The Domino Diaries Read online

  “Is it off?” Stevenson growled.

  I turned it off.

  The translator spread out three cups before Stevenson and placed a large bottle of orange juice next to the vodka.

  “We can talk but I don’t want to be filmed.”

  “If you grant me an interview I have to film,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “For one hundred dollars you can film the pictures on my wall and have the audio of our interview.”

  “I’m sorry.” I laughed. “On the phone I asked for a filmed interview. That’s why I came here. That’s my work.”

  Stevenson put out his cigarette on the floor and looked for another in an empty pack. I offered him one of mine.

  “What is this?”

  “American Spirit,” I said.

  “You want Teófilo Stevenson to smoke American Spirit?” He spat out the words. “Why did I ever let you in my house?”

  With that, Stevenson went about preparing three drinks in the large paper cups. He filled all three cups to the brim, but two had nine parts orange juice to one part vodka, while the last had nine parts vodka to just a token splash of orange juice. Half the bottle of vodka was already gone.

  “Okay.” Stevenson laughed. “How long you want for our interview?”

  “An hour?” I said.

  Stevenson nodded thoughtfully, reached down for the suicide screwdriver, and hoisted it up toward me.

  “Fuck that shit.” I waved it off. “I don’t even drink.” I knew the drill. I had seen my own father try to drink himself to death, just as Stevenson was doing now.

  “My friend”—Stevenson snickered—“my deal is this. If you pay a hundred and thirty dollars, you can have an hour with me on camera and film my trophy walls and pictures with Fidel and Ali.”

  “Done.” I reached over to my camera.

  “Annnnnnnd,” Stevenson added, “the time starts now, but you can only begin filming once you finish this drink. These are my terms.”

  “Those are your terms?”

  “Yes.” Stevenson smiled coyly. “Do you accept my terms?”

  “Deal.”

  I took the cup of vodka, chugged it in five or six excruciating gulps, struggled not to vomit in Stevenson’s living room for the next few moments, and once it had finally settled in my stomach, I reached over to turn the camera on to catch Stevenson’s reaction.

  “Nooooo!”

  “Deal’s a deal, campeón.”

  The translator shook his head. “You’re both insane. What am I doing here?”

  “Okay, one minute,” Stevenson pleaded. “One minute.” He staggered to his feet and wobbled his way into the dining room and found a shirt and cap after tossing aside some dominoes on his dinner table. He returned in a Che Guevara T-shirt and gray cap as armor and stared at me like an old lion.

  I started filming. “Are you happy with your life in Cuba?” I asked him, my voice shaking. “Are you happy with the life you’ve had?”

  “Happy? I’m happy. I’m very happy.”

  “No regrets?”

  “No.”

  “Why is that so hard for people to believe?”

  “There are people who become immoral. I would never do that. I endure until the end.”

  “I’ve just come from Ireland, where Guillermo Rigondeaux had his last fight. He told me you defended him after he tried to defect.”

  “The Cuban system helped him. Where he grew up, in Santiago de Cuba? They did not have the conditions that the revolution has created today. He should have respected that.”

  “Félix Savón told me he felt Rigondeaux betrayed the Cuban people,” I said.

  “I rejected all that money. Because they wanted me to stay out there in the United States like Rigondeaux and the rest of them. Rigondeaux decided to leave. He wasn’t allowed to box anymore in Cuba. He betrayed the Cuban people. And … he left.”

  “What does this decision feel like, to stay or to leave?” I asked Stevenson. “Is it a decision from the mind or the heart?”

  “There are decisions that emerge from your heart and your soul and those decisions can’t be betrayed. Now please stop the cameras for a moment. I don’t want the children to see the champ smoking, please. It’s a bad example.”

  * * *

  On that warm night in Cancún, Helmys Stevenson wore a long white dress with her curly hair hanging over her shoulders. While she was built long and lithe like an Olympic swimmer, her arms were as large and sculpted as any middleweight boxer I’d ever seen.

  “You lift trucks for a living in Cancún or what?” I asked her.

  “I do no exercise.” She blushed. “I’m fortunate with good genetics.”

  “You know, women box in the Olympics now.”

  “I heard.”

  “Maybe to settle the argument between your dad and Muhammad Ali I could promote a fight between you and one of Ali’s daughters.”

  “Laila Ali was a world champion!”

  “So was her dad when Teófilo got all those offers to fight him.”

  “I’ll consider it.”

  Just as Ali and Stevenson bore an uncanny physical resemblance, Helmys could have easily passed as one of Ali’s daughters. But I wondered how different her life would have been if she had enjoyed the benefits Ali’s children enjoyed from his fame and fortune. Teófilo Stevenson was a national hero, but he could never offer his two children the comforts and security of the millions Ali would leave behind. Yet I saw no sign of this fact burdening this lovely woman in any way.

  After I warned Helmys of the distance to where I had in mind for us to have dinner, she exchanged her heels for flip-flops.

  I took her to the same hotel where Yasiel Puig was held captive under threat of having his arm chopped off by a machete until the ransom was paid. It was the only hotel that fit all the basic clues Katz had provided me: U-shaped, with a pool, looking out over the water at the massive Mexican flag on Cancún, and a drunken stumble away from that strip club. Katz had tried for weeks to identify it on Google images but failed. Since Puig had been held there, the hotel had undergone a massive renovation. I wonder where the money came from to finance that? My aunt was certain the previous incarnation of the hotel was the dive Katz wrote about in his piece.

  We walked in the darkness along the shoulder of the road, a New York avenue worth of land dividing two seas. Helmys wasn’t wearing perfume but the scent wafting off her hair, detonated by moonlight, was distracting.

  “How did you leave Cuba?” I asked her.

  “I studied international tourism in Mexico. I applied for a visa to stay and work in Mexico. I visit my home in Cuba as often as I can.”

  “Where did you grow up in Havana?” I asked.

  “The house you visited, where my father eventually moved to, was in Náutico. We had the only swimming pool in that neighborhood, but he wouldn’t use it for swimming. He liked turtles and ducks and let them use it. But before that home Fidel gave us a house near the Plaza de la Revolución, where he spoke to the Cuban people. Actually, our house was next door to Che Guevara’s widow. Che’s children were all my friends growing up.”

  “And was Fidel close with your father?”

  “Very close.” She slapped my arm for emphasis, as only the daughter of a three-time Olympic Champion might. “After I was born my father introduced me to Fidel and apparently I pulled his beard very hard while he cradled me in his arms.”

  “So you knew him while you grew up?”

  “Of course. But I was … I was a little terrified of him. I could not speak to him ever. It was Fidel! But always I would ask my father if we were somewhere with Fidel in attendance. ‘Please, can I speak to him?’ And my father would ask Fidel to come over and he always would and I had no power of speech. It annoyed my father. But I just could never speak to him.”

  “Do you ever think about the kind of life you could have had if your father had taken all that money to leave?”

  “Money is very nice.” She smil
ed, caressing the shoulder she’d slapped before. “But I wasn’t raised that way. I had a beautiful life in Cuba and I’m very happy with my life now.”

  “You don’t think your father ever regretted his decision?”

  “No. Was it an easy decision? No. Not for anyone. My father lived the life he always wanted to live on his terms. Maybe he lived it too much and it cost him an old age. But he had a beautiful life and gave me a beautiful life, also. He was exactly who he wanted to be.”

  Helmys and I passed by the Casablanca, the dingy strip club Katz had mentioned, cigarette butts and bottlecaps studded into their dirty driveway. We could hear Britney Spears singing inside, but no light was visible. The club was hidden from the little road by a hedge, a bit like a double chin hidden by a beard.

  “Do you know about Yasiel Puig?” I asked her. “The baseball player who has become so famous in Los Angeles.”

  “Sure. Many Cubans come to this island or Cancún every year. Some, like him, are athletes who come for all that money waiting for them in the United States.”

  “You don’t feel strongly one way or the other about his choice?”

  “He has to live with his choice and whether it was right for him. I judge no one. It’s none of my business.”

  “What about when people judge your father’s choice? What about the people who don’t believe anyone could do what he did, turning down all that money?”

  She shrugged. “Just because someone does not agree with him or his reasons does not mean they have to accuse him of being a liar.”

  I only had the chance to meet Helmys’s father once and I was sorry from the first minute that our exchange wounded a great man’s pride, that for many it would reduce him. It took about the same amount of time with his daughter to realize he must have been as proud of his legacy, raising her, as he was of anything he accomplished inside or outside of a ring on behalf of the revolution.

  “I brought some photos to show you of my father that I carry on my phone. I thought you would appreciate them. Some photos of my father and Fidel. My father and me. Many have never been published. Would you like to see them?”

  She stood next to me, her hair in my face, and warmly flipped through the photos of her father’s life. While there were no boxing photos in her collection, everything she showed me illumintated all things I’d imagined he fought for. From his honeymoon to intimate moments with his family, to being introduced to Nelson Mandela, to doing the wave with Fidel at the Pan Am Games—all of it was bigger than life and handled with a coy smirk worthy of any iconic Hollywood movie star.

  “Jesus, your dad was a handsome guy,” I said.

  As she stared at her father’s face on the screen she corrected me, “He wasn’t handsome. My father was beautiful.”

  Two years before, I had watched Helmys at her father’s funeral as nearly a thousand Cubans in attendance collectively broke down in tears to mourn his loss. I watched her comfort her brother, a little younger than her, as Stevenson’s coffin was lowered into the ground and every face in view grieved a beloved hero. I included footage of this event in my documentary as a means of contrasting how the prospective funerals of defector Cuban boxing champions might look in America, so far removed from friends and family back home.

  I wasn’t looking to vilify or judge either decision; what I wanted put on trial had always been the insiduous choice itself, something Puig and Stevenson and so many others know so well.

  Trying to understand Stevenson’s life and death, I asked my father to watch my interview with him. It was a tense hour; he saw a bit of himself in Stevenson, as did I.

  When the film ended, my father referred me to a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. In 1905, Rilke was working as a secretary to the sculptor Rodin and confessed he was no longer writing. The artist sent him to the zoo and told him to look at an animal until he saw it. Rilke imagined the view from captivity, from the inside out.

  “The Panther” came as close as anything to help me bring Stevenson and Cuba’s blur into focus:

  His vision, from the constantly passing bars,

  has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else.

  It seems to him there are a thousand bars;

  and behind the bars, no world.

  As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,

  the movement of his powerful soft strides

  is like a ritual dance around a center

  in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

  Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly—.

  An image enters in,

  rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,

  plunges into the heart and is gone.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BRIN-JONATHAN BUTLER is a writer and filmmaker. His work has appeared in ESPN The Magazine, Vice, Deadspin, The Wall Street Journal, Salon, and The New York Times. Butler’s documentary, Split Decision, is an examination of Cuban-American relations and the economic and cultural paradoxes that have shaped them since Castro’s revolution, through the lens of elite Cuban boxers forced to choose between remaining in Cuba or defecting to America. His e-original, A Cuban Boxer’s Journey, is also published by Picador. You can sign up for email updates here.

  ALSO BY BRIN-JONATHAN BUTLER

  A Cuban Boxer’s Journey: Guillermo Rigondeaux, from Castro’s Traitor to American Champion (e-book)

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  1. How Did This White Motherfucker Get Inside My House?

  2. The One-Eyed King

  3. The Audition

  4. Dirty Secrets

  5. Hurricanes and Breezes

  6. Hungarian Jokes

  7. Valet Parking

  8. Punching Your Weight

  9. La Lucha

  10. The Old Man and the Sea

  11. Elevator Music

  12. If Spanish Lacked a Future Tense

  13. Sand Castles

  14. Wet Matches

  15. Musical Chairs

  16. Rosetta Stones

  17. Chasing the American Dream from a Smuggler’s Boat

  18. Tourist Information

  19. Shadow Boxing

  20. Waiting for Rigondeaux

  21. Writing in the Scrapbook of a Tyrant

  22. Misadventures

  23. Sliding Doors

  24. Judas

  25. Whistling Past the Graveyard

  26. Heroes for Sale

  About the Author

  Also by Brin-Jonathan Butler

  Copyright

  THE DOMINO DIARIES. Copyright © 2015 by Brin-Jonathan Butler. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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  “The Panther,” translation copyright © 1982 by Stephen Mitchell; from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Random House, LLC. All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Henry Sene Yee

  Cover photograph by Fernanda Preto/Aurora Photos

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um Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-1-250-04370-2 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-250-04371-9 (e-book)

  e-ISBN 9781250043719

  Picador books may be purchased for educational, business, or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or write to [email protected].

  First Edition: June 2015