trainers had agreed even to visit with him. “They’re hypocrites,” Rigondeaux said of these people. He confessed he continued to train on his own, exercising and shadowboxing, in case the remote chance ever arrived to continue his career. The rest of the time Rigondeaux said he watched cartoons with his five-year-old son Guillermo Jr. “I wait,” Rigondeaux lamented to Sánchez. “Some people recognize me and wave. Others shout, ‘Hey, why did you come back? You should have stayed.’ I don’t respond. I just come back inside and close the door behind me.”

  In 2013, when I interviewed Sánchez in New York, he described the sad scene of meeting Rigondeaux at the lowest point of his life:

  I went looking for him after his return to Cuba from Brazil. He came out from one of the rooms in the back of his apartment. He seemed to me like a broken man. He seemed sad. I would always see him just leaning over the balcony, just staring out at the traffic, chain-smoking. He told me he “stared into heaven” while he leaned over that balcony. The times that I interviewed him he would light one Popular cigarette after another, and he would drink the Bucanero beer, the one with the higher alcohol content. And I imagine that there was a certain amount of shame that he felt to suddenly find himself in this situation. And I think when he tried to defect, Fidel Castro wrote in one of his “Reflections” that Rigondeaux had “reached the point of no return.” He had essentially done the same thing as “a soldier abandoning his troops in combat.” He was called a traitor. And for people who knew nothing else, who were the symbols of the revolution, that was the ultimate indignity. You were essentially told that you no longer exist.

  *

  In the afternoon I went back to Trejo, hoping to run into Rigondeaux again. I hitched a ride most of the way to the boxing gym with a black Cuban driving an old Ford who gave me the dime tour of the greatest potholes in Havana. He serenaded the potholes with little songs before we could even see them. Outside my window were some people lining up and police officers and women in curlers standing on their balconies. “Be careful wherever you stop in Havana,” the driver warned, “there will be a lineup behind you in five seconds.” There was a pause after he tried to determine whether I found his joke funny or sad. Tourists snapped photos of ornate buildings where I once visited a friend; we had had coffee while his family complained about the broken stairwell and leaky roof. Finally the harbor came into view; a cruise ship moved toward it slowly through waters that were unsafe to fish in the early twentieth century because of all the bodies that had been dumped into it from the Morro Castle. A trumpet player on the Malecón blew at sea puddles on the pavement.

  Many areas of Havana feel like nightmares that never quite deliver what they threaten you with. With so many of the walls literally and figuratively decayed or fallen over, you can never shake the feeling of Cuban life being totally exposed. Like any nightmare worth its salt, every element seems to know where the story is going but you.

  Rigondeaux did show up at the gym again, halfway through my time with Héctor, but something was different. His face, as usual, gave away about as much as the sphinx. Nobody risked speaking with him, and people seemed as hesitant to acknowledge him as the last time for the same reasons as before. Anyone might be watching. Anyone could report it to any block in Cuba (each block in Havana had a CDR—Committee for the Defense of the Revolution—to which suspicious activity was reported). He stayed under the shade of the bleachers and watched the children laughing and shouting as they kicked a soccer ball around before their training began. One of the kids sensed Rigondeaux staring and went over to see what was wrong, tugging at his shirt. Rigondeaux slid his hand idly over the boy’s head.

  Héctor paused when he noticed this. He was a father himself. But when I dropped my hands Héctor swung at my cheek and growled, “Looka for me! Looka for me! Remember, leedle by leedle. He won’t stay long.”

  Perhaps more than any Cuban on the island, Héctor Vinent knew what Rigondeaux was up against. Héctor had been in nearly the identical position as Rigondeaux only ten years before. They were the same age when they won their Olympic gold medals for their country. Vinent had expressed the desire to leave only after Fidel had “retired” him from boxing based on the threat he might do so, following the defection of Vinent’s two closest friends on the team. S. L. Price and his photographer, Victor Baldizon, captured this photograph of Vinent, back when he was the same age Rigondeaux was now, in mid-confession, finally with all hope exhausted, pleading with the two foreigners to help him find a way off the island. Price later sighed, describing Vinent’s fingers to me as “the bars of the cell.”

  One of the coaches blew his whistle and the kids found their spots to begin shadowboxing. A different coach emerged from his office with a sledgehammer in one hand and lit a cigarette in the other.

  Some European tourists came in to take photos, totally oblivious to Rigondeaux standing beside them. One of them bumped his shoulder by accident. Before the tourist could apologize, Rigondeaux patted him on the shoulder affectionately and left.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the last glimpse of Rigondeaux I would have before he managed to escape.

  Héctor walked me part of the way home through the baking maze of Old Havana. He told me that while all of Rigondeaux’s former teammates on the Cuban national team were forbidden from consorting with him, they sympathized in private with his reasons for trying to leave. His close friends had been forced by threats from the government officials to avoid his home. The state intended to take away the car it had given Rigondeaux, and the only reason they didn’t seize his home was his wife and children lived there. Héctor talked about how much Rigondeaux had loved and cherished that little car, how it had been his favorite possession in the world. Even among Olympic champions, a car was a rare gift from the government. “But with every traitor,” Héctor added, “the government must worry about those that follow after them.” They had to make an example of Rigondeaux.

  Someone on a roof passing around a bottle with a group of friends called out Héctor’s name and Héctor held up his fist and winked. “Campeón!”

  “You never wanted to leave yourself? You easily beat guys who made millions when they turned pro,” I asked.

  “I beat Shane Mosley and Fernando Vargas. They took boxing away from me because my closest friends defected and they thought I was in on it. I wasn’t. I tried to talk them out of it. I had suitcases of
cash cracked open before me wherever I fought internationally. Crumpled pieces of paper with numbers written on them quoting how much they would pay just to talk. I said no. Not because I am so principled. No price is worth losing your family. But when they took boxing away, what choice was there?”

  “Do you think Rigondeaux’s a traitor or the government let him down?”

  Héctor smiled. The last few days’ lessons had focused on the art of cutting off the ring. Cornering opponents. Boxing them in. “Have you been in this area at night?” he asked me.

  “Only a few times. I was told not to because of the power outages. I was told it could be very dangerous.”

  “It is dangerous,” Héctor agreed. “With a blackout—and there are many—it’s dangerous for me and you who box. But maybe you can understand how my answering some of your questions about this subject is like walking around here at night wearing a Rolex watch.”

  Héctor put his arm over my shoulder and continued.

  “El Comandante has said he may deny Cubans from participating in other championships as punishment for Rigondeaux’s selfishness. In Brazil during the Pan Am Games Rigondeaux and his teammate were found with prostitutes when he was arrested. Officially I don’t think that information is being released. Teófilo Stevenson has publicly asked that Rigondeaux be excused. This will of course not happen, but these are interesting developments.”

  “Will Rigondeaux ever fight again?” I asked.