The Domino Diaries Read online

“Everything about you tells me what the rest of the world is like.” She laughed. “Do you think that someone who sleeps with a thousand women understands more about a woman’s nature than a man who only stays with one?”

  “Depends on the guy, doesn’t it? Both could be cowardly choices.”

  “Yes, they could.”

  “Why wouldn’t you want to see other places?”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Why not?”

  “You are free to travel anywhere else and yet you keep coming back here. You think it’s tragic I’ve never been on a plane in my life? You think I’m sad because I’ve never left this island?”

  “I’ve met a lot of people who consider this island a prison.”

  “Maybe it is for them. But wouldn’t Miami be another kind of prison for them, too? From all the people who visit here from cities all around the world, all I learn is how much these other cities wish to be like one another. People do the same things. They have the same struggles. They have the same fears. I see how afraid these people and their cities are to be anything different, let alone unique. Isn’t that why all these boxers who turn down all their money are so threatening to their values? Don’t they seem scared to question any of their own values for even a second? These cities and their people aren’t even stereotypes, they aspire to be stereotypes. El Norte has never wanted anything from us beyond reopening the casinos, fucking our women, having our men serve them mojitos with a smile, turning us back into their tropical resort. They tell us how fascinating Havana is with time standing still, but all I see is how everywhere else people rush to the point without spending any time wondering what the point is in the first place.”

  “You don’t want anything to change?” I asked.

  “Havana couldn’t be anywhere else if it tried!” She took a swig from the bottle. “I could have been born in any city in the world and made life bearable. This is the only city in the world where my heart is always in flower. Every day of my life something makes me laugh until I cry, whether from something sad or something beautiful. No one I’ve ever met or anything they’ve shown me inside their silly gadgets has ever convinced me I’d be in bloom anywhere else.”

  “How do you think this boy coming over will view his future?”

  “Like any other sixteen-year-old. He dreams of his chance to be in America like Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road headed for Oz.”

  Right then Cristian and his coach, Yosvanni, stepped out into the glare of the sun on my roof, both panting from the climb up the stairs. Cristian was wearing a Yankees cap that shielded his eyes, a buttoned-up jean jacket with the collar flared, and jeans. Yosvanni was wearing a Cuban national team sweater and red track pants. Both had a gym bag slung over their shoulders.

  In Sons of Cuba, Cristian had been shown as a sensitive boy devoted to his parents and his country. Now he had grown, just before the brink of manhood. He had an air of independence and detachment to his gaze that was absent from him during his years participating in the film. Yosvanni remained ever watchful of his star pupil, but had the easeful confidence and grace of someone who’d managed to walk between the raindrops of Cuban society.

  Cristian came over and tapped my shoulder. “After you film us for a little while up here,” he said, smiling, his voice a couple octaves lower than I’d last heard it, “maybe you’d like to spar with me? I’ve sparred with heavyweights before. I’ll go easy.”

  I looked over at Yosvanni removing some mitts from his gym bag. Without looking at us he was beaming approval.

  “After we film this and the interview.” Cristian tapped my shoulder again. “See how you feel.”

  Ana María tossed back another sip from the bottle of Havana Club and shook her head.

  “How big is your apartment in New York?” Cristian asked me.

  “The size of a closet.”

  “I would like to fight in Madison Square Garden one day. Cuba is changing.”

  Cristian changed into his gym clothes and his coach wrapped his hands, encircling his wrists and threading between his knuckles. As he stretched out his arms and legs and looked out over the rooftops toward the Capitolio, I saw bits of Stevenson, Savón, Vinent, and Rigondeaux in his pride and casual elegance. They’d all been in his place once. Cristian turned around and located his shadow and began throwing combinations in the air.

  When several of Cuba’s finest boxers had left the island, Yosvanni had asked Cristian and all his pupils the question he had been forced by the government to ask: “Would any of you betray your coaches and comrades?”

  “NO!” the children cried in unison.

  “So you’re not traitors?” Yosvanni asked with emotion in his voice. “You’re not going to betray the fatherland or your team?”

  All the children before him shook their heads vehemently.

  Now Yosvanni approached me as we watched his star.

  “How are things going for Cristian?” I asked him.

  “He’s extraordinarily special. But politics are getting the better of him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the film there are many jealousies. There are many jealousies with teammates and with coaches. They assume that we were paid for our participation in that film.”

  “Were you paid?”

  “No,” Yosvanni stated flatly. “But the perception remains. And he’s being punished for it. He’s not where he should be in terms of his talent and ability. His performance is flawless, but that doesn’t mean he’ll be given the opportunities he deserves here. I see this with so many of the great boxers—the safest place on earth for them is inside the ring. I love this boy as much as my own children.”

  Ana María filmed Cristian skipping rope and working relentlessly with his coach, round after round, for thirty minutes under the sun, hardly breaking a sweat. I sat on the edge of the roof and watched them together, imagining where both would be a few years on. I went back inside the apartment and brought everyone a pitcher of ice water and we retreated to my living room, where I set up a couple chairs for Yosvanni and Cristian in preparation for the interview.

  “Cristian is the first boxer I’ve spoken to who has his career in front of him.” I sighed. “If Cristian has any questions for me about where Rigondeaux’s career and life have gone in Miami, I’ll tell you whatever I can about what I’ve learned. I think it’s important. People internationally are already looking at you. The people who were interested in Guillermo are interested in you and I’m worried about you for that reason. If your life changes and things get more difficult, this is a very tempting reality.”

  Cristian said nothing, only glared vaguely in my direction.

  “When I saw you in the film, one of things that stuck out for me and many other people was the way you responded to the boxers who left—”

  This brought Cristian to life. “Everyone is entitled to their opinions and to do with their life as they please. It was their careers and their own choices.”

  “You didn’t feel that way as a boy in the film,” I said.

  “I was a kid back then.”

  “So why the change?”

  Cristian smiled and brought his elbow up onto the armrest of the chair and rested his chin on the palm of his hand. He gazed up at the ceiling fan.

  “I can speak to you about that,” Yosvanni interjected. “It’s not the same for a boxer or anyone else to receive for an interview a bit of money to resolve a problem you have at home. But at the same time, staying with your family—that is very different from receiving money and immigrating to another country where you are going to be away from your family. Your friends and the people are not going to love you the same way. Because after your glory days in that place are over, you won’t be looked up to as Teófilo Stevenson or Félix Savón are here. There is no higher gift than kids wanting to become what you are.”

  Cristian turned to his coach and they looked at one another in silence. Suddenly Yosvanni reached over and put his arm around Cristian: “Her
e is the next Teófilo Stevenson or Savón.”

  And in my mind I went thousands of miles away to Rigondeaux defending his decision to turn down becoming the next Stevenson or Savón. “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.” Rigondeaux, too, had shrugged, flashing his gold grill. “I don’t think for them, they shouldn’t think for me. Those guys are history. Their time is long gone. Those guys had a chance, they didn’t take it, and they got screwed.” He laughed. “Those opportunities don’t repeat themselves. They laid that opportunity on the table and I took advantage of it and now I’m here in Miami. If not, I would still be there in Cuba, just like they are, struggling. I would be in Cuba living off of photos and memories. Telling people what I did, that’s all you are left with.”

  Héctor Vinent had made an almost identical confession about what his life was left with, leaving the temptation of America behind.

  Cristian cleared his throat and brushed some dirt off his knee. “In every decision I’ve ever made my mom has been very supportive. And our ambition is for me to be greater than both Stevenson and Savón.”

  “Greater?” I asked.

  “Yes.” Cristian laughed. “Things could change and professional boxing could return to Cuba.”

  “Fidel has banned professional sports for the last forty-nine years on the island. If professional boxing doesn’t happen on the island, how does that make you feel?”

  Yosvanni turned and stared intently at his pupil just as Cristian shrugged his and maybe all of his generation’s answer to what came next.

  26

  HEROES FOR SALE

  Teófilo Stevenson deserves the recognition of the Cuban people.… We believe this man set a very valuable example. This young man, the humble son of a humble family … said he would not exchange his people for all the dollars in the world.

  —Fidel Castro’s tribute, after Stevenson’s death on June 11, 2012

  TEÓFILO STEVENSON WAS PERHAPS the only man on the planet who was not only Muhammad Ali’s equal in the ring, but could surpass him in what the poet Federico García Lorca referred to as duende, that ephemeral quality that separates the immortals from the rest of us. Stevenson was someone authentic, a man whose pride and principle bowed to no one.

  A generation after Stevenson turned down all the millions America was offering, when Orlando “El Duque” Hernández would have had to literally work a million years in Cuba to earn the 105 million the Dodgers gave an inferior pitcher, Kevin Brown, El Duque calmly explained to journalist Steve Fainaru: “I know the prettiest word in the world is ‘money.’ But I believe that words like ‘loyalty’ and ‘patriotism’ are very beautiful as well.” Even more telling is that after El Duque helped the Yankees win the World Series only months after his escape, he still maintained he never would have left his home had his hand not been forced. According to statistics I’ve read, during my time traveling to Cuba between 2000 and 2012, just under a million Cubans—941,953—legally traveled abroad, with 12 percent never coming back.

  “Cuba’s best athletes don’t stay there because of love of country,” the Miami-based journalist Dan Le Batard wrote in the February 17, 2014, “Cuba Issue” of ESPN The Magazine, to which I also contributed. “If the government were to collapse, if the rules were to change, those athletes would end up lapping onto our shores like so many waves, families in tow.” Le Batard, born in New Jersey to Cuban parents, then zeroed in on Stevenson’s famous words and explained, “This is one of the propaganda machine’s greatest quotes, but it is also the largest kind of lie, the one that has to be told when the truth is not allowed. First of all, Stevenson didn’t have any understanding of what those dollars meant.”

  So who does understand? A man with nothing or a man with everything? Stevenson seemed to encompass both extremes. In May of 2011, when I sat down with Teófilo Stevenson in his modest home in the comfortable Havana neighborhood of Náutico, his precarious physical state gave every indication, contrary to Le Batard’s estimation, that Fidel’s “favorite athlete” bore all the scars of turning down the life he might have lived away from his beloved island. By now Stevenson was a full-blown alcoholic, without enough money to replace a flat tire on his car. Yet while his life remained an open wound, I saw no evidence of regret or deceit as he offered the reasons behind an impossible decision. On the other side of the Florida Straits, it wasn’t as if Mike Tyson, having earned nearly half a billion dollars in the ring, was less damaged.

  When Stevenson agreed to talk about all the millions he turned down, he asked me for money, about a hundred dollars. I suppose you could choose one of those sums as a symbol to define the man and neatly illuminate who he was and what he stood for. Then again, if you just chose one, I’m more inclined to think your choice illuminates a lot more about who you are.

  Two years after Stevenson’s death on June 11, 2012, I arranged to meet with his daughter, Helmys, on the tiny Mexican island of Isla Mujeres just off the Cancún coast, where she’s lived and worked for over half of her thirty years. Isla Mujeres had just been splashed all over the news, revealed as the place where, in 2012, Yasiel Puig, the latest Cuban defector superstar athlete, and now an outfielder for the Dodgers, had been held hostage at machete point in a dingy hotel room until a ransom for his freedom was paid.

  Late one warm night, I picked Helmys Stevenson up at the island’s ferry terminal. She was easy to spot in the crowd, as striking in her own way as her father. Aside from her beauty, even without her heels she was a head taller than most of the men around her. I looked at her a few moments before she saw me and waved a hand high above her head like Venus Williams in mid-serve. She was another of these girls Cuba has in abundance, women who seem as if they entered the world peeled off a cigar box, all curves and color.

  The last time I had been on her island speaking with her father, after Sofía left, I’d resumed my fling with one of Fidel’s granddaughters for one last night. This hadn’t led to an especially pleasant departure from Havana’s airport. I smiled at Helmys and waved back and took one last deep breath before I crossed the street to meet her.

  “There may be no entrapped pool of human talent left on earth with the dollar value of Cuban baseball players.”

  —Michael Lewis

  “In a no-tell motel on Isla Mujeres, eight miles off the coast of Cancún, Yasiel Puig’s escape had come to a halt,” Jesse Katz’s April 13, 2014, Los Angeles Times Magazine profile of Puig’s escape began. “Confined to a corner room at the end of a shabby horseshoe-shaped courtyard, he could only wait and hope, for his value to be appraised, his freedom to be bought.”

  A day later, Katz’s account of Puig’s pursuit of the American Dream from a smuggler’s boat was the biggest sports story in the country, if not the world. Puig had risked everything to abandon a life in Cuba and be marooned in Mexico, a way station of sorts, where he was incarcerated by the difference between the $17 a month he earned in Cuba and the $42 million he would sign for in Los Angeles. Katz, while still in the eye of the media hurricane, wrote me, and described the ensuing days after the article broke as “pretty much the craziest week of my life—thirty-three TV and radio show appearances and counting.” A Hollywood bidding war erupted and a movie deal followed within a week, the myth already shaping reality.

  With some clues from Katz, I spent a couple weeks sniffing around Isla Mujeres. I was looking for the motel where Puig was held after he’d swum ashore in darkness against riptides and blindly negotiated razor-sharp coral after being dumped from a smuggler’s boat.

  “There’s a titty bar called the Casablanca, on the western side of the island,” Katz pointed out as a reference. He then explained, “I was trying to speculate where you might take a girl if you happened to be leaving that joint in search of temporary lodging.”

  Before the hat is passed around, Isla Mujeres—Island of Women—is only three dreadfully guitar-strummed songs on the tourist ferry from Cancún’s bloated coast. My aunt has had a little hotel there for five years and has been
visiting for the last thirty, but I hadn’t seen Isla Mujeres’ name in print before the Puig story. As she cast a finger over the waters toward the place where Puig most likely arrived, she told me the government plans to build a smuggler’s museum on the Caribbean coast of the island. Officials want to showcase all the vessels the Mexican navy has captured from various drug and human traffickers.

  She then pointed out the beach where the most recent smuggler’s boat arrived and where three people drowned before reaching shore. A handful of refugees were arrested, but the rest scattered and disappeared on the island. A long-abandoned, half-built time-share condominium complex stood watch over the desolate shore. A flapping red flag warned tourists not to enter the water due to deadly currents. A mile away, a dozen cigarette boats were docked next to the heavily guarded Mexican naval base. Soldiers patrolled the nearby tourist beaches armed with M-16s as locals sauntered around the sand peddling jewelry.

  Enough Cubans have passed through this place that the once sleepy fishing village now has a strange Havana aftertaste immediately discernible as soon as you get off the boat. Cuban music wafts out of restaurants as whispers peddle cigars on darkened back streets. The island is overrun with golf carts sending iguanas scampering off the roads, many carts decked out to look like the 1950s American cars left behind and still on the roads in Cuba. Although Isla Mujeres mirrors Cuba’s crocodile shape on a map, in the daylight the tourist coast on the western side of the island feels like a miniature, dressed down, ersatz Miami Beach. But after the sunset stains the sky, the rusty electric streetlights hum and smear their old-penny glow against narrow streets. Then everything on Isla Mujeres opens up like a chocolate Christmas advent calendar, just as Havana does.

  As far as cities go, Havana is a festering treasure chest, a primary color. Isla Mujeres’ palette is fresher, but still, somehow, not as bright. There are a lot of cities in this world that can break your balls, but nowhere I’ve ever been can break your heart and leave it bleeding like Havana. When you leave the scab comes off and the wound never heals. And after you first arrive, you’re told by many that everyone deserves to have Havana as a ciudad natal, a hometown. This is an ugly condition I’ll confess very uneasily: I’m homesick for a place I wasn’t born to.