The Domino Diaries (10 page)

“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 being 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 Jos
é
Mart
í
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
b
é
isbol
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 Sardi
ñ
as 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? H
é
ctor'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 H
é
ctor 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
H
é
ctor Vinent?”

“
Claro qu
é
s
í
.
Maybe a little heavier than his fighting days, but that's H
é
ctor Vinent Char
ó
n. Watch—
¡H
É
CTOR! ¡CAMPE
Ó
N! ¡OYE!
”

H
é
ctor 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 C
é
zanne 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, H
é
ctor 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
b
é
isbol
crop washed onto American shores tomorrow, they would be worth billions on the marketplace.

When I first saw him, H
é
ctor 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.

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

“H
é
ctor?”

“
Campe
ó
n,
” he grunted, offering his hand. “
¿Boxeador?
”

I nodded.

H
é
ctor 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.”

H
é
ctor 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.

“
¿Est
á
bien?
” H
é
ctor asked me.

“
S
í
,
” 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 H
é
ctor, 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 H
é
ctor, and they embraced. H
é
ctor 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. H
é
ctor 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.

—Andr
é
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.

While guidebooks might tell you that time collapsed here, another theory says that in Latin America, all of history coexists at once. Just before the triumph of the revolution, progress took shape in ambitious proposals made by American architects to erect grand skyscrapers all along the Malec
ó
n seawall offering a fine view and convenient access to a newly constructed multicasino island built in the bay. To accommodate the gamblers, vast areas of Old Havana were to be demolished and leveled for parking access. In 1958, Graham Greene wrote, “To live in Havana was to live in a factory that turned out human beauty on a conveyor belt.” Yet this beauty the people of Cuba unquestionably possess walks hand in hand with their pain. Whoever you might encounter in this place lacking the ability to walk or even to stand for whatever reason will inevitably remain convinced they can dance. When Castro was put on trial in 1953 by Batista's government and asked who was intellectually responsible for his first attempt at insurrection, he dropped the name of the poet Jos
é
Mart
í
. From the little I'd learned of it, the revolution's hold on Cubans resembled not so much poetry as the chess term
zugzwang
: you're forced to move, but the only moves you can make will put you in a worse position. Cuba had become an entire population of eleven million people with every iron in the fire doubling as a finger in a dike.

I hitched a ride in a gypsy cab most of the way to the boxing gym with a black Cuban who gave me the dime tour of the greatest potholes in Havana. He was literally serenading the potholes before we could even see them. Out my window there were lineups and police icily keeping their eyes peeled. “
¿
Ú
ltimo?
” someone shouted as they joined the line, followed by another “
¡
Ú
ltimo!
” confirming who was the last person in the line. This was how people found their place in queues all over the city. The driver told me what was clearly an old joke: stop anywhere in Havana for five seconds and you'll start your
own
lineup.

I looked up at clotheslines strung between columns, women in curlers leaning against the railings of their balconies. I saw tourists snapping photos of the architecture of a building where Lesvanne took me to visit a friend. We had coffee while his family complained incessantly about the broken stairwell and leaky roof. Finally the harbor came into view with the waters that in the early twentieth century were banned to fishermen because of all the bodies being thrown from the Morro Castle by government thugs. Trumpet players on the Malec
ó
n blew at sea puddles on the pavement. A policeman checked a man's identification while staring at a cruise ship coming in on the horizon. We drove a little farther and the whole colonial theme park faded in the distance.