The Domino Diaries Read online

  “You like this more mature type of woman because they are the most generous with you?” I asked.

  “Never.” He laughed. “Because I find this type of woman to be the most desirable! They are real women in their full expression of femininity! And with an American accent, too, that is the ultimate turn-on for me.”

  But Lesvanne’s biggest problem as a jinetero with these female tourists was that he couldn’t stop falling in love with his prey. He fell madly in love with all of them and spent most of his life licking his wounds from the heartbreak of them not writing him once they returned home.

  “You want them to marry you so you can leave?”

  “Never. I’m married already to the love of my life. They should move here until I’m ready to leave for Miami with my wife.”

  Lesvanne led us away from the leafy open squares and private homes of Vedado into the cramped, dusty streets of Centro Habana. Chinese bicycles jerked down the street over potholes as stray dogs and cats combed for scraps. Children played stickball with rocks. As we moved deeper into the neighborhood more and more eyes looked out at us behind the bars guarding front doors and windows. A hundred radios blared from apartments. Pedestrians stopped on the sidewalks and hollered “¡Oye!,” only to have baskets lowered from balconies with a string offering a wrench or a battery or an article of clothing. The neighborhood gave every indication of being a slum yet the mood was entirely unlike any of the Western ghettos I’d visited in my life. Men hissed at women from all corners, yet the women would just smile coyly and laugh. Nobody appeared to fear anyone else. I’d never seen women walk with such self-possession and pride. But then, of course, there weren’t magazine stands anywhere to remind them of how ugly they were.

  At Lesvanne’s mother’s apartment he introduced me to his mother, who had a cold and remained in her rocking chair without getting up. A framed portrait of her at fifteen was behind her, facing me, above a cupboard. The two versions of the same woman’s face smiled at me before she turned back to the television. She was intently watching a roundtable discussion on Elián González. They showed images of the boy’s father and then cut to a million people gathered to listen to Fidel giving a speech about him.

  “What do you make of this Elián González thing?” I asked Lesvanne.

  “There’s a joke about when the Pope came to Havana a couple of years ago. Fidel rode with him in the pope mobile on the Malecón. It was such a nice day they opened the roof and the Pope’s hat flew off from the sea breeze and blew into the ocean. Fidel jumped out and hopped into the ocean without getting wet. He walked on the water to grab the Pope’s hat floating on the waves. After Fidel returned the hat to the Pope the next day’s headlines about the event came in from Granma, our newspaper: ‘Fidel proves he is a god. He walks on water.’ And then the Vatican newspaper: ‘Pope performs miracle allowing Fidel to walk on water.’ And in the Miami newspapers: ‘Fidel can’t swim.’”

  Lesvanne grabbed a scratched, beat-up digital camera, fetched some batteries from a drawer, and kissed his mother good-bye as we left her home.

  As we made our way back to Calle Neptuno with him still searching through the camera to find his Miami photos, he was stopped in the street dozens of times. People hollered out from their homes and invited us in for coffee. Kids egged him on to kick a soccer ball around or play béisbol. Storekeepers left their shops to reach out and shake his hand and give him a hug. Old women selling sweets and flowers asked about his mother. He kept embracing people over and over with affection and warmth. Every time he tried to show me a photograph people came over to look and ask questions about his trip to Miami. Twice a policeman guarding a corner saw us walking together and asked Lesvanne to produce his identity card. They asked me in broken English if he was following me and if I wanted him to leave me alone.

  A few paces away from the police officer Lesvanne gently shook his head. “You see how shamefully we treat our own citizens here?” He returned to his camera and showed me a few photos of his common-law wife and a few hundred photos of the American tourist female “friends” he’d made since he was fifteen. “I love all of these beautiful women. I miss all of them.” Finally he located Miami inside his camera. Nearly all of the photos were an inventory of the materialistic orgy he had partaken of in Miami Beach. There were hardly any people in his photos, just things. They were things Lesvanne saw that he was determined to own once he moved to America and got busy making a success of himself: Hummers, houses, pools, jewelry, plastic-breasted women on posters at gift shops, bars, boats, condos. Lesvanne’s favorite outfit, which he bought in Miami, was what he wore nearly every day since his return, and he washed it every night until it was blindingly bright.

  I asked him if his American “friends” presented any kind of problem with his “wife” and he asked why it should.

  “Would you like to see a video of my wife?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  All I could make out from the camera monitor were blurs of undulating color.

  “What am I looking at here?”

  “That’s her gallbladder. Isn’t she beautiful?”

  “Come again?”

  “Isn’t she beautiful?”

  “I still don’t know what I’m looking at,” I said.

  “You’re looking inside my wife. This is from an operation I filmed.”

  Later, when I could breathe again, I asked him why he would film his wife on the operating table having her gallbladder removed.

  “Because I love all of her, man. Inside and out. I want to know all of her.”

  I didn’t say anything until he’d finished showing all the pictures.

  I’d lost count of how many people he’d kissed and hugged hello on our walk. It threw me because after ending my first long-term relationship I went months before I realized that I was having no human physical contact. How did that happen?

  “So you want all this shit once you’re settled in Miami?” I asked him.

  “Of course I do. I’ve never had anything here. I’d like to work for these things.”

  “Okay. You get all that shit—Hummer, house, pool, hot wife, jewelry, yacht. That whole photo album of other people’s stuff becomes your stuff. You’re loaded. Then you’re happier than here?”

  “Why not? I could bring the things I love here over there and have the stuff to enjoy also.”

  “Okay, so you’re loaded but maybe you’re also afraid of losing everything all the time. You’re afraid your wife is going to take you for half if she divorces you. You have to live in a gated community because you’re afraid of everyone. You have no sense of community or even give a fuck about your neighbor. Your kids don’t respect you and just want money to buy shit to distract themselves from being bored all the time. All the old people you know are in old folks’ homes because nobody wants to deal with them. You can’t be friends with any kids because everyone will think you’re a pedophile. You can’t hug any guys because they’re afraid you’re gay or they’re gay or everyone is gay. You can’t really touch anybody without second-guessing it.”

  “If I couldn’t touch anyone I’d die, man. I’d die. This country is a fucking cage. My island is a zoo. Without this contact life would be unlivable.”

  * * *

  Once we crossed the invisible border of Paseo del Prado into Old Havana, Lesvanne led us south, away from the elegant entrance to the Prado promenade guarded by lion statues and past the Hotel Inglaterra, Graham Greene’s old stomping grounds. A group of musicians were covering kitschy Buena Vista Social Club hits for sunburned European tourists smoking cigars and sipping mojitos outside the hotel, waited on by locals. Some older bachelors had young local girls at their sides fawning over them.

  “This is the new Cuba greeting visitors with open legs,” Lesvanne remarked. “Even if we had the money, ordinary Cubans are forbidden inside these hotels. Before the revolution, blacks could not visit hotels, some beaches, or even enter parks. Fidel changed that. Blacks became proud of be
ing Cuban, too. But now this new tourist apartheid has begun to replace the money we have lost from Russia after their collapse. We call this resolver.”

  Lesvanne pointed across the street to Havana’s Parque Central and the Esquina Caliente (Hot Corner), a group gathered near a giant statue of José Martí pointing accusingly in the direction of the United States. Esquina Caliente was a forum where the Cuban government had designated a small mob of fanatical béisbol fans “professional fans,” charged with engaging in screaming matches of almost homicidal intensity about the merits of current players, teams, and other unresolvable historical debates. Several debates were going on at once inside the crowd of perhaps seventy-five men, their women and children seated nearby on benches relaxing under the shade and snickering at choice sound bites delivered by the men.

  “This is for baseball?” I asked.

  “They look like they’re all ready to commit murder.” Lesvanne smiled and shook his head. “But in all the years I have watched them, I have never even seen them come to blows. This is one of the only places in my country where you can debate everything in the code of baseball. Even defections can be discussed if done carefully.”

  Beyond the men, Lesvanne pointed, was Obispo and tourist alley. We walked to the edge of Central Park and crossed the boulevard so Lesvanne could buy a peso ice cream from a vendor. I noticed more policemen on the corners glaring at Lesvanne, who now walked a little less freely under their surveillance. “Do the police look at you like that because I’m with you?” I asked Lesvanne. He nodded before lifting his chin toward the Capitolio, Cuba’s bizarro replica of Washington’s Capitol Building that was built in 1926 by a U.S. construction firm. Dollar portrait photographers were setting up their hundred-year-old cameras just below the fifty-five great front steps leading up to the entrance of the Capitolio while a couple shriveled, dolled-up “authentic” old Cuban women with unlit baseball bat–sized cigars between their teeth waited to pose with some tourists.

  A friend stopped Lesvanne in the street and asked him about seeing some boxing at Kid Chocolate the following day. A regional tournament was about to start.

  “How close are we to Kid Chocolate?” I asked both of them.

  “It’s right beside us! Twenty steps.”

  Lesvanne started drifting up the sidewalk with his ice-cream cone as I followed. He pointed his melting cone toward the chipped mural of Kid Chocolate’s face smiling teasingly behind an ancient, rusting fence locked with chains that looked as if they’d been recovered from the bottom of the ocean.

  They had named the auditorium after one of Cuba’s greatest champions. Eligio Sardiñas Montalvo was a boy who used to fight in the Old Havana streets for change back in the 1920s before he earned the nickname Kid Chocolate. As Jack Johnson had done before him in the United States, Chocolate learned to fight where the money was most available, mostly in battles royal paid for and attended by whites. A handful of blindfolded men, sometimes as many as ten, would fight until the last man standing could claim victory and the prize money. Before he’d left his teens, Kid Chocolate won every one of his 162 fights. In 1931, at the age of twenty-one, he became Cuba’s first professional world champion. Chocolate was so popular with women he’d defended his title dozens of times while suffering from untreated syphilis. He was such a confident champion he was often found in bars with a woman under each arm, freely drinking and smoking in the days leading up to his title defenses. After victories in America, where he had a house in Harlem, Chocolate would return to the streets of Old Havana in a new car and shower the fans who swarmed him with flowers and coins. He’d died an alcoholic in grueling poverty in 1988, long after most of the world had believed he’d already died.

  “Brinicito.” Lesvanne laughed. “We have bad luck about seeing boxing here. Today there is none. But I think we have good luck with the man you’re looking to train you.”

  “What?”

  “Look in the grocery store beside us. You see the man in the Cuba tracksuit with his back to us? You see the man with the newspaper under his arm? Héctor’s always reading. That’s him.”

  The grocery store across from the entrance to Kid Chocolate had a giant security guard working the front door. I couldn’t see anyone past his bulk. Someone finished paying at the counter and as he left the store I saw the sleeve of a red jersey filled out with a broad shoulder and a flash of a shaved head. After another person was finished at the register, I watched this man reach into his back pocket and produce several plastic bags for the checkout girl to place the items he’d purchased. His face was sullen yet his body language was confident. He pointed eagerly through the glass counter at chewing gum and a small bar of chocolate. The checkout girl teased him, reaching over to tap his tummy. Millimeters before contact he snatched her hand—savored her startled shudder for a split second—only to squeeze it gently with affection. She nodded and they kissed each other on the cheek good-bye.

  “You see?” Lesvanne reached into his own back pocket and held a fistful of his own plastic bags. “A two-time Olympic boxing champion like Héctor is just like any other Cuban who wants to go grocery shopping. He could have left and made millions anywhere else on earth, but here he has to wait in line and bring his own bags. We all carry those bags because none of our stores have them.”

  “That’s Héctor Vinent?”

  “Claro qué sí. Maybe a little heavier than his fighting days, but that’s Héctor Vinent Charón. Watch—¡HÉCTOR! ¡CAMPEÓN! ¡OYE!”

  Héctor looked out the window at us without smiling and reflexively held up a fist and winked.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” I gasped. “It is him.”

  “He doesn’t live any better than someone selling peanuts in the street.”

  As I looked on I couldn’t help trying to imagine stumbling upon Joe DiMaggio at a supermarket or Jack Nicholson waiting in line to catch the bus. Maybe it was more like unearthing a Cézanne while rummaging through piles of used Ikea prints at a garage sale. This was a human being who represented a deliberately uncashed winning sweepstakes ticket. Like any of the elite Cuban athletes, Héctor Vinent, in the bloom of his career, encompassed the most expensive human cargo left on earth. There were over twenty thousand boxers officially employed by Cuba. If a fraction of them along with the cream of the béisbol crop washed onto American shores tomorrow, they would be worth billions on the marketplace.

  When I first saw him, Héctor was twenty-eight, maybe thirty pounds over his fighting weight, and he was banned from competing for his country for the last four years by the most powerful political forces in Cuba. It happened after two of his teammates defected at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, leaving him to live out the rest of his life as a kind of living double-exposed photograph of the future he gave up in America versus the one awaiting the rest of his life in Cuba. Maybe his headline was a completely different cautionary tale depending on which side of the Florida Straits you told the story on, but staring at him, the fine print was completely illegible to me.

  Héctor shook the hand of the security guard who held the door open and glared at me with a mixture of curiosity and wariness.

  “Héctor?”

  “Campeón,” he grunted, offering his hand. “¿Boxeador?”

  I nodded.

  Héctor turned to Lesvanne, who turned to me. “I’ll ask him if he’ll train you. How much are you willing to pay?”

  “Whatever he thinks is fair.”

  Héctor proposed to train me at Rafael Trejo the following week for six dollars a day, nearly half his monthly wage for training children there. We could train as often as I liked, but there was also a daily surcharge of two dollars for the women who looked after the gym for the state. Palms had to be greased. Lesvanne shrugged and said it all sounded reasonable to him.

  “What’s the going rate for private lessons from two-time Olympic champions where you come from?” asked Lesvanne.

  “¿Está bien?” Héctor asked me.

  “Sí,” I answered. �
��Lesvanne, I don’t know the word but please tell him it’s an honor to meet him and I’m grateful for this.”

  Before Lesvanne could translate, a beautiful girl in a red dress passed behind Héctor, and he caught me following her movements. He laughed and quickly turned to look at her before crying out, “¡Oye! ¡Mi amor! Mi amiga. ¡Yaima!” The girl stopped, recognized Héctor, and they embraced. Héctor introduced Lesvanne and me to Yaima, who delicately leaned in to be kissed on the cheek by each of us. After I kissed her she leaned back and assessed me with a slowly curling smile. Héctor took a step toward Lesvanne and his gruff voice whispered gently into Lesvanne’s ear.

  “He says you look a little lonely and if you’d like to have Yaima visit your apartment tonight or be your girlfriend while you stay in Havana, none of that would be a problem.”

  9

  LA LUCHA

  Don’t try to understand me too quickly.

  —André Gide

  A MONTH GOES BY and the best I can do to explain anything to myself is to admit how many things don’t work here, but they don’t seem to work the other way, either. In Old Havana, the names of the streets before the revolution provided a glimpse into the city’s state of mind. You might have known someone who lived on the corner of Soul and Bitterness, Solitude and Hope, or Light and Avocado. After the revolution, they changed the names and put up new signs, but if you asked directions from a local today you’d get the old names. They all meant something personal to the people who lived on those streets. That avocado grew in the garden of a convent. That hope was for a door in the city wall before it was torn down. That soul refers to the loneliness of the street’s position in the city. Sometimes these streets lead you to dead ends and other times you stumble onto cathedrals, structures built with the intention of creating music from stone. The sore heart Havana offers never makes you choose between the kind of beauty that gives rather than the kind that takes something from you: it does both simultaneously.