The Domino Diaries Read online

  The world doesn’t get to choose the destinations where its most colorful, important characters stain history’s canvas. I’ve always played goofy games in my mind trying to imagine Shakespeare being born anywhere else, transplanting van Gogh to Detroit, or Napoleon to Mexico City, or allowing Hitler to fail at pastoral painting in a back alley in Shanghai. What impact could Fidel have had if he were born almost anywhere else but a small, impoverished island ninety miles off the shore of the most powerful civilization on earth? Even from such a meager stage, with such a humble role, he still managed to find a way of holding the world hostage and bringing it as close as it ever came to oblivion. What if he’d been born on third base? What would our world look like? What impact could he have had? Fidel didn’t have a bust or a statue or so much as a plaque anywhere across the country, but his dent in history was undeniable. And unless Fidel died during my last twenty-four hours in his country, I’d be watching Havana on cable news the next day like everyone else. “All the glory in the world can fit into a kernel of corn,” Fidel quoted José Martí, after Bardach asked him how he wished to be remembered.

  I was meeting a cinematographer named Ana María at La Milagrosa’s grave, Colón’s most popular. Ana María was a young girl fresh out of film school who worked for Cuban television. Ría had helped me find her. La Milagrosa’s grave belonged to a girl named Amelia Goyri de la Hoz. Amelia was buried, along with her child, in 1903. They had both died as Amelia tried to bring the child into the world when she was only twenty-three years old. Inside their tomb, Amelia’s infant son was placed at his mother’s feet. When both bodies were exhumed, according to legend, the child was discovered in his mother’s arms. Amelia’s inconsolable widower returned to his bride and child’s grave each day for the last seventeen years of his life. It was said that her widower never accepted their deaths and instead believed they were asleep beneath the ground. He installed a brass knocker over the grave and each day he brought flowers and knocked on the grave three times as a secret signal. After the knocks, he would cry out, “Wake up, Amelia! Wake up!” Since I’d first started coming to Havana and visiting Colón, the grave was guarded every hour of every day by a cult devoted to La Milagrosa. A sculptor had built a statue of Amelia clutching her child over the grave and I never once saw all the white marble of her tomb unadorned in fresh flowers and troves of offerings from people praying to her to look after their kids or to allow for them to be blessed with children.

  As I approached our meeting place, Ana María was talking with a few old women guarding the grave next to the statue of Amelia cradling her child. I noticed Ana María had a book under her arm and was smoking an unfiltered cigarette. She was tall and wiry, wearing a man’s white undershirt and torn jeans, her hair fastened in two wild clumps behind her ears. She had an alluring mixture of soft femininity in her features and masculine grace in her posture and movements.

  “So?” she said in perfect English. “Would you like to shoot the cemetery?”

  “Yeah,” I told her, handing over my camera. It wasn’t a film camera since I’d been terrified they’d confiscate anything looking professional at customs. I had a shitty tripod with me also.

  “This camera is mierda, yuma. Ría warned me about you. First she told me you had an affair with the granddaughter of Fidel.”

  “Why would she tell you that?” I asked.

  “I have a boyfriend,” Ana María declared.

  “Because I slept with Fidel’s granddaughter I’m a threat to the sanctity of all Cuban women in relationships?”

  “Well.” She smirked, changing the subject by holding up the camera as though it were rotting meat. “This tourist camera makes me even more uncomfortable. Ría also told me your work is sensitive. So I’m guessing you have zero clearance to do any of the work you’re doing here?”

  “If you can explain to me how I can get clearance in this country to work on anything sensitive—”

  “Are we shooting something sensitive today?”

  I shrugged.

  “Dangerous?”

  “You don’t have to help me.”

  “Ay—”

  “What?”

  “We both know I need the money.”

  “And I’m fifty thousand dollars in debt back home and desperately need this footage.”

  “Yuma, will this put me in danger?”

  I could see she was about five seconds from walking away, but I didn’t know what to say.

  From a pay phone the night before, I’d gotten as close to Teófilo Stevenson as I ever had, with him not outright rejecting an interview. “Call me tomorrow,” he growled, before hanging up. Someone close to him had told me things had gotten so bad financially Stevenson didn’t have enough money to put gas in the tank of his little car or replace a flat tire. But who knew how much money he expected to talk, let alone on camera. Who knew who was listening to our phone calls and might be closing in long before I ever had the chance to sit with him? Out of eleven million people in the country, three million were officially enrolled as CDRs spying on their neighbors.

  Besides Stevenson, Cristian Martínez and his boxing coach, Yosvanni Bonachea, the stars of Sons of Cuba, a documentary that had won awards around the world on the film festival circuit, had agreed to come over to my apartment that afternoon to talk. Before I left Cuba for good, my Hail Mary was somehow managing to include Héctor Vinent, Félix Savón, and Teófilo Stevenson in my documentary defending their decision to remain in Cuba, the whole continuum of great Cuban heroes who rejected America’s Faustian bargain. Then, with two years following Rigondeaux’s journey toward a world championship and riches in America, I would offer Rigondeaux’s life and reasons in defense of leaving. And then finally Cristian Martínez’s role, just before his sixteenth birthday, staring down his first Olympic Games, seemed to offer a unique view on where Cuba’s next generation on the horizon wanted to go.

  Cristian had come of age just as Fidel had stepped down from power. “If the U.S.A. dares to attack us at this sad moment,” Cristian said the day after Fidel announced his state secret illness, “we’ll run out to defend our country.” Fidel had rewarded Cristian’s father with a car and an apartment for his contributions to the revolution. But that home was in shambles and the car had long since broken down and there was no money to repair any of the damage. Cristian, like the others, would have to weigh the life of his father, and the lives of all the great boxers who came before him, in order to determine the right path to take. Perhaps where he went, and his reasons for doing so, would point the way where all Cubans of his generation might easily follow.

  There was some additional pressure on me talking to Cristian Martínez, as the manager who’d gotten Rigondeaux off the island was interested in doing the same thing with this boy. I’d been asked to feel the teenager out in terms of his receptivity to making the jump. To broach the topic of Cristian’s defection meant prison time for me, and the certain death of Cristian’s boxing career before it ever got started. Even creating the perception I was trying to help facilitate Cristian’s escape was a serious offense against the revolution. “Cuban boxers fight for a better future,” Cristian had told the cameras as a child of twelve. “We Cubans are fighting from the moment we are born.”

  “I think the next twenty-four hours are going to be pretty dangerous, talking to who I want to talk to,” I explained to Ana María. “There are risks. It’s up to you if you want to help me or not.”

  We looked at each other for a tense moment until we both smiled.

  “I was expecting a womanizer from how Ría described you. A romantic is even worse. Joder. No more talking. If you like, we could shoot one of the funerals taking place here. Ría told me you play a lot of chess. We could shoot some of the famous graves and start with Capablanca, with his giant queen over the grave. I love that grave. Alejo Carpentier is buried here, if you are partial to writers. Dulce María Loynaz, if you like poets. Máximo Gómez, if you prefer military men. Chano Pozo, if you wan
t a musician. Tell me where we should start.”

  “Today I’d like you to shoot anything you want. We can go anywhere you think is special. Take me to your favorite places. Today let’s just film your Havana.”

  “Shouldn’t we be filming your Havana?”

  “I don’t have the stomach for it today.”

  “This is the weirdest assignment I’ve ever been given.”

  “Later this afternoon,” I said, “I’d like you to shoot an interview with a young boxer at my apartment and also film him exercising with his coach on my roof. I’d like you to film him with all of Centro Habana and the skyline behind him while he shadowboxes and trains with his coach. Until then I just want to get my mind off of a few things.”

  “Why do you seem so sad?” she asked.

  “I don’t have much time left in Havana,” I told her. Maybe even less time than you think, I reminded myself. “What’s the book under your arm?”

  “My favorite book.” She smiled. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”

  “Let’s shoot for several hours, and then we can go somewhere before the interview at my apartment and maybe you can read some of it to me?”

  “I told you that I have a boyfriend.”

  “I’m not asking you to be my whore. You have a beautiful accent and I’d like to hear you read. Reading isn’t cheating.”

  “Reading Kundera to a stranger isn’t far from cheating.”

  “You don’t have to read anything to me. You can think it over while we shoot your city.”

  “You’re just going to use me to get over someone else.” Ana María smiled.

  “Not really,” I disagreed. “I’m just trying to use you.”

  “That’s sad, but I like that a little better.”

  We spent the rest of the morning and afternoon filming all over Havana. After filming some famous graves around the cemetery, we captured kids enjoying rides inside Jalisco Park, communism’s clumsy answer to Disneyland. Nearby, Ana María leaned over our old Ford Thunderbird’s window to shoot a long line of teenage students eagerly waiting to be let into the Charlie Chaplin Cinema to watch a matinee of City Lights. I watched her lie back on the ground and film some Orson Welles angles of little boys picking off beer cans inside a corner shooting gallery. She filmed gasoline rainbows swirling over the puddles that glazed the gutters of Centro Habana. She caught a stickball homerun smashing a window from an intersection in Centro Habana while bootleg DVDs of Annie Hall and Manhattan were peddled behind an outfielder punching his ratty glove. Down the street from the Karl Marx Theater, some lunatic was high above us on his balcony, screaming obscenities about Fidel while collecting laundry from a line. “If the revolution had worked out, I ask you why are none of Fidel or Raúl’s children in politics? How many of them have left? Answer me that!” Three teenagers laughed from a balcony across the street, passing around a joint they smoked in the peculiar Cuban style, through a nostril.

  We went back to my old gym in Old Havana and filmed children following instructions from Héctor, who remembered nothing from his drunken visit to my apartment. Ana María wandered with her camera around seniors assuming poses with yoga classes in the park, construction workers wiping the icy froth from their mouths at guarapo stands, fathers and sons window shopping at the Adidas store, tourists and whores leaving or entering hotels, Che look-alikes. Outside the Capitolio we filmed a man with a hundred piercings in his face sticking his tongue out at us while he posed with tourists being photographed by the portrait artists with their century-old cameras.

  We got in the back of a Chinese taxi and peddled around the most desolate slums of Old Havana until we arrived ten minutes later in the most beautifully restored area of Plaza Vieja and her pristine fountains. Ana María filmed kids lounging in the courtyard of the university surrounded by palm trees and tanks. We rode past the statue of El Caballero de París, maybe the world’s most beloved homeless man who ever lived. Long before the revolution, when they installed the Caballero in Mazora, Havana’s mental institution, there was such a protest across Havana that he was released by presidential order. He was invited to meet the president and his cape and mysterious belongings were returned to him. After the triumph of the revolution, he told the press that Castro and the other rebels had stolen his personal sense of style with their beards and grungy fashion. El Caballero died in 1985, and almost anyone I’d ever met who lived in Havana before that time, if you mentioned his name, produced such an incredibly thrilled smile recounting their interactions with him that it was impossible not to fall in love with him yourself.

  Schoolchildren marched across the Malecón in their uniforms. For the first time, I noticed some of them wore headphones. Cell phones were in the hands of teenagers rumbling by on skateboards. Many didn’t have enough money to pay for texting, let alone phone calls, but they clasped their phones everywhere they went as status symbols. Conspicuous consumption, too: the house band at El Floridita played “Guantanamera” and all the other deflated standards for tourists in Hemingway T-shirts, smoking Montecristos lit from red-uniformed bartenders waiting on blenders churning daiquiris.

  Even after a little more than a decade of returning again and again to this city, it had changed completely on me, and was changing even faster now than I’d ever seen before.

  “Of course it’s coming,” Gary Indiana, an American writer and filmmaker who had spent many years returning to Cuba, wrote of one visit to Havana. “Coming here, coming soon, the gathering tsunami of Our Kind of Capitalism. iPad, iPod, YouTube, Buy It, Love It, Fuck It, Dump It, Buy Another One. The people who sell all this shit say it’s what the people want, and they’re not wrong. But if the people knew what they were in for their heads would explode.”

  Yoani Sánchez, Havana’s world-famous blogger, once described the Cuban people as birds in a cage, birds reduced to servility, living a life of limited liberties in exchange for the seed and water of the education and health care systems. “Cubans wish to fly,” she said. “Yet the cage is well made and the bars are thick. And, by the way, neither the birdseed nor the water is all that great.” The analogy had always echoed what Guillermo Rigondeaux’s experience had been of Cuba and why he left. Yet as it turns out, he’d chosen, despite an offer to smuggle his family out with him to America, to leave his family behind in the “cage” of Cuban life. During my first interview with him after his escape from Cuba in 2009, I asked him why. He explained that, unlike Cuba, if he failed to succeed in the American system he would be left to die. He was bankrupt if anyone in his family got sick. He was thrown out of his home if he couldn’t pay the rent. He would be hopelessly unable to support his children to pursue an education to give them a better life than he could have ever hoped for if boxing hadn’t been his calling. He was more afraid to subject his family to the risks of America’s system than to allow his family to live the rest of their lives without him, suffering the cost of his choice in Cuba.

  “If I didn’t think the water surrounded me like a cancer,” Virgilio Piñera wrote in his poem “The Island Burdened,” “I could have slept easy … the weight of an island in the love of its people.” I’d heard so many people dismiss anything they saw sent back to them from Cuba that looked remotely positive as merely evidence of a Potemkin village. On the other side, three years in, the voters who’d put President Obama in office were suffering the effects of a hangover with what amounted to their Potemkin president.

  We got dropped off at my apartment in Centro Habana and went up on my roof waiting for Cristian and his coach to arrive. Ana María lit a cigarette and took in the views across her city—the Malecón, the dome of the Capitolio, the decaying rooftops and azoteas—then she turned inward with her chin resting against her palm.

  “Can I make you some coffee?”

  “Do you have any rum to go with it?”

  “I’ll bring the bottle,” I said.

  “Will you drink with me?”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “You
are a very strange person.”

  While I made coffee over the stove and pulled the Havana Club from the icebox, I was sizing up the situation with this kid and the coach who loved him. Turning over all my preconceptions and what I’d learned about these Cuban boxers I’d met, I felt more uncertain than ever about what to really ask someone like Cristian, with so much of his life in front of him. Could his answers ever have a hope of revealing more about him than my questions revealed about me? I wasn’t sure if I was doing him any favors letting him know that people internationally were already keen to bankroll his escape and start the same money drip they’d offered many of the fighters who’d left. Maybe the only reason he’d agreed to come to my apartment was to hear the offer. Did Guillermo Rigondeaux’s fate in America, never seeing his family again, look more appealing than Héctor Vinent’s complete inability to support his own family after staying? And between them, who had the moral high ground? Or was life so hard for Cristian already that it didn’t really matter anyway?

  I came back outside with the coffee and rum and found Ana María crumpled up on the corner of the roof, with her back to Miami, holding her favorite book.

  “Yuma,” Ana María said. “Would you still like me to read to you from Kundera?”

  “Very much.”

  “Today wasn’t what I expected,” she said. “At first I thought it would be a feo day with you, but now all I have is this strangeness.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You’re so obsessed with us as a people being torn between two horrible choices, but I have no desire to leave. And I don’t know why we look so exotic to people like you in the first place.”

  “You’ve never wanted to know what the rest of the world was like?”