The Domino Diaries (32 page)

“After we film this and the interview.” Cristian tapped my shoulder again. “See how you feel.”

Ana Mar
í
a tossed back another sip from the bottle of Havana Club and shook her head.

“How big is your apartment in New York?” Cristian asked me.

“The size of a closet.”

“I would like to fight in Madison Square Garden one day. Cuba is changing.”

Cristian changed into his gym clothes and his coach wrapped his hands, encircling his wrists and threading between his knuckles. As he stretched out his arms and legs and looked out over the rooftops toward the Capitolio, I saw bits of Stevenson, Sav
ó
n, Vinent, and Rigondeaux in his pride and casual elegance. They'd all been in his place once. Cristian turned around and located his shadow and began throwing combinations in the air.

When several of Cuba's finest boxers had left the island, Yosvanni had asked Cristian and all his pupils the question he had been forced by the government to ask: “Would any of you betray your coaches and comrades?”

“NO!” the children cried in unison.

“So you're not traitors?” Yosvanni asked with emotion in his voice. “You're
not
going to betray the fatherland or your team?”

All the children before him shook their heads vehemently.

Now Yosvanni approached me as we watched his star.

“How are things going for Cristian?” I asked him.

“He's extraordinarily special. But politics are getting the better of him.”

“Why?”

“Because of the film there are many jealousies. There are many jealousies with teammates and with coaches. They assume that we were paid for our participation in that film.”

“Were you paid?”

“No,” Yosvanni stated flatly. “But the
perception
remains. And he's being punished for it. He's not where he should be in terms of his talent and ability. His performance is flawless, but that doesn't mean he'll be given the opportunities he deserves here. I see this with so many of the great boxers—the safest place on earth for them is inside the ring. I love this boy as much as my own children.”

Ana Mar
í
a filmed Cristian skipping rope and working relentlessly with his coach, round after round, for thirty minutes under the sun, hardly breaking a sweat. I sat on the edge of the roof and watched them together, imagining where both would be a few years on. I went back inside the apartment and brought everyone a pitcher of ice water and we retreated to my living room, where I set up a couple chairs for Yosvanni and Cristian in preparation for the interview.

“Cristian is the first boxer I've spoken to who has his career in front of him.” I sighed. “If Cristian has any questions for me about where Rigondeaux's career and life have gone in Miami, I'll tell you whatever I can about what I've learned. I think it's important. People internationally are already looking at you. The people who were interested in Guillermo are interested in you and I'm worried about you for that reason. If your life changes and things get more difficult, this is a very tempting reality.”

Cristian said nothing, only glared vaguely in my direction.

“When I saw you in the film, one of things that stuck out for me and many other people was the way you responded to the boxers who left—”

This brought Cristian to life. “Everyone is entitled to their opinions and to do with their life as they please. It was their careers and their own choices.”

“You didn't feel that way as a boy in the film,” I said.

“I was a kid back then.”

“So why the change?”

Cristian smiled and brought his elbow up onto the armrest of the chair and rested his chin on the palm of his hand. He gazed up at the ceiling fan.

“I can speak to you about that,” Yosvanni interjected. “It's not the same for a boxer or anyone else to receive for an interview a bit of money to resolve a problem you have at home. But at the same time, staying with your family—that is
very
different from receiving money and immigrating to another country where you are going to be away from your family. Your friends and the people are not going to love you the same way. Because after your glory days in that place are over, you won't be looked up to as Te
ó
filo Stevenson or F
é
lix Sav
ó
n are here. There is no higher gift than kids wanting to become what you are.”

Cristian turned to his coach and they looked at one another in silence. Suddenly Yosvanni reached over and put his arm around Cristian: “Here is the
next
Te
ó
filo Stevenson or Sav
ó
n.”

And in my mind I went thousands of miles away to Rigondeaux defending his decision to turn down becoming the next Stevenson or Sav
ó
n. “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.” Rigondeaux, too, had shrugged, flashing his gold grill. “I don't think for them, they shouldn't think for me. Those guys are history. Their time is long gone. Those guys had a chance, they didn't take it, and they got screwed.” He laughed. “Those opportunities don't repeat themselves. They laid that opportunity on the table and I took advantage of it and now I'm here in Miami. If not, I would still be there in Cuba, just like they are, struggling. I would be in Cuba living off of photos and memories. Telling people what I did, that's all you are left with.”

H
é
ctor Vinent had made an almost identical confession about what his life was left with, leaving the temptation of America behind.

Cristian cleared his throat and brushed some dirt off his knee. “In every decision I've ever made my mom has been very supportive. And our ambition is for me to be
greater
than both Stevenson and Sav
ó
n.”

“Greater?” I asked.

“Yes.” Cristian laughed. “Things could change and professional boxing could return to Cuba.”

“Fidel has banned professional sports for the last forty-nine years on the island. If professional boxing
doesn't
happen on the island, how does that make you feel?”

Yosvanni turned and stared intently at his pupil just as Cristian shrugged his and maybe all of his generation's answer to what came next.

 

26

HEROES FOR SALE

Te
ó
filo Stevenson deserves the recognition of the Cuban people.… We believe this man set a very valuable example. This young man, the humble son of a humble family … said he would not exchange his people for all the dollars in the world.

—Fidel Castro's tribute, after Stevenson's death on June 11, 2012

T
EÓFILO
S
TEVENSON WAS PERHAPS
the only man on the planet who was not only Muhammad Ali's equal in the ring, but could surpass him in what the poet Federico Garc
í
a Lorca referred to as
duende
, that ephemeral quality that separates the immortals from the rest of us. Stevenson was someone authentic, a man whose pride and principle bowed to no one.

A generation after Stevenson turned down all the millions America was offering, when Orlando “El Duque” Hern
á
ndez would have had to literally work a million years in Cuba to earn the 105 million the Dodgers gave an inferior pitcher, Kevin Brown, El Duque calmly explained to journalist Steve Fainaru: “I know the prettiest word in the world is ‘money.' But I believe that words like ‘loyalty' and ‘patriotism' are very beautiful as well.” Even more telling is that after El Duque helped the Yankees win the World Series only months after his escape, he
still
maintained he never would have left his home had his hand not been forced. According to statistics I've read, during my time traveling to Cuba between 2000 and 2012, just under a million Cubans—941,953—legally traveled abroad, with 12 percent never coming back.

“Cuba's best athletes don't stay there because of love of country,” the Miami-based journalist Dan Le Batard wrote in the February 17, 2014, “Cuba Issue” of
ESPN
The Magazine,
to which I also contributed. “If the government were to collapse, if the rules were to change, those athletes would end up lapping onto our shores like so many waves, families in tow.” Le Batard, born in New Jersey to Cuban parents, then zeroed in on Stevenson's famous words and explained, “This is one of the propaganda machine's greatest quotes, but it is also the largest kind of lie, the one that has to be told when the truth is not allowed. First of all, Stevenson didn't have any understanding of what those dollars meant.”

So who does understand? A man with nothing or a man with everything? Stevenson seemed to encompass both extremes. In May of 2011, when I sat down with Te
ó
filo Stevenson in his modest home in the comfortable Havana neighborhood of N
á
utico, his precarious physical state gave every indication, contrary to Le Batard's estimation, that Fidel's “favorite athlete” bore all the scars of turning down the life he might have lived away from his beloved island. By now Stevenson was a full-blown alcoholic, without enough money to replace a flat tire on his car. Yet while his life remained an open wound, I saw no evidence of regret or deceit as he offered the reasons behind an impossible decision. On the other side of the Florida Straits, it wasn't as if Mike Tyson, having earned nearly half a billion dollars in the ring, was less damaged.

When Stevenson agreed to talk about all the millions he turned down, he asked me for money, about a hundred dollars. I suppose you could choose one of those sums as a symbol to define the man and neatly illuminate who he was and what he stood for. Then again, if you just chose one, I'm more inclined to think your choice illuminates a lot more about who
you
are.

Two years after Stevenson's death on June 11, 2012, I arranged to meet with his daughter, Helmys, on the tiny Mexican island of Isla Mujeres just off the Canc
ú
n coast, where she's lived and worked for over half of her thirty years. Isla Mujeres had just been splashed all over the news, revealed as the place where, in 2012, Yasiel Puig, the latest Cuban defector superstar athlete, and now an outfielder for the Dodgers, had been held hostage at machete point in a dingy hotel room until a ransom for his freedom was paid.

Late one warm night, I picked Helmys Stevenson up at the island's ferry terminal. She was easy to spot in the crowd, as striking in her own way as her father. Aside from her beauty, even without her heels she was a head taller than most of the men around her. I looked at her a few moments before she saw me and waved a hand high above her head like Venus Williams in mid-serve. She was another of these girls Cuba has in abundance, women who seem as if they entered the world peeled off a cigar box, all curves and color.

The last time I had been on her island speaking with her father, after Sof
í
a left, I'd resumed my fling with one of Fidel's granddaughters for one last night. This hadn't led to an especially pleasant departure from Havana's airport. I smiled at Helmys and waved back and took one last deep breath before I crossed the street to meet her.

“There may be no entrapped pool of human talent left on earth with the dollar value of Cuban baseball players.”

—Michael Lewis

“In a no-tell motel on Isla Mujeres, eight miles off the coast of Canc
ú
n, Yasiel Puig's escape had come to a halt,” Jesse Katz's April 13, 2014,
Los Angeles Times Magazine
profile of Puig's escape began. “Confined to a corner room at the end of a shabby horseshoe-shaped courtyard, he could only wait and hope, for his value to be appraised, his freedom to be bought.”

A day later, Katz's account of Puig's pursuit of the American Dream from a smuggler's boat was the biggest sports story in the country, if not the world. Puig had risked everything to abandon a life in Cuba and be marooned in Mexico, a way station of sorts, where he was incarcerated by the difference between the $17 a month he earned in Cuba and the $42 million he would sign for in Los Angeles. Katz, while still in the eye of the media hurricane, wrote me, and described the ensuing days after the article broke as “pretty much the craziest week of my life—thirty-three TV and radio show appearances and counting.” A Hollywood bidding war erupted and a movie deal followed within a week, the myth already shaping reality.

With some clues from Katz, I spent a couple weeks sniffing around Isla Mujeres. I was looking for the motel where Puig was held after he'd swum ashore in darkness against riptides and blindly negotiated razor-sharp coral after being dumped from a smuggler's boat.

“There's a titty bar called the Casablanca, on the western side of the island,” Katz pointed out as a reference. He then explained, “I was trying to speculate where you might take a girl if you happened to be leaving that joint in search of temporary lodging.”

Before the hat is passed around, Isla Mujeres—Island of Women—is only three dreadfully guitar-strummed songs on the tourist ferry from Canc
ú
n's bloated coast. My aunt has had a little hotel there for five years and has been visiting for the last thirty, but I hadn't seen Isla Mujeres' name in print before the Puig story. As she cast a finger over the waters toward the place where Puig most likely arrived, she told me the government plans to build a smuggler's museum on the Caribbean coast of the island. Officials want to showcase all the vessels the Mexican navy has captured from various drug and human traffickers.

She then pointed out the beach where the most recent smuggler's boat arrived and where three people drowned before reaching shore. A handful of refugees were arrested, but the rest scattered and disappeared on the island. A long-abandoned, half-built time-share condominium complex stood watch over the desolate shore. A flapping red flag warned tourists not to enter the water due to deadly currents. A mile away, a dozen cigarette boats were docked next to the heavily guarded Mexican naval base. Soldiers patrolled the nearby tourist beaches armed with M-16s as locals sauntered around the sand peddling jewelry.