The Domino Diaries (20 page)

“I always read how primitive things are here relative to everywhere else. You might get around to adopting this glorious invention called ‘small talk' one of these days. You sure know how to go for the kill, don't you?”

“Military service is mandatory here. I'm a good shot with a rifle. My point is just, even with us, it is strange. Do I have the same melody in person as in writing when you read me before? Are both melodies playing for you and you're guessing which is the real me? Do they play nicely together or give you something you didn't expect? Less or more? Maybe you were curious and attracted to me but you aren't now. Maybe it's the other way around. This is a little more complicated than maybe you expected with your question. I don't even know if my melody or my country's deserves to be a happy one to someone like you. Maybe we seem very sad and this gives your own sad feelings some comfort.”

“How would that possibly give me comfort?” I asked.

“Because unlike the
Titanic
our voyage isn't a luxury cruise. And even if it failed there's beauty in some failed journeys. We're sad for reasons many of us remain proud of. And from what I see of many who come from where you do, you can't even put your finger on what makes you sad. That is a sadness none of us understand. It's incomprehensible to not know why you're sad here. That's a strange gift, isn't it?”

We were nearly at the lion statues at the end of the promenade. Cabs were parked on the corner of Calle Neptuno overlooking all the hotels R
í
a was forbidden to enter. Hotel-approved bands were playing Buena Vista Social Club standards on several of the patios while doormen and security stared off. We crossed the street over to Parque Central and R
í
a snickered at the mob of Esquina Caliente raging at one another over the merits of this or that Cuban pitcher's dominance if they had a chance to pitch outside the confines of the island. “
¡Yo discrepo!
” one ancient man cried out. “There are not two opinions unless you are a fool, old man!” “
¡Yo discrepo!
” “
¡Usted est
á
senil!
”

“We should stay here and listen.” R
í
a laughed. “Listen to the formality of these people. This will be much more interesting and informative than the boxing at Kid Chocolate. This is better than the Brazilian
telenovelas
that shut down Havana. Who knew?”

I pried R
í
a free and we walked down the block to Chocolate's entrance, yet while I paid two Cuban pesos for tickets, all I could hear from inside was a barely intelligible speech over a broken-down loudspeaker. As we entered the gymnasium the voice made one final pronouncement overrun with churning feedback that echoed off the walls and suddenly everything fell silent. Inside they had problems with most of the lights and the scene was lit like van Gogh's
The Potato Eaters
, the shadows smeared and lathered all over the room. The packed audience was quietly standing at attention before a lineup of Cuba's pantheon of great revolutionary boxing champions, a murderer's row of legendary fighters. Their heroes were all a little grayer and paunchier than in their primes, all wearing a mishmash of various Cuban jerseys or tracksuits, but the silence had no stuffy formality. The boxers' faces had scars from their battles, though the audience had many scars of their own from daily battles, too. The capitalism grenade the fighters had smothered was the same grenade everyone else received the same shrapnel from. Boxing is the only sport where the score is hidden from the competitors while competition rages on. Life didn't seem all that different a lot of the time, considering the circumstances. But not knowing the score imbues the moment with a horrible tension that's only relieved when one arm is raised in victory and the other is left hanging.

In the silence we all saw the Cuban Olympic team's famously grumpy head coach for the last forty years, Dr. Alcides Sagarra, look down the line of champions and not be able to contain a smile. He clearly couldn't contain the smile while his countrymen in the stands admired his life's work. Sagarra was soon to step down and retire as Cuba's coach, and no small portion of the silence was offered in homage to his contribution and for his fighters' contributions to the revolution's struggle: thirty-two Olympic gold medals and sixty-three World Amateur Championships. No country on earth could touch Cuba's achievements in that realm. And in Castro's symbolic war against the United States, these soldiers to the cause had trounced a country with infinitely more wealth and thirty times the population. Even more, they'd all done it while turning down every offer of riches to leave. My sense witnessing this ceremony was that the silence wasn't just in gratitude for that sacrifice, it was equally an attempt to impart that what they had done on behalf of Cuba wasn't in vain. La Lucha—the struggle—in the ring was irrevocably intertwined with the struggle of all Cubans. There was no way to illuminate anything about the struggle of Cuba's boxers without exploring all Cubans' courage and humanity. I'm still not sure if that silence I witnessed lasted a few seconds, or an hour.

Te
ó
filo Stevenson was the centerpiece of the group, still handsome and effortlessly composed, grinning almost bashfully as he magnetized the auditorium's collective wonder yet again. Nobody could look away. Stevenson's grin made him seem like a Cuban Cool Hand Luke, but this version hadn't just rebelled against every temptation America had offered him and been crushed by way of reprisal, he'd gained some measure of satisfaction. It was as if he knew that it was all the people watching who had given him the strength to stand up to the forces and temptations that had conspired against him throughout his life. He'd spent his life climbing pedestals to accept medals and trophies and accolades, but after all his battles were over, he was on no pedestal. Little separated Stevenson from anyone there and that was by Castro's design, after all. Distilling the interplay between Stevenson and the crowd that night was easiest to understand as an inside joke, which was as impenetrable as Mona Lisa's smile to an outsider. Stevenson looked out and giggled at the smiling faces in the crowd with as much admiration for them as they had for him.

Next to Stevenson stood F
é
lix Sav
ó
n, Cuba's second most famous champion, who had just returned from the recent Olympic Games with his own third Olympic gold medal in tow (which he was wearing), finally achieving what only his idol beside him and L
á
zl
ó
Papp of Hungary had. Just before his thirty-third birthday, Sav
ó
n's final fight representing his country at the Sydney games had been a brutal, bloody affair. But what had caught my eye more than anything about his final match was what happened when the final bell sounded. Sav
ó
n's historic career was over, having spanned fourteen years of unparalleled dominance on the international stage, and he paced back to his corner with blood dripping from one eye like a teardrop. Instead of looking for any validation from the crowd for his achievement, he instead looked out to spot the Cuban flags in the audience and hollered out through his mouth guard, “
¡Gracias, Cuba!
” He radiated gratitude. Back home in Havana standing in that lineup, Sav
ó
n, a six-foot-six hulking heavyweight with one of the most lethal right hands in the history of the sport, wore the expression of a little boy who'd just learned how to ride a bike for the first time standing next to Stevenson, his hero, and being counted with him. Nobody in the room looked more adoringly at Stevenson than Sav
ó
n, even though, after all these years as his successor, despite all his bravery, he still only managed to shyly peek.

And down the row the next face I recognized straight away was my trainer, H
é
ctor Vinent. Of all the heroic boxers standing in that line of champions, Vinent was the only one who seemed uneasy and double-parked in his role. His best friend, Joel Casamayor, only four years before, had become the first Cuban Olympic gold medalist to defect during the Atlanta games. Casamayor had left after being rewarded for his first gold medal with nothing more than a Chinese bicycle. For him it was the final straw. Vinent was the superior boxer with the far more marketable puncher's style. Far more money was on the table for him to accept his friend's pleadings to defect along with him, and he'd not only turned them down but urged Casamayor to remain in Cuba. Despite this fact, the state had punished Vinent, at the age of twenty-four, in his absolute prime, with never being able to pursue the craft he'd mastered on the island. Every fighter in that line, save Vinent, represented Cuba's past. Vinent was the only one there who pointed both to Cuba's troubled present and uncertain future.

Vinent spotted R
í
a and me and nodded just as the crowd roared an end to the ceremony and ushered in that night's fights with the clang of a wrench against a rusty fire extinguisher.

Vinent walked over to us and offered his hand for me to shake hello, and kissed R
í
a's cheek.

“So did you bring me back any books?” H
é
ctor laughed. “You can both sit with me and the Havana team and their coaches. After we can get dinner in Barrio Chino and talk.”

“Who is the best boxer right now?”

“
La mejor?
” Hector smiled. “Guillermo Rigondeaux. I have never seen anyone with his ability in my life. Sav
ó
n gave him the captaincy after the Olympic Games. Fidel gave him a house near the airport. It's more than he gave me for both my medals,” he said.

R
í
a shook her head and laughed.

“What's so funny?” H
é
ctor asked her.

“Maybe it's not so funny.” R
í
a shrugged. “I was just thinking about the next great athlete in the crowd who is just a little boy, watching all of you with his dad. What's going through that boy's mind staring at all of you?”

H
é
ctor laughed. “It's not going to be easy convincing this generation to follow our path. Time will tell.”

 

16

ROSETTA STONES

But if that flower with base infection meet,

The basest weed outbraves his dignity:

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;

Lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds.

—William Shakespeare, Sonnet 94

S
OMETIMES IT TAKES STARING
for a while to really know what you've been looking at. It took a long time to understand that night at Chocolate and bring the blur into focus. After the fights I went with R
í
a and H
é
ctor out to dinner at a restaurant in Barrio Chino. H
é
ctor was always in a good mood going out to eat. I finally got around to asking him the question I'd wanted to ask since I first met him.

“What was the temptation like for you with so many people outside Cuba willing to pay so much to have you fight for them?”

H
é
ctor turned to Ría and winked.

“We've drifted away from sports and jumped into politics.” H
é
ctor smiled, refilling his glass from a can of Hatuey beer. “But I'll answer your question. The U.S. is like a beautiful girl who is in love with you, but you don't like her. You have to ignore her. You have to resist and lament and live the rest of your life based on memories.”

Boxers entered the ring in defense of their families, their neighborhoods, their society, and then—and only then—their own self-respect. Most stayed, but soon some left. The first defection took place five years after Fidel's ban, when Enrico Blanco, at fifteen, won a gold medal at the Pan American games in Canada. Shortly after his match he snuck off and vanished. In 1993, a year after H
é
ctor won his first Olympic gold medal in Barcelona, Giorbis Barthelemy swam eleven miles to Guant
á
namo Bay's naval base. He failed to reach Gitmo and was captured and jailed on his first attempt. After he was freed from prison he made another attempt and succeeded. The following year, in 1994, five more Cuban boxers defected. Eliseo and Elieser Castillo, two brothers, watched in horror as sharks attacked their raft while they drifted for days. Diosbelys Hurtado defected during a layover in Miami. Alexis Barcelay wandered across a minefield to get to Guant
á
namo Bay. Mario Iribarren snuck off from a competition in Denmark. Two years after that, H
é
ctor's best friend and Olympic champion, Joel Casamayor, and an amateur light heavyweight champion named Ram
ó
n Garbey abandoned Cuba. As times got more desperate, the floodgates were opening. Cuba's heroes transformed into traitors overnight and Fidel removed any trace of their legacy he could find. As much as the state could muster, they ceased to exist in their homeland.

That night in Havana at Kid Chocolate, with H
é
ctor and R
í
a beside me, was the first time I'd seen Guillermo Rigondeaux, Cuba's next great champion, fight before his home crowd. It was obvious Rigondeaux had accepted the baton as Te
ó
filo Stevenson and F
é
lix Sav
ó
n's successor in Fidel's continuum of symbolic weapons against the United States. What
wasn't
so obvious was what he was going to do with it. H
é
ctor hadn't exaggerated his abilities. Rigondeaux wasn't only calibrated like a five-foot-five, 118-pound Stradivarius of a fighter, he was even more impressive as an artist. He inflicted violence with balletic grace, flawless balance and timing, and an almost mournful disdain for his opponent as he fluttered across the ring barely landing on his toes while lashing lethal blows, which struck and evaporated from view as quickly as he unleashed them. He'd been a prodigy since he was a boy and now, at only twenty, this strange gargoyle-faced Cuban was Mozart with a pair of gloves. But was that going to be enough for him to resist the temptation of defecting? Castro had given him a house; for the next medal he might get a decent car. Small potatoes compared to what he could get elsewhere, but there were other factors to consider, like how much money or fame was worth losing your family forever.