The Domino Diaries Read online

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  Past the entrance to Rafael Trejo, the sun blazed down and there were rows and rows of bleachers surrounding a ring, barely covered by a roof. For warm-ups, students raced up and down the bleachers and their footfalls were as loud as a New York express subway train until the coaches whistled them on to the next task. Car tires were set against an iron railing for boys to practice their combinations, snapping their punches. In place of bags, sacks were hung next to the tires. A tractor tire lay in the shade under the far-side bleachers, where an instructor swung a sledgehammer over one shoulder and then the other, plunging the hammer down and showing a kid the proper technique of incorporating the entire body with each swing and the mechanics of the weight transfer involved. The ring was the centerpiece of the gym, its canvas blood- and sweat-stained, with a little neighborhood mud smeared here and there. There was a lucky child who lived next door, on the second floor of his building, who spied with his friends on the action below from his window.

  Héctor walks into Rafael Trejo in jeans and an undersized Cuban national volleyball team shirt that accentuates a growing paunch. I’m shadowboxing in the ring with half a dozen other students, all several years younger than me. Héctor has a book and a folded newspaper in one hand and one of the other coaches quickly hands him a bundled-up shoelace necklace with a whistle hanging off. Héctor lays the book and newspaper over the equipment table and drapes the necklace over his bowed head. It’s a daily ritual with a ghostly nod to the elephant in our roasting, open-air gym. I can’t help but try to imagine how he copes with the two Olympic gold medals that were placed around his neck in Barcelona and Atlanta, this future barely earning enough in a month to afford the cost of a movie ticket as his reward.

  Héctor puts his hands on his waist and watches me expressionlessly.

  “¡Oye, Brinicito! Three more rounds of shadowboxing, then we’ll work.”

  I nod and look back at the ground and throw more combinations in the air, spilling more sweat over my shadow. The old ring creaks and moans under the collective feet finding their rhythm and transferring weight to give force to our blows at imaginary opponents.

  I’ve taken Héctor to dinner a few times after our lessons but he’s not interested in the conversation veering toward defection stories or even boxing, really. He’s more interested in the fact that both of us are the only people at Trejo who bring in novels to read. He loves Hemingway and Don Quixote. He’s desperate for more books the government won’t permit locals to read. He enjoys the work of Gabriel García Márquez so deeply he asks if I could bring him Márquez in English when I come back to the island. He thinks it would be the best way to learn the language. Mostly Héctor just seems grateful to enjoy a full meal without having to worry about the looming fight that in the past he’d have had to make weight for.

  Héctor yells for another kid to imagine squishing a cigarette under his back toe when he throws his right hand. He’s not turning it properly. Where’s your ass in that punch? How do you expect the weight between your shoulders to snap without the full extension of your punch? Where’s your balance? Héctor gestures to steal the cigarette from an onlooker’s mouth and flick it into the ring to help the education along.

  Three more rounds of the art of shadowboxing for me, a lifetime of battling against their shadow selves over in America for Héctor and any other Cuban boxer that remained on the island.

  “Our athletes are and always will be an example for all” are words painted over a sign hanging in the entrance to Rafael Trejo. The same sign hangs over most boxing gyms across the country, I was told by the Macbeth witches for a tourist dollar. “Men’s sacred values are beyond gold and money,” Fidel once explained. “It’s impossible to understand this, when you live in a world where everything is bought and sold and gotten through gold.” Professional boxing had been banned for thirty-eight years at that time, since 1962, and, in part to vindicate Fidel’s explanation, only a fraction of fighters from then until now had left. This was rarely if ever a story outside reporters gave much credence to, let alone bothered to explore. Tough to find a peg on which to hang that story.

  But as I peeked up from my shadow at Héctor, unfurling his newspaper to read a few paragraphs of the state news, I wondered what was the example Héctor was meant to convey to the next generation of Cuban children by his choices? Or perhaps the better question was, what could be made of the powerful revolutionary figures taking Héctor’s choice away before he ever had a chance to betray their ideals? In Cuba you could be convicted of crimes you were only suspected of committing, all under the Orwellian umbrella term of “dangerousness.” Fidel hogged the credit for any athlete that stayed as proof of the revolution’s triumph, but by the same logic, when boxers defected how much of a referendum was it about why all Cubans might be torn about remaining?

  Héctor hadn’t spoken freely to me much since I’d first met him, but I’d done some homework on him. Héctor Vinent Charón was born in Santiago de Cuba, an eastern province where the bulk of the best boxers are found. Many in that region, like Héctor, come from large families who suffered the worst before the revolution and were some of the biggest beneficiaries of the revolution’s reforms. Massive literacy drives, eradicating obscene rates of death by curable diseases, lowering infant mortality rates below nearly all first-world countries, agrarian land reform, access to education, an emphasis on social justice that made a tangible impact across the country, an end to racial discrimination—a massive overhaul of a whole society conspiring to help the weakest and end widespread corruption and exploitation. The upper crust in Cuba got the shaft and most fled. While the ideals of the revolution resonated deeply with almost every Cuban I encountered, the results in so many areas, especially over the last ten years, had driven home just how untenable this regime in power truly was. But the United States and the embargo had rarely missed an opportunity to antagonize matters and essentially let the government off the hook in the eyes of many. Fidel’s bogeyman was just as stubborn as he was.

  Then again, Héctor was almost thirty and already the father of five children he was clearly struggling to support. He was only eight when the Mariel boatlift took place in 1980, during which ten thousand Cubans attempted to gain asylum at a Peruvian embassy. An exodus of 125,000 Cubans fled the country. “Fidel has just flushed his toilet on us,” Maurice Ferré, the Miami mayor at that time, famously remarked. Héctor had won his first Olympic medal in 1992, just as Cuba entered its Special Period, after the collapse of the Soviet Union ended the Soviets’ massive subsidies to the island. “We’re in a Special Period,” Fidel spoke before a crowd at that time. “Why? Because we’re alone confronting an empire.… Only a weak, cowardly people surrenders and goes back to slavery.”

  Héctor won his second medal in Atlanta, as the Special Period’s hardships reached their peak with widespread blackouts, fuel shortages, and starvation. The choice to remain for any Cuban, let alone an elite athlete, had never been more difficult. And Héctor was part of a continuum of Fidel’s champions, meant to reject any offer to leave and be a proxy for Fidel and the revolution’s values, displaying they were still strong enough to dominate those of Americans stepping into the ring and challenge America itself.

  Héctor was a chubby young boy when he began training as a boxer, stepping into a broken-down gym called Los Songos to throw his first punches. It didn’t take him long to get noticed and selected for entry into La Finca, the special elite school in Havana for boxers. The Cuban sports machine might have been the most effective apparatus on earth for uncovering and developing athletic talent and Héctor was exactly the kind of world-class athlete they were looking for. Héctor’s talent was never inconspicuous. Barely into his teens, he left his family behind in Santiago and took the train across the country, and before long he became a national champion. He won the nationals six times in all. He won a junior world championship in Lima at age eighteen. By twenty, when the Barcelona Olympics rolled around, he cruised to a gold med
al with a combined score of 85 points to his opponent’s 11. The Cubans trounced the Americans at the Olympics that year, winning seven gold medals to the United States’ one. Héctor had also proven, pound-for-pound, he was one of the greatest living fighters in the world. What made him even more enticing to foreign promoters was his professional style: he was a tenacious, brutal puncher who savored finishing off opponents and electrifying crowds.

  I’d heard one of his eyes was damaged from a detached retina after the accumulation of punishment he endured over his hundreds of amateur fights and sparring. He’d given some interviews to foreign journalists using the injury as the reason his boxing career was finished. But in truth, after the 1996 Olympics, when his teammates Ramón Garbey and his best friend Joel Casamayor defected—Casamayor being the first Olympic champion ever to do so—Héctor took the brunt of the consequences back home for their actions. Héctor’s fate was sealed when he was only twenty-four years old.

  “¡Oye!” Héctor hollered and blew his whistle. “Come outside the ring. Today we spar a little.”

  “With whom?” I asked, climbing out of the ring.

  “Me.” Héctor grinned and offered two thumbs he happily tugged back at himself. He put his arm over my shoulder and let loose a deep, growly laugh. “The Olympic Games are in Sydney soon. Maybe they’ll let me make a comeback. I need some sparring just in case.”

  “Who is the best boxer Cuba is sending to Sydney?” I asked.

  “Guillermo Rigondeaux,” Héctor answered immediately. “El mejor.”

  “No question?”

  “Por favor. Nobody close. He’s magnificent. But what a sad face he has! We both came from Santiago de Cuba. He came from a coffee plantation. He is only 118 pounds, but we’ve never seen anything like him. Most people like the big guys, but they are very limited in terms of skill. To be small you must have everything. Rigondeaux might be the most beautiful boxer I’ve ever seen. He is a little Stradivarius of a boxer. I’m friends with Félix Savón, the captain of the national team. A very simple but good man.” (A running joke in the gym and across the island was Savón’s Yogi Berra–like quote, “Technique is technique because without technique there’s no technique.”) “Savón has told me he will hand over his captaincy to Guillermo after these games. Only one gold medalist has defected, never someone that high profile. Who knows, Rigondeaux will turn twenty the day he wins his gold medal. He could easily be the first man in history to win four. Certain things in my country make his choices different than when I was twenty and won my first medal.”

  “The offers followed you everywhere you fought?”

  “Everywhere.” He laughed. “Suitcases of money popped open from ringside. Crumpled-up paper thrown into the ring with dollar figures just to talk. Just to talk more money than I would see in ten years living here.”

  “You like Dickens?” I asked Héctor.

  “Yes, I like him.”

  “Aren’t you Rigondeaux’s ghost of Christmas Past?”

  “A Christmas Carol was not so popular here.” Héctor smiled. “Christmas was banned in Cuba for many years until the Pope visited our island and Fidel reinstated it. He did not reinstate El Duque, and so he escaped to the Yankees.”

  “But not you.”

  “Not me.” Héctor shook his head, and when he looked away I wasn’t sure if he was looking into his past or Rigondeaux’s future.

  10

  THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

  Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called [by] the Masai “Ngàje Ngài,” the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

  —Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro

  IT’S HARD TO WALK in any direction here without bumping into politics. What King Midas was to gold, Fidel might be even more to politics. Sports took you there. Hemingway did, too. Like his metaphorical leopard, I’d wondered for a long time what America’s most famous writer was seeking from Cuba for the last twenty years of his life. How could someone like him support Fidel? I’d heard the captain of his beloved Pilar had even gained his permission to carry explosives for the revolutionaries. How could America give Hemingway such a pass for this?

  Hemingway and Castro only met once, in 1960. Very few photographs of the meeting exist and the one movie camera filming their union lasts about as long as the Zapruder film. They met right after Fidel entered—and won—Hemingway’s annual fishing tournament. Fidel was asked why he was so eager to meet Hemingway and casually explained that he’d always envied his adventures. Hemingway had lived in Cuba for twenty years leading up to and during the revolution. While Tolstoy had, in Hemingway’s terminology, “gotten in the ring” with Napoleon, Hemingway—after taking on World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II, with the Cuban revolution taking place in his own backyard—never went near Castro or what he was up against in print. To me, that was a far more compelling mystery than whatever that leopard was sniffing around for.

  After training one day, I took the long way home along the sea, turning off the Prado promenade, with the Morro fortress and the lighthouse behind me. While I was training with Héctor, one of his students tapped me on the shoulder and warned me about not missing him fighting on HBO when I got home. “You’ll see.” His eyes sparkled. “Don’t be surprised when you see me.” Of course this was a kid who had zero access to HBO or any other American television that wasn’t pirated and sold on the street. If he had been growing up in the 1990s he could have been thrown in jail for having so much as an American dollar on him.

  It gnawed at me as a fisherman along the Malecón waved hello. An old fisherman with a mustache cast a hunk of bread just over the crest of the last wave that broke against the wall. A fish bit quickly and he reeled it in and removed his shoe in order to clunk the fish on the head and drop it wriggling into the pail nestled between his ankles. He rigged another hook and relit his peso “torpedo” cigar. Beyond the fisherman’s line were some cruise ships headed for the harbor. Beyond them were warships. The fisherman wasn’t paying attention to either. He stared at his line while the death rattle of the fish in the bucket petered out.

  The day before, the staff had let me inside the Finca Vigía, Hemingway’s house on a hill in the nearby town of San Francisco de Paula, about seven miles away from Havana. Five minutes outside of Havana by car and you’re in a different world all over again. Modern technology assumes an even lower profile. I’d gone alone. A gypsy cab agreed to drive me there and back for five tourist dollars. Letting me inside the home was against the rules—too much to steal and no security cameras—but the staff made an exception after grilling me on some trivia. I was a terrible student who flunked nearly every subject in school, but I’d skipped a lot of classes and spent hundreds of hours in the library reading everything I could get my hands on about Hemingway’s work and life.

  After the revolution they’d converted Hemingway’s home into the Hemingway Museum. Bullfighting posters, animal heads, horns, and antlers were everywhere, but far and away the most dominant feature was the personal library of 8,000 books along with his typewriter. The contents of the bookshelves represented one of the most profound displays of curiosity I’d ever encountered. I saw piles of first editions: Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Mailer, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Wolfe—even The Catcher in the Rye. I wanted very badly to steal that book. During World War II, not long after the liberation, J. D. Salinger had met Hemingway in Paris. It was a meeting that changed Salinger’s life. Salinger had continued to write to Hemingway after the war. Hemingway knew who Holden Caulfield was long before the world did. However interested the world was in Hemingway, his library demonstrated he was even more interested in the world. The great seducers are always suckers. And what I loved about his home was feeling that Hemingway was the biggest sucker who ever lived; the world had never seduced someone
so completely. And that mutual seduction put such smiles on the visitors I saw that day.

  Everything in the house was left untouched since he’d died. There was alcohol still inside a handful of bottles in the living room lying beside a vast pile of magazines and newspapers he subscribed to. You were surrounded by his passion for bullfighting and the hunt in paintings and trophies hung all around the house. The bathroom had his chicken-scratch handwriting on the wall showing his battle with his weight and high blood pressure over the years. Beside the pool visiting Hollywood starlets like Ava Gardner swam naked in, there was an understated cemetery for his beloved cats and dogs.

  Every step I took on his property felt as if he could come back through the door at any moment. It was a little eerie combing so much of a man’s life left pristinely as he’d chosen to live it in his adoptive home. Havana’s marina had been named after him. Why not? He’d donated the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer to the Cuban people. His Pulitzer had been stolen from the shrine where it was kept near Santiago de Cuba. The staff guarding the house told me that it was eventually returned. Back in Havana, the room where he started writing For Whom the Bell Tolls at the Ambos Mundos was roped off. There were old women guarding it who had met him as teenagers. Apparently he wasn’t stingy with compliments for pretty girls and they still blushed remembering them.

  I’d admired Hemingway’s work for a long time, but his effect on so many of the Cubans I spoke with in his adoptive country added a great deal to my appreciation of the man. Cubans by and large are a tremendously respectful people, but they aren’t easy to impress. Héctor had shrugged once after mentioning he’d fought around the world for crowds but never felt (not heard) anyone respond like his own people. “Everybody deserves to have Havana as a hometown,” I heard again and again.