The Domino Diaries (21 page)

Like H
é
ctor and many of the other great Cuban boxers, Rigondeaux came from the east, born in Santiago de Cuba on a coffee plantation with eight siblings. He grew up with no running water in his family home, so each day he walked a few miles to load up on water and transport it back to his house. He was born the same year as the Mariel boatlift. When barely in his teens, he was discovered for his potential by the Cuban industrial sports complex and sent to train in Havana at La Finca, the most elite sports academy on the island. The collapse of the Soviet Union and an end to their billion-dollar subsidies sent to Cuba led to the Special Period, during which Rigondeaux spent the remainder of his teens. And now he was Castro's official face of boxing on the island in the turbulent time of Eli
á
n Gonz
á
lez.

Rigondeaux's face, like all the other fighters' faces that night, was obscured by headgear until he claimed victory. But even then, as soon as his coach removed the headgear, he held a photograph of Fidel aloft, which concealed his face. How token was this act of public glorification? Was he truly grateful for what the revolution had provided him, or was he simply looking after his own survival?

I kept waiting for him to turn so I could study his face, look into his eyes, but almost immediately he was whisked out of the ring by his coaches and ushered back to the dressing room. It would take six years, another Olympic gold medal, and one of the most notorious failed defection attempts in Cuban history for me to cross paths with Rigondeaux again.

The following summer, in June of 2001, thousands of miles away from Havana in Belfast during the World Amateur Boxing Championships, Rigondeaux would meet someone eager to support his professional dreams and set him free to claim them. Rigondeaux and several other Cuban boxers had managed to sneak away from their fortified hotel rooms to have a drink at a local Irish pub. An Irishman named Gary Hyde, who owned a few pubs but had never had a drink in his life, remembered the handful of Cuban boxers lined up at the bar “like sitting ducks.” Hyde zeroed in on Rigondeaux and warmly began to exchange words in broken Spanish. Six years later, Hyde promoted a boxing show in Cork, which his friend, Michael “Lord of the Dance” Flatley, attended by his side.

“You're missing a superstar in the making,” Flatley chuckled in Hyde's ear. “Somebody we can all get a feel for, and follow through to big titles.”

“Where you going to get one of those?” Hyde replied.

“Maybe go to one of the poorhouses of the world.”

Rigondeaux's sad face instantly flashed in Hyde's mind. “Why skip Cuba?” Hyde thought to himself.

It was ten years in a Cuban prison for each athlete you so much as
discussed
defection with. And Hyde, like Rigondeaux, had his own wife and kids to potentially never see again. But Hyde crunched the risk versus reward calculus and two weeks later, in March of 2007, he was in Havana and had arranged through contacts at La Finca boxing academy to meet Rigondeaux next to the Esquina Caliente arguing baseball in Parque Central. Rigondeaux knew exactly what the meeting was about without it being told in advance. He simply asked Hyde what he was doing in Cuba. “Writing a book,” Hyde lied.

“On what?” Rigondeaux asked.

“Boxing.”

“
Professional
boxing?”

Not long after that meeting, Rigondeaux signed his name to a contract with Hyde as his manager, written in a language he couldn't read. By then the joke in Havana I was told about Cuban athletes was that they signed more contracts than autographs. Only after many lawsuits filed in Miami after he'd escaped on a smuggler's boat did Rigondeaux understand the importance of his signature on
this
contract. He'd traded in Castro's spider web for another in professional boxing.

After Hyde had signed Rigondeaux, he wandered down to the Malec
ó
n and pondered the logistics of escape. He sorted through every means imaginable: rafts, speedboats, jet skis,
submarines
—anything he could think of. He looked up at the moon. “This was the same moon I look at when I'm looking up in Ireland,” he told me years later. “How can I get from here to there without going through airports, without going through security. All we had to do was get them twelve miles away; once you were twelve miles off the coast of Cuba, you were in international waters. I didn't think about the consequences after that.”

Hyde couldn't identify the ideal escape route so he flew home to Ireland to give it some more thought. But in the meantime he left his signed boxers with cell phones. He also left behind his daughter's debit card, which he promised to replenish regularly once he returned home, and to send over more money hidden inside the pages of printed material via DHL.

Every year I returned to Havana after meeting Rigondeaux that day at Chocolate, so many boxers and ordinary Cubans I'd known disappeared, or were in the desperate process of doing everything they possibly could to flee, that it was impossible to take for granted any casual good-bye anywhere, because it could mean a good-bye forever. Security cameras sprouted up all over the city, tracking millions of footsteps from above street corners, only intensifying the Cuban version of
1984
that always felt rewritten by Charles Dickens. Everywhere you looked people's eyes looked bloodshot from how exhausting this reality made interpersonal dynamics. I saw people laugh themselves to tears or fight themselves back from sadness almost every day. People either had no time to spare to get close to life or they had to pull back so far it was like they'd fallen out of orbit with their regular lives and into some poisonous constellation of dread. Both extremes only highlighted the difference between you and them, all the while with the sinking awareness that, sooner or later, even with the lucky ones, they all had a different train to catch from yours. More than ever before Cuba began to sharpen and snap into focus as some kind of nightmarish Grand Central Station, divided with such cruelty between those with tickets and those condemned and resigned to purgatory for the remainder of their lives.

 

17

CHASING THE AMERICAN DREAM FROM A SMUGGLER'S BOAT

I couldn't bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn't think about nothing else.

—Mark Twain,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

T
HE PERVERSE IRONY
with increasing numbers of Cuban boxers, ballplayers, and ordinary citizens being trafficked off the island was that the same waters had transported their ancestors on slave ships
to
Cuba almost five centuries before, starting around 1520. Slavery continued to flourish in Cuba for the next 366 years, until it was outlawed in 1886.

The transatlantic slave trade tore between ten and fifteen million Africans from their homes and grimly deposited them into indentured servitude in the New World. More than two million more, shackled together in cramped, disease-ridden spaces, died making the horrific seven-week passage. Recent estimates suggest as many as one in ten voyages underwent a slave mutiny. Africans attempted suicide, tried to jump ship, or refused to eat. Slavers were known to remove the teeth of slaves so they could force-feed them. Even before any slaves entered and perished on the boats, perhaps twice as many died being marched hundreds of miles to the awaiting ships or while being held in confinement in dungeon-like conditions. In all, for every hundred slaves that reached the New World, forty perished somewhere along that excruciating journey.

Havana's port used to be home to one of the biggest slave markets on earth. The port was protected by El Morro, which was built by the Spanish in 1589 as a fortress to guard Havana against invasion and raids. A chain was spread out across the waters. In 1762, the British captured El Morro after they landed in Cojimar, attacked from land, and mined through a bastion to seize control. The following year England returned Cuba to Spanish control and La Cabana was built as insurance against further invaders. The lighthouse was added in the mid-nineteenth century.

Importation of slaves was outlawed in the United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century and Spain officially did the same twelve years later in 1820, the same year the American government ruled that bringing African slaves to the United States was an act of piracy, a capital offense. However, the trade hardly slowed down. Seven years after the American ban, twice the amount of slaves arrived in Havana. The number of slaves
doubled
again the following year. Slaves would continue to arrive on Cuban shores, unabated, for the next fifty-six years. By the turn of the eighteenth century, nearly one in four people living in Cuba was a slave. Hundreds of thousands more slaves continued to arrive by the boatload. In 1886, Cuba's population had exploded to nearly a million and a half people. The global demand for sugar and tobacco, and the extraordinary labor force required to produce both, contributed to the ever-growing slave class. By that time three U.S. presidents had offered to buy Cuba from the Spanish, offering a lot more money for the island than they'd offered France in 1803 for Louisiana ($15 million) or the Russians in 1867 for Alaska ($7.2 million). In 1897, President McKinley offered Spain $300 million. No dice.

The following year, in 1898, when war broke out between the United States and Spain after the U.S.S.
Maine
sunk in Havana's harbor, the United States finally had their island. On December 10, 1898, following four months of fighting, Spain and the United States signed the Treaty of Paris. After Spain relinquished control of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico to the United States, Cuba took down the Spanish flag and raised the stars and stripes.

“What's a million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans?” Te
ó
filo Stevenson famously replied to an offer of millions of dollars to leave his island. But since Castro took power in 1959, over a million Cubans
had
left. Castro called anyone who wanted to leave a “worm” or a “traitor,” and most of the Cubans who had escaped looked at anyone who agreed with Stevenson's position as being brainwashed or scared for their lives to voice any dissenting opinion to the party line. What most compounded the ambiguity of this dynamic for me was watching the boxers who defected—mostly black Cubans (although, unlike African Americans, I've never met a Cuban who didn't refer to himself solely as a
Cuban
)—proudly wearing the Cuban flag on their trunks and on their robes in the United States. I could never determine exactly
which
Cuba they believed they were fighting for. It was never clear if they were fighting for the Cuba
before
Fidel or the one they hoped would come after. And what Cuba was that supposed to be?

 

18

TOURIST INFORMATION

As Castro lay on his deathbed, his brother Ra
ú
l was holding his hand. A crowd had gathered outside the window chanting up to their leader, “Fidel! Fidel!”

“What are those people doing outside?” Fidel asked.

“Saying farewell,” Ra
ú
l replied.

“Where are they going?” Fidel asked.

—Cuban joke

I
N THE SUMMER OF
2006
,
not long after Fidel suddenly stepped down from power and handed over the reins to his brother Ra
ú
l, I went back to Havana to see how much had changed. It doesn't take long to hear from the people you meet that Havana is the biggest small town on earth. I'd experienced it from almost the first day with tracking down boxing heroes. Finally Cuban kismet brought it home with the Castros.

The plane began its descent over the last handful of haunted miles dividing Cuba from the United States. Out my window the sunset glazed over the surface of the ocean and glinted off the slits and nicks of wave creases like fresh wounds. Up and down the plane I heard the slap of blinders yanked down over the windows while the rest of us eagerly took in the view. It's this last homestretch that fleshes out the tourists from the locals on flights to the island.

An announcement came over the speakers on the plane that we'd begun our descent into Havana and the bald woman sitting next to me tapped my shoulder.

“Are you okay?”

I shrugged while an advertisement on the screen lauded some company's corporate responsibility and philanthropy:
The future is friendly.

“Do you—,” the woman began, smiling magnanimously and pointing at my heart. “Un-der-
stand
—English?”

I couldn't figure out if her overenunciation implied I might be deaf, a foreigner, or suffering from some severe mental handicap. Maybe she had me pegged for the trifecta.

“I flunked English in ninth grade.”

“I don't mean to sound presumptuous, but I wondered if you'd like to know why the stranger sitting next to you on the plane was returning to Havana.”

“Shoot.”

“I have a
score
to settle with Havana.”

I looked around at some of the other passengers on the plane. Healthy mix of agendas on all the faces.

“I'm guessing you're not alone on that front,” I told her.

“Well, it was exactly one year ago today that I discovered a lump in my breast while I was taking a shower in an Old Havana hotel. I wanted to come back here, to the same hotel, in the same room, for the anniversary as a
fuck you.
…” She seemed to be trying to cling to the anger but losing traction. “I wanted to come back here as a
fuck you
to what I've gone through the last year fighting cancer. Because, well, I may have lost a breast and I may not be able to conceive a child anymore, but guess what?”