The Domino Diaries Read online

  It always amazed me how people with so little are willing to share so many precious things with strangers. But they do. That’s why I spent twelve years doing anything I could think of to spend as much time in Havana as I could, mostly exploring the other side of Puig’s story’s coin. One of the reasons I came up with to go back ended up being to film a documentary. And filming that documentary, paradoxically, has cost me the chance of ever being able to return. Small potatoes compared to anyone else missing Havana with any skin in the game, I know. But forty-two million dollars, the amount of the contract Puig signed, seems enough incentive to me for anyone to risk their life, even abandon their family and country forever, to cash in. People sell their souls every day for a lot less in New York, where I live now, and it doesn’t raise eyebrows or turn heads. And those people have all the options in the world living in the greatest country on earth, don’t they?

  No, I understood why Cubans left within five minutes of arriving. Who didn’t? What I wanted to know was why so many Cubans stayed. And I wanted to know the cost of that decision, too, and the price of leaving, to know why so many lives of refugees like Puig, despite hitting the American Dream jackpot, somehow remain so unbearably incomplete without home. In 1956, as Russian tanks rolled outside her apartment, my mother abandoned most of her family and left Budapest as a refugee from communist Hungary. She was happy with the new life she found and was never nostalgic for what she left behind. For many reasons, it’s entirely different for Cubans.

  I have a dirty little habit of distilling every city I’ve ever visited into the historical person I’d have most wanted to meet and share a cigarette with. From the first moment I set foot in Havana my dream was to speak with Teófilo Stevenson, Cuba’s twisted answer to Vincent van Gogh. If van Gogh, in part, captured the world’s imagination by not being able to sell masterpieces, Stevenson did so by turning down every offer. The world knew he was good, but they weren’t sure how good. Shortly after Stevenson’s death, George Foreman told me Stevenson was far and away the best heavyweight fighter of his era. He was sure that if Stevenson had left Cuba and become a professional he could have been the dominant heavyweight of his time. And of course, Stevenson had that shot at Muhammad Ali, not just to defect, but to conquer. But it was a lot more than that, too. Forget the question of whether or not he could have beaten Ali. Stevenson could have been Ali. How much was that worth? What was the cost of saying no to that? Could there be a principled position to justify such a refusal? The answer depends on who you ask.

  I tried for years to ask that of Stevenson, but when I finally heard his voice over the phone agree to sit down on camera, I assumed my days in Cuba were numbered. I knew that showing the condition Stevenson was in to the world would go over on the island about as well as releasing a sex tape of Michelle Obama in the States. If, at his height, Stevenson was an emblematic hero of everything that succeeded for the revolution, his deterioration remained just as potent for what had failed.

  I wasn’t happy about that. Exploring Castro’s pawns in Cuba and exposing anything negative also makes you a pawn to all his enemies ninety miles away. Both sides don’t have much of a track record for nuance of opinion.

  * * *

  Of course, there was nothing unique about the circumstances of Puig’s story any more than there was with Stevenson’s. Se fue (he left) and se quedó (he stayed) are decisions that have scarred and defined the identity of every Cuban family and have been around since Fidel Castro and the revolution split in half nearly every family on the island.

  It’s estimated as many as ten thousand Cubans—men, women, and children—are smuggled off the island to Mexico each year. The drug boats the navy catches are mostly from Colombia, but nearly all of the speedboats trafficking human beings that have been impounded in Isla Mujeres have Florida plates and are owned by Cuban ex-pats. With Cuban smugglers, it’s always about people, that fragile contraband that breathes and weeps—their own people are driving this industry. One smuggler I’d been exploring in my documentary, the Caribbean Queen, earned that nickname because he always dressed in drag while smuggling people, a tactic he adopted because Cuban authorities were forbidden from shooting at women. Castro had warned if he ever caught him, he’d cut off his balls.

  The Queen made untold millions profiting from Cubans’ egregious desperation. “Venture humanitarianism,” Steve Fainaru called it when he wrote of El Duque’s escape.

  Isla Mujeres, only four miles long, has become an even more desirable destination for smugglers than the Cancún mainland three miles away. From Isla Mujeres’ seawall malecón to Havana’s is a distance of 308 miles; to the western edge of Cuba, only 96—about as far as from Cuba to Miami. Some vessels, I was told, took as long as eighteen days to make the journey. On the way, boats capsize, people drown, children starve and get dehydrated—people are sometimes tossed into the water if the boats are given chase. I’ve reviewed grainy U.S. Coast Guard footage of some of these human atrocities and it looks like something from the foul corners of Goya’s imagination. One of the first jokes I heard upon visiting Cuba asked, “What is the primary source of food for sharks in the Florida Straits?” The answer? Cubanos. Ja, ja, ja …

  The drug cartels in Mexico who back the trade see human smuggling as little more than a way to diversify their portfolios. At ten thousand dollars a head, the going rate to Mexico is one-tenth the asking price for direct passage to Florida, so they make up the difference in profit through pure volume. With an average of thirty Cubans smuggled per trip, this is big business for everyone involved: a hundred million dollars a year at least, in a place where that amount of money feels more like one billion. “COD” doesn’t mean “cash on delivery” in this transaction; it means “cash or death.” The real “winners” of this sordid enterprise, the cargo, like Puig, are shackled and held for days and sometimes die awaiting payment to be made while bankrupt policies on both sides of the ninety miles only encourage this perversely thriving industry to grow and become ever more profitable. As Joe Kehoskie, a friend and baseball agent who has dealt with Cuban refugees for many years, put it, “As it gets more lucrative it’ll only draw in more of a criminal element than exists and get worse.”

  Cuba’s athletes are worth billions anywhere else but their home. While less than 1 percent of all of Cuba’s athletic talent have abandoned Cuba since the “triumph” of the revolution, over the last few years more Cuban ballplayers and boxers than ever have entered these smugglers’ boats and perversely transformed into the most expensive human export on earth. Even after the athlete’s fee or ransom for transit is paid, a sizable backend chunk from the contracts these athletes make in the United States must still be coughed up under threat of murder or harm to families back on the island. And while the press debates whether financing these athletes amounts to human trafficking, it’s puzzling what exactly is required for it to be recognized as something even more malevolent: a modern slave trade. Athletes like Puig, despite their multimillion-dollar contracts in the United States, remain indentured servants who have to work off their debt.

  Despite this, the incentive to leave is only going to grow as the offers continue to get bigger and bigger. Kehoskie estimates there are at least a half dozen other Puig-sized contacts awaiting players who thus far have proved to be, in the language of the trade, “true believers.”

  It has long been this way. Back in 1492, encountering Cuba for the first time, Columbus described it as “the most beautiful land that eyes ever beheld.” Of course, this was just an unexpected detour from the real objective of his voyage. Fortunately, the Taino natives quickly brought everything back into focus when they greeted their visitors with offerings of gold (which held no value in their society) and happily disclosed other places where more could be found. Columbus and those who followed promptly enslaved the natives and enlisted them to mine for any and all gold that could be seized and returned to Europe.

  Columbus and his men also rounded up the Taino wives and femal
e children and after endless gang rapes sold them into sex slavery back in Spain. Once the remaining natives of Cuba fully understood that insatiable lust for the island’s natural resources was the reason behind Columbus and his men’s continued presence, they dispensed of whatever gold they still had into the sea in hopes of ridding the island of its intruders. Farther inland, the Tainos dumped their gold into rivers. By the 1530s, nearly all the Tainos were wiped out by a combination of genocide, slavery, starvation, suicide, and disease. Nearly five hundred years later, athletes like Puig have replaced gold as Cuba’s most lucrative treasure.

  Today history repeats itself as Cuba’s loot once again enters the sea in protest, but this time the protest is in opposition to the original Taino values—the ones that saw gold as no more valuable than anything or anyone else—now advanced by Castro’s government. Now Cuba’s treasure willingly throws itself into the sea for top dollar.

  “America … just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”

  —Hunter S. Thompson

  I interviewed Teófilo Stevenson in his home in May of 2011, the same week Osama bin Laden, the CIA’s “most dangerous man in the world,” was killed. On the way over to Stevenson’s house I drove past a dozen billboards of Che Guevara, Cuba’s most revered revolutionary hero. Today, most Americans know him from a popular tourist T-shirt, even worn by one New Yorker I saw celebrating bin Laden’s death by lighting a Cohiba cigar. But Che was also executed by CIA order back when he was listed as the “most dangerous man in the world.” I wondered if kitsch could do for bin Laden one day what it did for Che’s legacy.

  I’d already taken one too many chances interviewing famous boxers under surveillance by the government. Coupled with that fling with Fidel’s granddaughter, things were getting edgy for me in Havana. There are moments in Cuba when you never know whether you’ve arrived at the wrong place at the right time, the right place at the wrong time, or—the most sinister of all—simply the last time. Cars full of strangers would pass by gleefully pointing up at security cameras. I figured if the police were coming, they were coming. I called Stevenson again from a pay phone and he reluctantly agreed to meet.

  Okay then, fuck it. One way or another, I would never have another chance. Hold on tightly, let go lightly. I stopped a gypsy cab and offered him a day’s fare for a round trip to take me and my translator across town to Stevenson’s home in Náutico, near the Marina Hemingway.

  The translator told me that the best chance we had to coax Stevenson into talking on camera was to bring him some suitably “respectful” vodka as a present. Stevenson was known to trick a lot of journalists into throwing him a party for everyone he could find on the street and then, when the time came to film, curtly call the evening to a close. My friend Bobby Cassidy, a writer in New York, had been duped in the same manner.

  When we arrived in Náutico, we grabbed a bottle from a kiosk and walked the rest of the way to Stevenson’s house. The neighborhood was green and lush, far more cheerful than Félix Savón’s place, but reports of Fidel giving Stevenson a “mansion” were nothing more than propaganda. What passes for a luxurious neighborhood in Cuba is, by American standards, sad and drab. Fresh coats of paint and old Russian cars—Ladas locked behind fenced-in driveways—are the only signs of relative affluence. Most Cubans elsewhere, of course, have no money for cars or paint in the first place.

  My translator grew quieter the closer we got to Stevenson’s home. It was clear that he was having second thoughts about being involved with this. He’d spent time with Stevenson before, translating for diplomats who wanted to meet him. He had not enjoyed the experience.

  “How bad is he?” I asked him.

  “Have you ever spoken to him on the phone when he isn’t drunk?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Exactly.” He shook his head.

  In conversation, he often didn’t know what day or month it was. I was never sure if he was joking. He’d switch from English to Spanish to Russian. If Muhammad Ali was locked in his body as the physical cost for his career, what was the price Stevenson paid locked in the vise of this body politic?

  “I think it’s fairly obvious how bad he is, isn’t it?” my translator lamented. “He’s not meeting you for the pleasure of speaking with a foreign journalist. He needs the money. So do I. So does everybody in this fucking country. This man is a great hero of mine and to many around the world, and having him reduced to this makes me feel ashamed.”

  “Do you even think he’ll talk with us?” I asked.

  “I doubt on camera. He’s not well. There’s his car up ahead. There.” He pointed to a rusting green early-1990s Toyota behind a fence. “That’s his. He turned down five million dollars and he drives that. Do you think I’m proud of my country for that? That’s the house of Teo. By Cuban standards it’s nice, but in Miami he would have lived in a palace. You want to know how hard things have gotten? He doesn’t even have enough money to put gasoline in his car.”

  In 1987, Stevenson had been involved in what many assumed was an alcohol-related car accident that took a motorcyclist’s life. The crime, if indeed it was one, was swept under the rug to preserve Stevenson’s iconic status. He was never charged or convicted of any wrongdoing, and although he slowly receded from public view, symbolically he remained a lodestar for Cuba’s moral compass. Many Cubans still set their moral watches to Stevenson’s clock, and even some of those opposed to his socialist principles admire the man’s courage and conviction.

  I wasn’t looking forward to undermining that. Galileo wasn’t put in prison because he was wrong about anything he discovered looking through his telescope; rather, he was incarcerated simply because he saw what others didn’t wish to see.

  When we arrived at Stevenson’s driveway we could see through the padlocked fence that his front door was open. My translator hollered out and a few tense moments later Stevenson, shirtless and in blue track pants, a cigarette dangling from his lips, wound his stiff six-foot-five frame into the entryway with care, bracing himself against the doorjamb. I wasn’t sure if the fragility in Stevenson’s movements owed more to his boxing career or the booze. Nonetheless, he’d recently celebrated his fifty-ninth birthday and still looked lean and handsome.

  Stevenson approached us, holding out the key to his gate while my translator turned to me with a look of dread.

  Teófilo Stevenson won his first Olympic gold medal in 1972 and his last world amateur championship in 1986. He won 302 fights and once went eleven years without a single loss. The offer to fight Muhammad Ali came after Stevenson won his second Olympic gold medal in Montreal in 1976.

  Ali was a man adept at finding weakness in his opponents and cruelly exploiting it to his own advantage, yet he never saw weakness in Stevenson, not even in his refusal to turn professional and face him in the ring. He admired a man standing up for what he believed in, as Ali had done when he refused to compromise his spiritual beliefs to fight in Vietnam. In 1996 and 1998, Ali donated a total of $1.7 million worth of medical aid to Cuba as a way of opposing the economic embargo against the island nation, which had contributed so much to the brutal economic crisis of the previous decade. Stevenson greeted Ali at Havana’s international airport and they were inseparable during both of Ali’s visits, equals.

  Stevenson pried open his lock and pulled back the gate until we had entered and then proceeded to lock us in. There were rumors that he kept a pistol Fidel had given him personally for protection. He offered a warm handshake and smiled, yet his eyes were bloodshot and turned sad the moment he noticed my camera.

  “Please come inside,” he said in English.

  “You like speaking English?” I asked.

  “As long as he doesn’t start the Russian.…” My translator smiled in Stevenson’s direction.

  Once we got inside his home—surrounded by photographs
, mementos, and trophies—Stevenson pointed to a chair for me to sit in while he sat across from me, the street visible to him out the open front door. I quickly realized why this was: every last person who walked by, spotting Stevenson, sang his name in joy, raising a hand of praise, and it lifted his spirits. I handed the bottle of vodka to Stevenson and he tilted his head in thanks, asking the translator if he could go back into the kitchen and bring out some cups and orange juice for us.

  Even though at the time I had no idea that this was going to be the last interview of Stevenson’s life before his sudden death a year later in June 2012, I knew this wasn’t going to be easy.

  I turned and began attaching my camera to a small tripod. I was in the process of stretching out and unfolding it just as Stevenson lit another cigarette, turned to our translator, and said in Spanish:

  “Tell him he has to pay, or there is no interview. Make him come up with something.”

  “How much do we ask for?” my translator asked Stevenson.

  “You tell me,” Stevenson grunted. “You have experience in this. Give him a number.”

  “I say we ask for eighty or a hundred. I’m broke.”

  “Okay.” Stevenson shrugged. “But I’m worse off than you. If I say there is no interview—”

  Just then he noticed the camera pointed in his direction. “Don’t film me now. No camera! Put the camera away.”

  I swung the camera away.

  Stevenson was in an impossible situation. He not only rejected America’s millions, but he also had to pretend there was no consequence. Stevenson had to be just as defiant in his choice as Puig was in pretending he’d reached salvation entering American life, with no lingering pain. Zero tolerance for dissent on this point cuts both ways. The emotional truth remains hidden.