The Domino Diaries Read online

  Once we got near the Plaza, thousands of immaculate, olive-uniformed and white-gloved soldiers marched in formation, row after row, with rocket-propelled grenade launchers slung over their shoulders. Behind them dozens of military trucks with forty red-tipped rocket payloads drove next to other bulky vehicles rumbling by, with .50 caliber cannons and gleaming tanks bringing up the rear. The huge building-high stencils of Che and the newly built Camilo Cienfuegos stared down over another procession of soldiers following the last pack, with automatic Russian guns held against their chests. Framing the festivities were hundreds of silhouetted citizens on the roofs of the various ministry buildings enclosing the square, waving diaphanous Cuban flags against the sky. Then the navy marched into view with their rounded hats and bayonet-tipped rifles pointed up at the sky. Far off, we could see Raúl Castro waving a beach hat in front of the José Martí monument surrounded by other government heads. Fidel’s name was chanted and posters featuring his face at various ages were held aloft. Some Cuban troops fired a cannon while the fighter jets made another pass over the throngs.

  As we got closer to the crowds, Sofía and I were jammed in against everybody like a packed snowball. We saw a procession of schoolchildren in their colorful uniforms wave their scarves over their heads as a replica of the Granma, the leaky boat that brought eighty-two revolutionaries to the island, was pulled on a float behind them. The kids, as usual, caught my attention because innocence in Cuba does not resemble the Disneyfied kind that I was accustomed to back home. Cuban childhood has its own intricate character and coding. Fidel was welcomed by the children as a kind of cute grandfather figure compared with the hyperpaternalistic view their parents always seemed to have of him, whether they loved or hated him.

  As we slowly churned toward the bottleneck of the main procession, with hundreds of home-painted placards held high—¡VICTORIA O MUERTE! and ¡SOCIALISMO! and ¡VIVA FIDEL! and ¡VAMOS BIEN!—next to Camilo’s smiling face, Sofía leaned over to me in the crush of the parade. She had been seething through all of this.

  “Why did we come here, Brinicito? This is fucking excruciating. They’re just doing this to pretend that if Cuba can stand up to the United States it can deal with how much worse life is about to get after Raúl lays off a million government workers. Everybody’s only here because 80 percent of them work for the government! They have to come here. It’s the same old bullshit, scapegoating the U.S. for all our problems. It makes me sick to my stomach. Over fifty fucking years to turn one page from this same comic book they offer us. Let’s get out of here. I’ve had enough of all of this to last a lifetime. Please, I can’t be here anymore.”

  * * *

  After Raúl waved his hat over us from a platform surrounded by his entourage of stooped yet supremely powerful political old men, Sofía yanked me out of the parade and dragged me down a nearby side street where someone just turned a pickup truck’s engine. Another person waved us over to the bed of the truck and we climbed in and sat alongside a dozen Cubans eager to get back home after perfunctorily paying their dues at the great celebration.

  After being rebuked for trying to console her, I sat holding Sofía’s hand while everyone in the back of the truck took turns bemoaning their flawed country with as many jokes as earnest complaints. Despite looking furious for the same reasons as everyone else in the truck, I noticed that Sofía didn’t bother to chime in or participate in the grousing. Nursing her own grudge brought on an agitation in her that was so overwhelming none of the people around us even tried to cheer her up with a joke. As much as was possible crammed into the bed of the truck, the others stayed clear. Instead they looked at me apologetically while Sofía closed her eyes and breathed heavily as the wind played with her hair. Without her having to say a word, they knew she’d endured what they had, but they also mysteriously determined she wasn’t staying long.

  We drove back into town down a long, hilly street with the sidewalks mostly empty. I was trying to think of a place we could go to cheer Sofía up. Havana was all but abandoned, even more of a city of ruins than usual for the next few hours. We’d have the Hotel Nacional to ourselves for a drink or the Museo del Chocolate without the forty-five-minute wait to get in next to an open sewer or Coppelia for an ice cream. Maybe hitchhike out to Playa del Este on a deserted section of beach, with the tropical water and sand so bright it was almost neon. But one look at Sofía’s sullen face and it was obvious that I was to leave her alone for the rest of the drive in.

  Like most of the Cubans on the flight over, Sofía had brought a huge amount of supplies to deliver to her grandparents and extended family: medicine, a walker for her grandfather who’d just suffered a stroke, vitamins, toothpaste, foot cream, tampons, an mp3 player, soap, and a slew of other basic necessities well beyond the reach of average citizens. Sofía had been hassled by customs officials, being forced to explain and then defend each item, as with many other Cubans returning home to help their families. It was clear that she’d been through the routine so many times already that the only emotion she had left was disgust. She told me after we got in the cab outside José Martí Airport that once her family had raised enough money to survive in Canada, all their resources went toward sending Sofía back to the island to deliver what they could provide back home to family members buried by increasing needs as things continued to deteriorate in Cuban daily life.

  From the beginning, unlike most Cubans I’d met who had defected or found other means of leaving, for Sofía nostalgia for anything relating to home repulsed her. Her sentimentality was reserved only for the decidedly unsentimental stories she’d left behind. Mainly stuff she trotted out to demonstrate how elusive she was from my grasp and best to keep at a distance.

  The first time I met her in a Toronto hotel lobby on King Street, she’d laughed in my face before confirming to herself the suspicion that she’d had since we’d begun writing each other: that she was completely out of my league. She announced this finding at such volume that most of the hotel staff took my measure and nodded agreement. Naturally, any hopes I had collapsed on the spot and I assumed at any second she would turn around and disappear forever, all with the indifference one might bring to throwing away trash. “Listen, Gypsy, maybe we can just grab a drink first since you came all this way, but don’t get any ideas.…”

  Some snow was falling outside and clung to her hair and jacket collar, and the rest of her looked like some tropical princess. Before she’d left Cuba, all her life she’d wanted to see the snow, and on the day she finally arrived to Canada, Toronto was under siege, battling a blizzard. She’d traded one excruciating extreme for another, and that was before she had enough English to contrast Cuban men with their Canadian equivalents. Leaving home as a teenager, Cuba was like a bear trap where the only means of escape required amputating vital portions of her soul. Food and music were the only safe areas to remain connected. Everything else seemed to bring into focus how the two worlds she straddled had left her life completely off-balance. And because our meetings after this one had all been restricted to fleeting marathon fuckfests around Toronto—behind the backs of our respective partners—there was always a kind of wartime urgency compounded by a tacit prohibition of talking about the past or the future. Last Tango in Paris was for both of us a favorite movie, and so we re-created our own version in my home country each time I departed for her hometown.

  But the good-byes were rigged with all kinds of explosives. The moment I’d raise the prospect of seeing her again she’d pull up her drawbridge and dig a moat around herself, informing me we’d never see each other again. “We’d only make ourselves miserable anyway,” she’d sneer. So I stopped asking permission and continued to lay over in Toronto for a few days every time I went to Havana with the express purpose of ambushing her. The more secure a setup she had with a man, the easier it was to entice betrayal.

  Back in Havana Sofía finally smiled. “I know where I want you to take me,” Sofía said. “Let’s get off the truck and grab an
other car.”

  “Where do you wanna go?”

  “Quinta Avenida. Let’s go to Miramar and you can fuck this sadness out of me at Parque de los Ahogados. I’m tired of feeling grumpy. It’s my favorite park and where I lost my virginity. While you fuck me I’ll think about him.” She smiled.

  “Hold on, I’m still stuck on ahogados. Park of the hanged?”

  “Yeah, from all the suicides who hung themselves off these incredibly haunting banyan trees there. The park looks like someone’s nightmare.”

  “This is where you lost your virginity?”

  “Mhmm,” she said, waving at our driver in the rearview to stop the truck. “My old house isn’t far. I’ll take you to see where I grew up.”

  * * *

  We stopped an old Plymouth that was huffing its way over to Quinta Avenida, the avenue where the Malecón ends and dips under a tunnel and climbs to blossom into a six-lane avenue, divided by a lush, tree-lined island for pedestrians to stroll in the shade or relax on stone benches straight out of Santa Monica, California. When you exit that tunnel Miramar isn’t so much a different neighborhood of the city as a different world. The decay and despair of so many homes in Vedado give way to the abandoned, opulent mansions that run for miles, many converted into foreign embassies. At night the most expensive jineteras across the city strut in their Lycra catsuits looking to lure diplomats and other rich visitors until someone accepts their price.

  We turned off the avenue down a side street just before the spooky suicide park Sofía had mentioned. A man from a group playing dominoes over a table on the corner glared at Sofía in her summer dress and then over at me. He muttered something and they all stared at us.

  “¡Coño! These tourists steal the best of everything in our country,” one of them moaned.

  Our visit to her childhood neighborhood hadn’t begun auspiciously.

  Sofía turned and gave me a scolding look before smiling her satisfaction. “My people giving you shit definitely helps cheer me up.”

  “It’s depressing as fuck,” I said.

  “People like you are all the same. The ugliest thing you can find traveling around damaged places is always another tourist. That’s your biggest fear, isn’t it?”

  “I can’t help where I’m from any more than they can help where they came from.”

  “Why should you be depressed? According to them you’ve stolen the best mujer in all of Cuba. I bet they wouldn’t have said the same thing about Fidel Castro’s granddaughter. Who knows, maybe she’ll see us around Havana.”

  This was an accurate forecast of my doomed last stretch in Havana. And after this she walked away emphasizing her triumph with each voluptuous step and wrecking-ball swing of her hips while the domino table full of men hissed and shrieked their approval. I followed her over to the park until she reached behind herself to pull up her skirt. We unpacked some much needed cheer and goodwill at the Park of the Hanged under one of the nightmarish banyan trees while Sofía sarcastically called out the name of the guy she lost her virginity to as a means of encouraging me to pick up the tempo before we got arrested.

  Afterward, we wandered a few blocks off the avenue and turned up at a residential street littered with drowsy homes that wouldn’t look out of place in any suburb across the United States. Most had the familiar Cuban sausage dogs behind fences yelping “Intruder! Intruder!” until they abandoned their posts once we went over to pet them and applaud their ferociousness.

  “The next house was ours,” Sofía said softly. “They painted it yellow. It was nicer pink. I wonder if the man my father sold it to still lives there now. Probably. I’ve heard he’s had a terrible time since he bought it ten years ago.”

  “Who was he?”

  “A Spanish businessman. Supplies the hotels in Miramar with various things. I don’t know him well. I don’t really know why I’m taking you here actually.”

  Sofía opened the gate and I followed behind her into the front yard of her former home. As she walked she looked a little shaken glancing over at her neighbors’ properties. When we got to the front door we could hear what sounded like a sledgehammer coming from the backyard. We went around the side of the house and saw construction workers being overseen by an older, debonair gentleman who’d brought out a pitcher of mojitos and was pouring glasses.

  “¡Oye, Mario!” Sofía cried out.

  Mario turned around and smiled wide with his lips slowly parting.

  “Still here?” Sofía laughed.

  “I’ve been stranded ever since I bought the place. Look at you. You’re as beautiful as your mother. Come closer so I can give you a kiss.”

  They talked for twenty minutes while Mario showed Sofía the changes he’d made to the house in an attempt to improve its value for a sale. In between Mario pointing out his changes and Sofía updating him on her family on the island and in Canada, she showed me where she’d taken her first steps, where she’d slept with her brother and aunt, and the room where she’d kissed a boy for the first time. It was as if we were viewing her past and the forgotten dreams she’d long since abandoned behind the glass of a pawnshop window. In every room we entered she made a face like her heart caved in.

  “It’s a beautiful home,” I said to both of them. I turned to Mario. “Why are you trying to sell it?”

  He sighed as Sofía shook her head.

  “My friend.” Mario put his hand on my shoulder. “As I’m sure you know, to visit Havana is paradise. But to live in Havana is hell. And that’s before I could even begin to explain what doing business is like in this fucking country. Over the years they’ve come here and seized my car, my motorcycle. I’m harassed constantly. They’ve seized all kinds of things. You can’t do business here without dealing with the black market. Of course the government knows this. The illegal economy is bigger than the official economy. It’s all institutionally corrupt and I was just too naïve to think I could ever navigate such a hideously broken system. I need to go back to Spain and start over. I give up. I’ve spent everything I’ve ever earned here just to improve this property to sell it off so I can finally leave. I’m dying faster than even this rotting-away city.”

  “Would you leave tomorrow if you could sell it?” I asked Mario.

  “Por favor.” He laughed. “Would I leave tomorrow if I sold this place? I would leave tonight.”

  “Brinicito is here trying to interview the family Guillermo Rigondeaux left behind.”

  “A very beautiful boxer. What a sad face he had even before Fidel called him a traitor. A true Cuban champion for his time.”

  “How dangerous is it to try to talk with them?” I asked Mario.

  “Two government cameras are focused on his house twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Easily the most politically radioactive home in Havana. If you go, be prepared for a knock on the door any second and to be escorted to the airport by security. I wouldn’t go if I were you.”

  “I don’t even know where it is yet.”

  “Qué va.” Mario snickered. “We all know where it is. Boyeros. Near the airport. Everybody knows the little green house. His house was on the news here for weeks after he tried to defect. Stay here, I’ll go inside and get a pencil and paper and draw you a map.”

  After he’d finished sketching the street and government buildings next to Rigondeaux’s home, I asked how he knew the directions were accurate.

  Mario smiled and asked me to stop any taxi on the street, secure a ride, and then ask them to take me to the address he’d written down. After we’d left her old home, Sofía and I tried this twice back on Quinta Avenida. Both times drivers gave us an incredulous look before driving off. It was pretty evident this was a real danger in a land where, if there was a suggestion you were sympathetic to one of the most famous living traitors in any way, your whole life was in peril. Maybe not just your life, either; anyone close to you, also. While you aren’t likely to meet a people more generous, nobody can hold a grudge like Cubans.

 
24

  JUDAS

  A revolution is not a bed of roses.

  —Fidel Castro

  “LISTEN, BRINICITO,” SOFÍA WAS SAYING in bed at our apartment, late on the night before we went to the house Fidel had given Rigondeaux as a reward for his first Olympic medal. “We don’t have long in Havana together. It’s only because of Rigondeaux winning his fight that we have this time together, so I’ll go with you to this house. I’d like to meet his family. Keep in mind, if we visit that house you’re never going to be let back into this country again. So if you’re comfortable with that, you better get everything you want to film in Havana before they take you away.”

  The phone rang.

  “Oye, campeón,” a voice slurred. I knew from the word campeón that it was a boxer, all right, but whoever it was, he was drunk out of his mind and I couldn’t make out much. “Lo siento, campeón. Lo siento. Emergencia. Por favor. Lo siento. Mi familia. Emergencia. I must see you right away. Lo siento.”

  The only boxer I’d ever spoken with on the phone who was drunk was Teófilo Stevenson. He’d declined or indefinitely postponed every request I’d ever made to meet with him and usually ended each phone call with the same tragic question, “Campeón, what time is it anyway?” I’d answer with the time and he’d follow up, “Bueno. Which day is it?” After I’d tell him the day he’d break my heart again asking what month it was. It made no difference what hour I called him. No matter how early it was that I called him on his cell phone, Stevenson was to some extent intoxicated.