The Domino Diaries (24 page)

“Guillermo Rigondeaux,” I said, naming the most recent and highest-profile defection in Cuban boxing history.

“The same boxing promoters interested in him came here.” Sav
ó
n smiled, lifting his fist and poking his index finger toward his carpet.

“The same ones?”

“The same.”

“What did you tell them?”

“My wife answered the door when they arrived.” His wife came over and stopped for a second at the doorway to listen. “My wife told them, ‘F
é
lix is more revolutionary than Fidel.'” As I laughed with him, F
é
lix looked back at his wife, they smiled to each other, and she went back into the kitchen to be with their children.

“
¿Entiende?
” F
é
lix asked coyly, grinning.

“Rigondeaux left this country. What are the reasons that you stayed here and turned down the money?”

“I have many reasons why I'm a Cuban boxer.” Sav
ó
n lifted his chin and pondered them fondly. “The love of my family. My love of the motherland. In Puerto Rico I was offered five million to leave. In Mexico ten million. Even more later—”

“These offers were to fight Mike Tyson?”

“Yes, that was part of it. But none of it mattered to me. They tried other times to convince my wife to speak with me. But I've always said I'm not a millionaire in Cuba, but I have millions of friends that can always lend me a peso or a piece of bread if I need it.
¿Entiende?
”

“How do you feel about Rigondeaux?”

“As time goes by, the younger generation loses values.” Sav
ó
n paused and gathered himself. “They lose the will we had in my time. When Rigondeaux was a boxer here, I was the captain of our team. Due to the confidence I had in him, I left him as a captain of the Cuban national team. He betrayed his principles. I'm sure he had his reasons for doing that. But life's motives for most people nowadays are giving more value to money than honor.”

After another fifteen minutes Sav
ó
n's watch sounded its alarm and our time was up. He shrugged sheepishly and indicated for me to shut off the camera. Once the camera was off he reached over to collect the agreed-upon price for the interview. I paid and Sav
ó
n smiled and spoke the only two words I'd ever heard him speak in English: “Thank
you
.”

When I got back to my apartment I packed up the rest of my belongings along with the footage from the interview and caught the next flight out of Havana.

 

20

WAITING FOR RIGONDEAUX

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

I
N THE SUMMER OF
2007, two-time Olympic champion Guillermo Rigondeaux and his teammate, Erislandy Lara, had been arrested in Brazil after going AWOL from the Cuban team during the Pan Am Games. The defection attempt made international news and quickly became a national soap opera, regularly appearing on Cuban news and in round table discussions. Castro, though largely out of public view since stepping down from power because of his secret illness the year before, spoke out in the state newspaper
Granma
. Castro branded Rigondeaux a “traitor” and “Judas” to the Cuban people. “They have reached a point of no return as members of a Cuban boxing team,” Castro wrote in
Granma
. “An athlete who abandons his team is like a soldier who abandons his fellow troops in the middle of combat.” And then Te
ó
filo Stevenson, despite his legend being built on the foundation of having turned down every offer to leave Cuba, defended Rigondeaux and Lara. “They are not traitors,” Stevenson declared. “They slipped up. People will understand. They've repented. It is a victory that they have returned. Others did not.”

Only a few months later, one afternoon in the autumn of 2007, I was training with H
é
ctor at Trejo when I spotted someone out of the corner of my eye at the gym's entrance.

“
Mi madre,
” H
é
ctor whispered, dropping his hands slowly, looking in the same direction as me. “It's
him
.”

“
Him?
” I asked.

“
S
í
,
” H
é
ctor confirmed, then repeated gravely, “
é
l.
”

When any Cuban refers to “him” in conversation, with little to no information or context provided, it invariably refers to Fidel.

“
Mi madre,
” H
é
ctor groaned again.

“
¿C
ó
mo?
” I asked. “
¿Qui
é
n?
” Who?

H
é
ctor remained frozen. It was one hundred degrees out that afternoon training in the open air of Rafael Trejo. I nudged him, but H
é
ctor wouldn't come to. I looked around us as the silence took hold. All the proud coaches refused to look at the problem straight on, instead glancing sidelong at the entrance to the gym. A profoundly disturbing thing you discover very quickly traveling in Cuba is that the most dangerous person for Cubans isn't the police or even the secret police; it's their neighbor. Anyone can report you for anything “outside” the revolution—even if you haven't done it yet. H
é
ctor himself had been banned from boxing before he'd ever attempted escape.

So what was this?

Was there news that Fidel died or was
é
l
paying a visit?

“It's
him
.” H
é
ctor repeated, this time even more softly, nodding in the direction of the entrance. “This is very dangerous for us.”

“
¿C
ó
mo?
” I asked. “
Who?
”

“
Rigondeaux
. There, hiding in the shadows.”

All I could see was a child near the entrance. Kids came in off the street all the time to watch or hang out at the gym. I hadn't noticed anything special about this one.

“
That's
Rigondeaux? That child?”

“
Claro,
” H
é
ctor grunted. “That child is twenty-seven and perhaps the greatest boxer Cuba has ever produced. Fidel has said he will never fight again. He has nowhere to go. Anyone in sports can no longer be seen talking to him. We could lose our jobs.
You
can talk to him.”

It was as if a Cuban version of Mr. Kurtz had stepped out of his own version of
Heart of Darkness
to haunt our gym. I'd never seen Rigondeaux's face without it being obscured by headgear or a photograph of Fidel he was holding up after winning a tournament. Finally I saw him, only to recognize the saddest face I'd ever seen in Cuba. He stood aloofly in the shadows wearing a Nike ball cap and jeans, with a fake Versace shirt that had the sleeves ripped off.

Without realizing it, I started toward Rigondeaux. As I approached him, in the shade under the bleachers of the entrance to Rafael Trejo, I reached out a hand and introduced myself. He did what he could, under the strained circumstances at the gym, to muster a smile. Up close I noticed his right eye showed damage, slumping slightly from his left. Rigondeaux's attempt at a polite smile betrayed the gold grill over his front teeth for a brief moment as he took another drag of his Popular cigarette.

“So where did you get that gold on your teeth?” I asked him.

Rigondeaux snickered, dropped his head, and smirked, taking a last long drag on his cigarette before flicking it on the ground and stamping it out with his sneaker. For a moment his face assumed the same hopeless expression as Lee Harvey Oswald bemoaning, “I'm just a patsy.” Then it vanished and he sighed. “Oh, you know, I melted down both my gold medals into my mouth.”

I didn't know where to go from that statement.

“I used to fight in this place.…”

*   *   *

I met Rigondeaux that strange day in Rafael Trejo in November of 2007, and for the first time Cuba ceased to be an abstraction—it finally had a face.

Rigondeaux survived in Cuba as best he could—living under house arrest after his failed defection in Brazil during the Pan Am Games the previous summer—until his escape on a smuggler's boat in February of 2009. After his escape, his father back in his hometown of Santiago de Cuba disowned him for betraying Fidel and the revolution. But his mother supported him. According to jokes told around the Trejo, he'd signed more contracts with foreign promoters promising to fight in the United States than he'd ever signed autographs for fans. Maybe he lived off a few foreign money drips secretly sent to him to help support his family and build some trust to take the leap of his life. He'd owe all those people every dime once he took the bait and at least
physically
left Cuba behind.

Rigondeaux and I arrived in America to start new lives at about the same time fifteen months after our first meeting. He was installed in Miami while I'd moved to New York. His journey required abandoning a wife while I'd found one. When I caught up with him in Los Angeles in March of 2010, he looked even more distraught than when I'd first encountered him in Havana. He finally found the stage he wanted. It was hard to imagine how anything in America could be worse than the situation he'd escaped back home. His sixth professional fight was the following week. He was making more money in a fight than he would have made in a lifetime fighting in Cuba.

But that wasn't the issue. His mother had just died back on the island and he was forbidden to attend the funeral. He was told if he set foot back on the island he'd be arrested on sight. Back in Cuba, the eighteen months Fidel had taken boxing away from his life forged an overwhelming bitterness in his heart, but he would describe the voyage on a crowded smuggler's boat to Canc
ú
n—surrounded by thirty other terrified human cargo—as the most traumatic event of his life. The boats capsized, smugglers threw their cargo overboard, people were held hostage at gunpoint until a ransom was paid. I didn't have to pull back all that far to see that a badly wounded canary in the coal mine for Castro's Cuba had emerged on the opposite side of the Florida Straits.

Boxers have a notoriously limited shelf life and Rigondeaux was making up for lost time, of which he had little left to cash in on his talents. Rigondeaux's only path to success was to hurtle toward the American Dream like a runaway ambulance through traffic. I spent the next three years chasing my own version behind the hurtling ambulance of his life.

The first fight of his I witnessed was in Tijuana. His manager wanted publicity and had invited me down there for an interview and offered to let me inside the dressing room and enter the ring with Rigondeaux to soak up the atmosphere. The promise of total access at the ground floor of Rigondeaux's professional career in the States, on the way to a world championship, was the bait. But gangsters had threatened the manager about entering Tijuana, where they had connections to the mafia. They could arrange police planting drugs, hire a hit man, or just have us kidnapped. For as little as fifty dollars, any of the three were at their disposal. So these were the risks and rewards about heading down across the border. Rigondeaux's manager, Gary Hyde, got on a plane after leaving an entire family in tears begging him not to. My wife was too angry about my recklessness and stupidity to muster any tears when we said good-bye.

I was going to turn the offer down when my old trainer Ronnie Wilson found a pretty miraculous way to give me one final push out of my own way. I received a letter several months after I'd published a story about how Ronnie had helped me and others clarify our paths, while succumbing to his own addiction.

Hello Brin,

I'm not at all sure where to begin with this. I am Ronnie Wilson's daughter. He did also have a son, my older brother Dean. Silly as it sounds, I Google my father's name from time to time, looking for stories such as yours … yearning to know more about him. Your article touched my heart. He was such a kindhearted man, who would give the shirt off his back to anyone in need. However, drugs and alcohol are horrible friends to keep. They turned him into an ugly person … he was a totally different person when under the influence. I want you to know his family loved him to death and I personally time and time again tried to help him. I took him to rehabs and attended AA meetings with him, pulled him out of bars and got him home safe to get some sleep and food. I could go on and on. I'm still so saddened by his disease and refusal of any help. My husband and I have even offered him to come live with us on many occasions, but he has always declined.

I have three beautiful children, Ronnie's grandchildren. It's heartbreaking to know they will never get to know the wonderful man he used to be. I was always daddy's girl and still feel that way at age thirty-four. He was my hero and I'll forever wonder what I could have done to save him from this horrible addiction. I appreciate the time you took in describing the kind, selfless, gentle man he once was. Those are memories I cling to and choose to share with my children. If you do have any other memories you might have of my father I'd be extremely grateful if you shared them with me. I have very few articles and photos left of his boxing career. At one point when he began to clean up a bit, he asked me to send him what I had because someone was writing a biography about him. He soon ended up back on skid row in downtown Vancouver, so I don't know what became of it all. I still have a couple of
Ring
magazines and some old black-and-white photos. Thank you for sharing such kind words about my dad.