The Domino Diaries (12 page)

The grocery store he was supposed to be guarding had dozens of people lined up outside the entrance, peeking through the windows into the glass display cases of chocolate, makeup, gum, toothpaste, soap, suntan lotion, American cigarettes, and other “luxury” items.

It was worse a few blocks down the street at the Adidas store on Calle Neptuno. You'd see kids buying sneakers at American prices—the equivalent of eight months' salary for a Cuban neurosurgeon—acting casual about the transaction. Phony designer T-shirts were available on the
mercado negro
. You could spot the occasional busted-up, discarded tourist cell phone carried like a talisman in the hand of a teenager. Every now and again you'd see useless, tossed-away cell phones carried around in the hands of Cubans as a status symbol, their best attempt at conspicuous consumption.

The designated tourist Lada taxis were waiting across the street in front of the steps at the Capitolio and the drivers were all leaning over the hoods of their cars chatting and smoking with a few of the drivers of horse-drawn carriages. The cabbies were some of the best-connected men in Havana: girls, drugs, whatever you need for your stay. “You don't like the food? Don't you know the best meals are all cooked at secret locations? Would you like to visit the private home that cooked for Steven Spielberg? Come, my friend, let me show you.… Have you tried our cocaine yet? Have you seen how we smoke joints through our nostrils? You need a girl who will treat you right, not like the stuck-up ones you have back home. I have an uncle who has several boxes of Trinidad Cigars stolen from Castro's personal collection for diplomats.
Don't worry, my friend.
”

Nothing alerts me to the fact that I'm out of my depth like preemptive assurances of my safety. All the hustlers worked this area of town day and night looking for tourists to ride. Which was fair, because a hefty cross-section of tourists pretty much only frequented the areas of Havana where they could give young Cuban girls a ride.

Police were everywhere but lots of product—cigars, merchandise, even drugs—was being moved in secret stashes all over town. Everybody had a friend or a relative who could get it for you. Another herd of tourists arrived fresh off a cruise ship or from a bus visiting from Varadero, where locals were no longer able to vacation with their families. The government had forbidden them. I watched them march through Parque Central headed for Calle Obispo and some Hemingway daiquiris at El Floridita, where the first daiquiri was invented and poured.

*   *   *

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.

H
é
ctor 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. H
é
ctor 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. H
é
ctor 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.

H
é
ctor 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 H
é
ctor 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 Garc
í
a M
á
rquez so deeply he asks if I could bring him M
á
rquez in English when I come back to the island. He thinks it would be the best way to learn the language. Mostly H
é
ctor 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.

H
é
ctor 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?
H
é
ctor 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 H
é
ctor 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 H
é
ctor, unfurling his newspaper to read a few paragraphs of the state news, I wondered what was the example H
é
ctor 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 H
é
ctor'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?

H
é
ctor hadn't spoken freely to me much since I'd first met him, but I'd done some homework on him. H
é
ctor Vinent Char
ó
n was born in Santiago de Cuba, an eastern province where the bulk of the best boxers are found. Many in that region, like H
é
ctor, 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, H
é
ctor 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 Ferr
é
, the Miami mayor at that time, famously remarked. H
é
ctor 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.”

H
é
ctor 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 H
é
ctor 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.

H
é
ctor 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 H
é
ctor was exactly the kind of world-class athlete they were looking for. H
é
ctor'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 medal 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. H
é
ctor 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 Ram
ó
n Garbey and his best friend Joel Casamayor defected—Casamayor being the first Olympic champion ever to do so—H
é
ctor took the brunt of the consequences back home for their actions. H
é
ctor's fate was sealed when he was only twenty-four years old.

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

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

“
Me
.” H
é
ctor 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,” H
é
ctor 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 F
é
lix Sav
ó
n, the captain of the national team. A very simple but good man.” (A running joke in the gym and across the island was Sav
ó
n's Yogi Berra–like quote, “Technique is technique because without technique there's no technique.”) “Sav
ó
n 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.”