The Domino Diaries (27 page)

Last, if at all possible, I wanted to interview Rigondeaux's wife and children: the collateral damage. Even knocking on their front door represented crossing a Rubicon. Or
worse
. An American, Alan Gross, had just been imprisoned for illegally working as a covert U.S. operative supplying satellite equipment to people on the island.

After we drove to meet Sof
í
a's grandparents near Playa del Este and unloaded all the supplies we'd brought, I went over to the Habana Libre to check on the status of the people I wanted to meet and discovered nearly all of them were spooked about the risks and asked that I make no effort to contact them again. At the other hotels around Havana where I'd arranged to discuss the possibility of other interviews, I was stood up by every contact I'd had lined up through journalists in New York. Cars began to drive past with strangers smirking and pointing up at the cameras hanging over the streets, heightening my paranoia. My desperation still had a step on my fear, but it was pretty evident that things were falling apart.

“Beeeg brother eez watching, gringo,” I was warned by the people renting me the apartment in Centro Habana, where Sof
í
a and I were staying. “Welcome to Hotel California! Leezon to Mr. Henley's words. ‘Check owwd aanee time bhat joo can never leave.…”

Any
country takes on a sinister hue once Don Henley's lyrics begin to carry any significance.

I made more calls around Havana to sort out something—
anything
—and salvage the two months I had already committed to being there. I'd borrowed a lot of money and maxed out every credit card and line of credit I had, and the only way out of bankruptcy was getting a story.

My attitude at that point was that my debts were an asset, because anybody else chasing after this story with a budget would steer clear. Bad cards or not, I was all in. Pretty soon the warnings I received from the people who were renting me the apartment escalated to begging on the lives of their children that I cease anything that could get their families in trouble. Everyone was petrified to talk about anything related to Rigondeaux or other defected fighters. “You're on your own,” I was told repeatedly.

I heard the same things over and over:
Security knows everything. Taps the phone. Checks your e-mails. Talks to your neighbor. When your boxer tried to defect, Castro wrote about Rigondeaux himself. This is not a man to ask questions about. Officially he is a traitor.
Surveillance had escalated since Castro had stepped down from power. Cameras were on most of the street corners now across the entire city. More uniformed police. More secret police. The CDR on every block had stepped up their vigilance. More informants. The government was clamping down on everything, especially an issue as touchy as defecting athletes.
Leave this situation alone. You can leave. We cannot. We live with the consequences of your actions. If you are not careful you will not leave or ever be able to come back.

After I went back to Playa del Este to pick Sof
í
a up, the time with her grandparents had left her sealed off. They were two sweet people who lived in a small apartment after they'd traded in their house in Havana for two apartments in this suburb. Relatives lived in their other place. Sof
í
a's grandfather had been a wealthy man who managed three sugar refineries that were all seized by the rebels. A couple of strokes had left his speech very limited, but he was open to talking about the circumstances of the complete overhaul that his life and country underwent during that time. He acknowledged the many struggles and missteps of the government's maneuvers.

When he touched on the impact of the U.S. blockade he was nuanced and explored it from several sides. The Cuban American vote in Florida had largely been responsible for the results of both of George W. Bush's elections, while Castro had a scapegoat for his own blunders, he said. He had no bitterness about losing his own station in life prerevolution in exchange for the improvements he saw for so many others from how life had been pre-Castro. “Do you really imagine the Cuban people would hand over the wheel of our country and abandon our whole socioeconomic system to a pack of bearded kids if all the greed, corruption, and unspeakable cruelty hadn't made life in this country a living hell for millions of our citizens? Castro was created by those conditions. The new generation never saw what was before. Those who did are dying off.”

After we left and headed back to Havana, Sof
í
a was very quiet in the car. She stared out the window at the sea and finally shook her head. “After they're gone I'll never come back here. I hate returning to Havana more each time. It only reminds me I don't belong here any more than I do where I live now. All of my beautiful memories just rot away while I'm in Toronto, but here the stench makes me sick. I'll never ever come back after they die.”

This was the backdrop of our trial-run honeymoon from hell.

*   *   *

While the rest of the world's attention had turned to the struggle against dictators in Syria, Egypt, and Libya, Sof
í
a and I landed in Havana just as the celebrations on behalf of the fiftieth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs failed invasion were picking up steam. As a tidal wave of antigovernment protests swept the Middle East, Havana was caught in some kind of bizarro Fourth of July, collectively celebrating their greatest victory against imperialism and their maximum leader outliving ten U.S. presidents and counting.

I brought a camera along and we marched with the masses. It was a weird and convoluted mix of the deadweight of so many other things Cubans had endured along with that half-century's opposition to the United States. But along with all the mandated hypocritical bullshit summed up on billboards proclaiming it was all
¡VAMOS BIEN!
, thousands more people were lost in their pride like kites blown out of their souls scratching the sky. It was like being on the field for the Super Bowl with a hundred thousand players from one team. In between the little flags, blown whistles, and chants, I saw faces bracing all around me, struggling against an unknown future and turbulent past to create a spectrum of emotions that spanned from panic to exhaustion. The surreal spectacle was held in the Plaza de la Revoluci
ó
n with Russian MiG fighter jets straight out of
Top Gun
soaring through the clouds and scaring the hell out of a flock of vultures circling over our heads. Hundreds of thousands of
habaneros
took buses, hitchhiked, biked, or simply walked out their front doors and struck out across the city on foot to join the crowd in the square.

Once we got near the Plaza, thousands of immaculate, olive-uniformed and white-gloved soldiers marched in formation, row after row, with rocket-propelled grenade launchers slung over their shoulders. Behind them dozens of military trucks with forty red-tipped rocket payloads drove next to other bulky vehicles rumbling by, with .50 caliber cannons and gleaming tanks bringing up the rear. The huge building-high stencils of Che and the newly built Camilo Cienfuegos stared down over another procession of soldiers following the last pack, with automatic Russian guns held against their chests. Framing the festivities were hundreds of silhouetted citizens on the roofs of the various ministry buildings enclosing the square, waving diaphanous Cuban flags against the sky. Then the navy marched into view with their rounded hats and bayonet-tipped rifles pointed up at the sky. Far off, we could see Ra
ú
l Castro waving a beach hat in front of the Jos
é
Mart
í
monument surrounded by other government heads. Fidel's name was chanted and posters featuring his face at various ages were held aloft. Some Cuban troops fired a cannon while the fighter jets made another pass over the throngs.

As we got closer to the crowds, Sof
í
a and I were jammed in against everybody like a packed snowball. We saw a procession of schoolchildren in their colorful uniforms wave their scarves over their heads as a replica of the
Granma
, the leaky boat that brought eighty-two revolutionaries to the island, was pulled on a float behind them. The kids, as usual, caught my attention because innocence in Cuba does not resemble the Disneyfied kind that I was accustomed to back home. Cuban childhood has its own intricate character and coding. Fidel was welcomed by the children as a kind of cute grandfather figure compared with the hyperpaternalistic view their parents always seemed to have of him, whether they loved or hated him.

As we slowly churned toward the bottleneck of the main procession, with hundreds of home-painted placards held high—
¡
VICTORIA O MUERTE!
and
¡
SOCIALISMO
!
and
¡
VIVA FIDEL
!
and
¡
VAMOS BIEN
!
—next to Camilo's smiling face, Sof
í
a leaned over to me in the crush of the parade. She had been seething through all of this.

“Why did we come here, Brinicito? This is fucking excruciating. They're just doing this to pretend that if Cuba can stand up to the United States it can deal with how much worse life is about to get after Ra
ú
l lays off a million government workers. Everybody's only here because 80 percent of them work for the government! They
have
to come here. It's the same old bullshit, scapegoating the U.S. for all our problems. It makes me sick to my stomach. Over fifty fucking years to turn one page from this same comic book they offer us. Let's get out of here. I've had enough of
all of this
to last a lifetime. Please, I can't be here anymore.”

*   *   *

After Ra
ú
l waved his hat over us from a platform surrounded by his entourage of stooped yet supremely powerful political old men, Sof
í
a yanked me out of the parade and dragged me down a nearby side street where someone just turned a pickup truck's engine. Another person waved us over to the bed of the truck and we climbed in and sat alongside a dozen Cubans eager to get back home after perfunctorily paying their dues at the
great celebration
.

After being rebuked for trying to console her, I sat holding Sof
í
a's hand while everyone in the back of the truck took turns bemoaning their flawed country with as many jokes as earnest complaints. Despite looking furious for the same reasons as everyone else in the truck, I noticed that Sof
í
a didn't bother to chime in or participate in the grousing. Nursing her own grudge brought on an agitation in her that was so overwhelming none of the people around us even tried to cheer her up with a joke. As much as was possible crammed into the bed of the truck, the others stayed clear. Instead they looked at me apologetically while Sof
í
a closed her eyes and breathed heavily as the wind played with her hair. Without her having to say a word, they knew she'd endured what they had, but they also mysteriously determined she wasn't staying long.

We drove back into town down a long, hilly street with the sidewalks mostly empty. I was trying to think of a place we could go to cheer Sof
í
a up. Havana was all but abandoned, even more of a city of ruins than usual for the next few hours. We'd have the Hotel Nacional to ourselves for a drink or the Museo del Chocolate without the forty-five-minute wait to get in next to an open sewer or Coppelia for an ice cream. Maybe hitchhike out to Playa del Este on a deserted section of beach, with the tropical water and sand so bright it was almost neon. But one look at Sof
í
a's sullen face and it was obvious that I was to leave her alone for the rest of the drive in.

Like most of the Cubans on the flight over, Sof
í
a had brought a huge amount of supplies to deliver to her grandparents and extended family: medicine, a walker for her grandfather who'd just suffered a stroke, vitamins, toothpaste, foot cream, tampons, an mp3 player, soap, and a slew of other basic necessities well beyond the reach of average citizens. Sof
í
a had been hassled by customs officials, being forced to explain and then defend each item, as with many other Cubans returning home to help their families. It was clear that she'd been through the routine so many times already that the only emotion she had left was disgust. She told me after we got in the cab outside Jos
é
Mart
í
Airport that once her family had raised enough money to survive in Canada, all their resources went toward sending Sof
í
a back to the island to deliver what they could provide back home to family members buried by increasing needs as things continued to deteriorate in Cuban daily life.

From the beginning, unlike most Cubans I'd met who had defected or found other means of leaving, for Sof
í
a nostalgia for anything relating to
home
repulsed her. Her sentimentality was reserved only for the decidedly unsentimental stories she'd left behind. Mainly stuff she trotted out to demonstrate how elusive she was from my grasp and best to keep at a distance.

The first time I met her in a Toronto hotel lobby on King Street, she'd laughed in my face before confirming to herself the suspicion that she'd had since we'd begun writing each other: that she was completely out of my league. She announced this finding at such volume that most of the hotel staff took my measure and nodded agreement. Naturally, any hopes I had collapsed on the spot and I assumed at any second she would turn around and disappear forever, all with the indifference one might bring to throwing away trash. “Listen, Gypsy, maybe we can just grab a drink first since you came all this way, but don't get any ideas.…”