The Domino Diaries Read online

  Before I ever set foot on Cuban shores, I wondered what Shakespeare might have done with Fidel Castro and his cursed treasure chest of an island Columbus had tried to plunder, along with all the other intruders ever since. And then an hour later after my first visit in 2000, when I was only twenty, it became clear that the better question was what Fidel Castro and Cuba would have done with Shakespeare. Everywhere I looked, I was confronted with the same question: Who would believe this society ever existed in the first place, let alone for this long?

  During my first week in Havana, I took a gypsy cab over to Cojimar and tracked down Gregorio Fuentes, the still living 103-year-old model for Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. I asked him, “If Hemingway wrote about every other war he’d chased after around the world, why not the revolution going on in his backyard?” Gregorio shrugged and took a puff from his cigar. “He liked boxing. Maybe Hemingway’s knowledge of boxing taught him enough to know to punch your weight.” He smiled. As for a hero like Teófilo Stevenson turning down all that money to leave, on my final trip to Cuba, eleven years after my first visit, Stevenson reluctantly granted me the last filmed interview of his life before his sudden death a year later, in 2012. When the Miami Herald ran a front-page feature about that interview, in which Stevenson asking me for a hundred dollars in return for our session somehow overshadowed all the millions he’d turned down during his career, it cost me my ability to ever return to an island I love and greatly admire. I’d handed ammunition to a lot of enemies of the Cuban government by exposing one of its idols. And over half a century after Fidel Castro seemed to be taking a joyride on the Titanic, dedicating his life to opposing America, with the latest banking collapse, suddenly our unsinkable ship of capitalism was taking on water with a limited supply of lifeboats to go around. Maybe with The Old Man and the Sea, a lovingly told story embracing the haunting beauty found in certain failed journeys, Hemingway spoke with equal truth to both sides of the ninety miles separating his adoptive home and his native country.

  The first thing that happens when you arrive in Havana is you feel your heart’s watch resisting your mind’s clock about what time it is. The Cuban poet Dulce María Loynaz once described the shape of her island as “like the drawn bow an invisible archer raises in the shadows, aimed at our hearts.” I was warned like all visitors that books were banned in Cuba. This had the unintended consequence, at least for me, of redoubling my desire to go to a place where books were still that powerful. No matter what was written in a book in most places in the modern world, who would think to waste their time banning it? It was hard enough getting people unplugged for long enough to read, let alone care enough to rally against one. When the revolution triumphed, four out of five soldiers who marched into Havana with Fidel were illiterate. Forty years later, when I arrived in 2000, the city boasted one of the highest literacy rates in the world.

  Havana is a city of bright lights and dark corners I explored as much as I could, on and off, for twelve years. It’s very difficult to see anything clearly for long. It never seems to finish what it has to say, and part of its essential mystery and beauty is how you always come away missing something.

  6

  HUNGARIAN JOKES

  The formula “two and two make five” is not without its attractions.

  —Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  MY INTRODUCTION TO CUBA came in the form of the punch line of a Hungarian joke my grandfather left behind for me after his death. We’d never talked much, but in the last decade before his death we hadn’t spoken at all. I lost someone I never really had. Then, after my mother gave me some photographs from his youth and an old cigarette tin from his mandatory service in the Hungarian army, my feelings for him started to change. My mother saved the biggest surprise for the breakfast table not long after he died. She wanted to use what little money he had left her to send me to Cuba.

  As far as I can tell, most Hungarian jokes have two central objectives: making you laugh to avoid crying or crying your way into laughter. Alcoholism and suicide rates among Hungarians are some of the highest in the world (and my own family did their part to chip in on both fronts), so perhaps this is to be expected. My deepest connection to my grandfather is through the Hungarian minor chord in music. The composers Béla Bartók and Erik Satie favored the Hungarian minor chord in some of their compositions, whereas most composers avoided it, because too many listeners found the unresolved nature of the melody simply too haunting. Any untrained ear can decipher whether most melodies are happy or sad, but the Hungarian minor chord conjures an ambiguity that leaves you off-balance and unsettled, much like a Hungarian joke.

  My grandfather escaped Hungary in 1956 as a refugee while Russian tanks were rolling down the streets outside his family’s apartment. One of my mother’s first childhood memories was seeing the tanks outside her window. While in Canada, he sent back whatever money he could to support his family and saved in order to bring his family over with him. It was always his intention to reunite with his wife and two children. It didn’t work out that way. The distance was too much and finally both my grandparents moved on with their lives and divorced six years after his escape. My grandmother met the love of her life while my grandfather never truly recovered.

  My uncle was caught trying to escape Hungary and was sent back, but my mother succeeded ten years after my grandfather’s escape and followed him to Canada. At sixteen she reunited with my grandfather but he was a changed man, a drinker, hardened and abusive. She tried to take off three times before she finally got away. That same year she became pregnant with my brother, and married the father. Almost as soon as she gave birth, she was pregnant again. Seven months after giving birth to her second child, he died from crib death. Things kind of spiraled out of control for her after that, until she found God. My grandfather never reached out with any help during that time. She had another child from an affair two years later that ended her first marriage. From then on my mother and brothers lived in the projects while she supported her family on welfare and odd jobs she could get cleaning houses or working with the elderly.

  My grandfather, at least while I knew him, was a grumbling, unhappy, standoffish man fastened to the portable whipping post of regret. He shared my mother’s enormous pale blue eyes but lacked the kindness and generosity that kept hers lit up. My favorite story my mother told about him centered on a wedding he attended after he divorced my grandmother. He’d fallen in love with a woman already engaged to someone else. After failing to persuade her against the marriage, he showed up at the wedding and hanged himself in revenge during the ceremony. In the banquet hall, my grandfather swayed for two minutes from the noose before anyone was able to cut him down. He spent the next fifty-six days in a coma.

  In his old age, my grandfather expected his family to reach out to him, but I could never find much about him to justify bothering. After about the age of ten, we stopped communicating altogether and the last time I ever saw him was when I visited him in the hospital a few days before his death, not long after his eightieth and my twentieth birthday. He’d had a stroke and could no longer communicate verbally. I couldn’t get past the doorway to his room as he lay there staring at me.

  During the last year of his life, the only times I heard his voice were when he would sing Hungarian and Gypsy folk songs on my mother’s answering machine. It was such an uncharacteristically sweet, warm act that I wasn’t even sure how to approach asking my mother why he’d begun regularly doing it. My mother visited him at the hospital as often as she could in the last days of his life. There were silly, petty issues with his will where the obvious desire he’d had to look after his two children was complicated by fears of being exploited. He didn’t have much money in the first place, yet his wish to offer something to my mother was botched at the end, and she never complained despite always having financial constraints herself. She laughed about how typical it was of him.

  She invited me for a palacsinta (Hungarian crepes) breakfast a few months
after he died.

  “Darrrrling,” she began in her Count Chocula accent, as I braced myself.

  Our breakfast table had always been a dangerous place for me. When I was eight, after having watched her light a candle on the anniversary of my dead brother’s birthday, I asked over palacsinta how anyone could possibly get over the death of a child.

  “Well, darrrrling,” she smiled, “your mother lost the will to live.”

  I stopped scraping jam over the pancake.

  “I couldn’t feel anyt’ing. The only place I could feel anything was tw’oo sex. Not making love. Just sex. Sex was the only t’ing that made me feel like a human being.”

  “Sex?”

  “Sex was the only t’ing, Bwinny.”

  The week before we’d clarified that sex, making love, and fucking were three entirely different things. But it would be another year before I’d seek clarification on which of the distinctly different, obviously designated holes one was supposed to use when seeking to lose one’s virginity. Was it insulting to ask for the “fuck hole” or “sex hole” with a girl? Did all women expect their first time to be through the “making love hole”? If you lost your virginity to someone who’d already lost theirs, was it insulting to ask for the “making love hole”?

  “Sex?” I repeated.

  “You asked me so I’m telling you.”

  “You were still with the husband before daddy?”

  “No.” She smiled. “T’ank God I was free of dat.”

  “So you were with daddy?”

  “No. Dis is before I met your fadder.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let me have some of your jam if you’re not using it.”

  Little was functioning inside me as I contemplated what she was telling me.

  “Sex was the only thing that helped you to feel alive?”

  “Yes,” she said, fiendishly jamming her knife into the jar of strawberry jam. “Sex was the only t’ing. So every weekend I went to discos and I watched very carefully for the best dancer and I went over to dance. Then after, I would go home with them and we would have sex. On Saturday and Sunday, every week, for an entire year this is what your mother had to do to find any reason to live.”

  Multiplication was part of the curriculum that year and, while not having memorized the times tables, I felt confident I had easily gleaned enough to comfortably handle this one. Fifty-two weeks, times two of the best dancers in these clubs every week, equals …

  “You slept with two thousand men in one year?”

  “Around a hundred, I would say. But then I got much better just before I met your fadder.”

  Four years later, at the same table, pancakes steaming on the plate, she brought up the sexual education pamphlet I’d brought home from school the day before.

  “Bwinny, I read what you brought home. We have always been open with each other, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “Have you ever woken up with the sheets moist? I don’t mean pee.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You have never had an or-gasm? You know what dat is, right?”

  “I don’t think I have.”

  “It might happen soon. All I vant to say, it’s very, very normal.”

  “How old were you when you had your first one?” I asked her.

  “I was eleven. In Budapest they have a beautiful park called Margaret Island. Very beautiful place in the summer. I was dere one summer afternoon and saw an old man feeding birds on zee park bench. All the birds were so happy and some flew into his hand to eat the birdseed. So I sat down across from him and asked for some birdseed.”

  “Mom,” I interrupted. “What the hell does this have to do with your first orgasm?”

  “I tell you. Zee old man was very kind and asked me to cup my hands and reach over so he could give me some seed. I did and he gave me some and then I started to feed zee birds. But zen zee old man did an interesting t’ing. First he put down the birdseed. Then he came over close to me on zee bench. Then as I kept feeding the happy little birds he reached down and put his hand slowly up my dress and he was touching me.”

  “Mom.”

  “Let me finish the story. You asked, so I am telling you this story.”

  “I don’t want to hear this story.”

  “He was touching me there right on the bench and I had never felt deez sensation in my life. I wasn’t scared or hurt, I was confused. But I didn’t say anything or do anything. I just felt this new sensation building and building until, finally, an amazing thing happened. And at that exact moment, this very old man took his hand away, grabbed his birdseed, and walked off.”

  “Your first orgasm was from being molested by an old man on a park bench?”

  “It’s true.”

  “Something like this would scar a woman for life, wouldn’t it?”

  “Why? He gave me pleasure and I was never hurt. I t’ink it’s interesting. Someone else can have it mean somet’ing else. I won’t argue with them, they shouldn’t waste time arguing with me.”

  When I mentioned this story to my father, he ventured that my mother had been denied the kind of love she needed in her childhood. And maybe that desperation was why she was willing to take such risks in finding it, even from this stranger’s touch. My father always nursed a grudge against my mother’s dad that I adopted very early on. It ended one day after I was back at the breakfast table after my grandfather’s death.

  “My father and you never had much closeness. I’m sorry for dat. For both of you. He was better than I think you realize.”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged.

  “I have a silly question.” My mother smiled. “If you could go anywhere in the world. Where do you think you would go?”

  I’d just finished reading The Old Man and the Sea and a teacher at school had told me that Hemingway’s captain and friend from the story was still alive and kicking at 103 years old in Cojimar, the same town as in the story.

  “Cuba,” I told her.

  “Why Cuba?”

  “To find a boxing trainer and to meet the guy from The Old Man and the Sea.”

  “Okay, then today your grandfather is sending you to Cuba. He didn’t leave much, but there’s enough to buy you a ticket. I think he would enjoy giving you this present. So you will have to look up many of my friends in Havana.”

  “You have friends in Cuba?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I do.”

  “I’ve never heard you mention knowing anybody in Cuba.”

  “That’s because I haven’t met them yet. But they’re there. You’ll see, darling.”

  7

  VALET PARKING

  It is well known that curious men go prying into all sorts of places (where they have no business) and come out of them with all sorts of spoil. This story [Heart of Darkness], and one other … are all the spoil I brought out from Africa, where, really, I had no sort of business.

  —Joseph Conrad

  A WOMAN SITTING next to me on my first plane ride to Havana was underlining an entire passage from a story she was reading, La causa que refresca (A Cause for All Seasons) by José Miguel Sánchez. The story was about a Cuban male prostitute waiting at the airport for a tourist he would spend the next six weeks with. After reading just the first few sentences over this woman’s shoulder, I asked if I could copy it into my notebook:

  I’m only a guide, but I’m like a priest in a way.… I absolve you, but I leave you with just enough guilt so that you will come back soon to this Cuba, which lies behind the picture postcards, to this game of masks that we play, and you play, too.… I absolve you and rekindle in your heart your faith in the cause, a cause for six weeks of the year of Latin love and forbidden fruits, of sex and idealism. A safe and cozy cause. Easy to carry around. A cause for all seasons.

  The philosopher Slavoj Žižek once said that fantasy is for those who can’t cope with reality, while reality is for those who can’t cope with their fantasies. I’ve go
ne back and forth my entire life about which, between the two, really triggers the more lasting damage. Some people are homesick the moment they leave their front door, others are homesick from birth for a place they can never find. Some girls enjoy the walk to a new boy’s house more than they will ever enjoy the boy himself.

  My first trip to Havana was in February of 2000, right in the middle of the Elián González fiasco. As with everything about Cuba, nobody could agree on anything. And now, what the press referred to as “political kiddie porn” had entered into a Cuban civil war fought across ninety miles of ocean. What was portrayed as a custody case by some (and a kidnapping by others) became an existential crisis for millions of Cubans on both sides of the issue. With Elián’s story, millions of Cubans saw their own family’s breakup writ large.

  At the age of five, Elián González and his mother, along with twelve other passengers, had fled Cuba on a small aluminum boat. The boat’s faulty engine gave out after they encountered a storm while attempting to cross the Straits of Florida. Only Elián and two other passengers managed to survive the journey. Elián’s mother died—heroically, some in America said—trying to save her son from the horrors of a life in Cuba. To allow any child to live under Castro’s rule in Cuba was tantamount to child abuse, is what seemed to be implied. The survivors were discovered floating at sea by two fishermen. The fishermen handed the survivors over to the U.S. Coast Guard and all hell broke loose in Miami and Cuba. It turned out Elián’s mother had taken Elián from the boy’s father in Cuba, without his knowledge, let alone permission. After some negotiation at the highest levels of government in the United States and Cuba, Elián would be sent back. The young boy became yet another feather in the cap for Fidel against the United States.

  For my own research, I was reading Pitching Around Fidel: A Journey into the Heart of Cuban Sports by S. L. Price. Price’s book was the most current, in-depth breakdown of Cuba’s enigmatic powerhouse sports machine. I wanted to learn how to locate boxers and how to properly approach them to see if any would be willing to teach me. I had no idea how to handle negotiation in Cuba or what the risks involved were. But I’d read that the black market economy in Cuba eclipsed its official economy. In the book, Price details how each elite athlete he profiled encountered the same hopelessly impossible decision to stay or leave as every other Cuban on the island, only with a lot more money at stake if they managed to escape. Whereas Teófilo Stevenson had rejected five million dollars in the 1970s to fight Muhammad Ali, the going rate offered to Félix Savón, Cuba’s latest heavyweight destroyer, was in the neighborhood of twenty million, to defect to America and fight Mike Tyson. Even the act of writing a book exploring the ambiguity of the choice involved had caused Price to be banned from ever returning to Cuba. “You have penetrated an impenetrable system,” he was told by security agents. The bombshell of the book was a Cuban boxer, Héctor Vinent, a two-time Olympic champion, confessing to Price his desire to escape. No Cuban athlete, in Cuba, had ever confessed such a thing on the record before. Yet Vinent never managed to escape. He was punished before he’d ever had a chance to try. Vinent only wished to leave Cuba after the government had banned him from boxing for the rest of his life. Price’s book didn’t say what became of Vinent, whether he remained in Havana or had returned to be with his family in Santiago de Cuba in the east of the island. If Vinent was living in Havana as I flew over, he was twenty-eight, and my guess was he could probably use some extra money training me at a local gym. It was as good a place as any to learn about his island, too.