The Domino Diaries (30 page)

“Let's get the fuck out of here,” Sof
í
a demanded. “I already lived through the Special Period once, I don't need to revisit it.”

Whatever path we took across the city where Sof
í
a was born, her whole life seemed to be pressing against her, not just behind and in front of her, but from all directions at once.

 

25

WHISTLING PAST THE GRAVEYARD

A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.

—Fidel Castro

E
ARLY THE NEXT MORNING
I dragged Sof
í
a's luggage over the potholes of Calle Neptuno to her grandmother's house to say good-bye. We didn't look at each other walking down street after street, but we held hands until she'd complain I was squeezing too tightly. Her head was high, while my chin was down against my chest. I saw a dead chick in the gutter that a stray cat was toying with. I don't remember much else about that walk.

We stopped outside her grandmother's apartment and I let go of her hand and told her I couldn't wait with her for the taxi to take her to the airport. We heard Nat King Cole singing “Nature Boy” out someone's barred window, “The greatest thing … you'll ever learn … is just to love … and be loved … in return.”

She smiled at me when she saw that my eyes were wet.

“Oh
pleeeease
. You acting like you never see me again.”

But I hadn't thought that far ahead.

“I think it's a little worse.”

“Why is that, Brinicito?”

“I'm crying because I won't see you
tonight
.”

“See? What did I tell you the first time I saw you? No chemistry between us.”

I kissed her and she bit my lip hard enough to draw blood. With her teeth inside my upper lip, I smiled without being able to look at her and ran my hand through her hair. She let go and I told her that I loved her before stepping away and turning the corner. I caught the first taxi that stopped and told them to drop me off at Col
ó
n cemetery in Vedado.

*   *   *

I've always loved cemeteries. When my father took me to new places as a kid, for our first stop we'd always stop at the local cemeteries and make a game of tracking down the first person laid to rest. Col
ó
n was the most beautiful cemetery I'd ever seen, filled with all the marvelous people who added their weight, color, and melodies to Havana's Goya-like dreamscape. After being built in 1876, over a million people had been buried in eight hundred thousand graves, with hundreds of impossibly detailed mausoleums, family vaults, and chapels so white under the sun they blind you when the tropical heat doesn't blur the air. The first man buried in Col
ó
n was the architect, Calixto Arellano de Loira y Cardoso, who never finished building it.

I've never met anyone from Havana—even those who left so young they can't remember it—who didn't seem to be sucking life from a bent straw living anywhere else. Part of Havana's twisted magic is how even visitors aren't immune to this disease, with some clumsy music inside your own heart playing an off-key karaoke version of the real symphony you observe behind the eyes of locals. The first time I ever visited Madrid and asked a stranger outside the Plaza de Toros who the greatest bullfighter in the world was, he listed off the names and held his hands apart to symbolize how close the matadors allowed the horns to their hearts. His hands got closer with each name until he smiled mischievously before concluding the list. “But Jos
é
Tom
á
s? He lets the horns come so close to his heart nobody can bear to watch. We all cover our eyes. His genius is so beautiful that nobody in Spain has ever dared to see it.”

As the cab got closer and the 140-acre cemetery was in view, something besides Sof
í
a or getting arrested gnawed at me. In the back of my mind, I had always yearned to be in Havana when Fidel would be laid to rest in Col
ó
n. Ever since I'd first seen
The Second of May 1808
in the Prado when I was eighteen, I'd been obsessed by Goya's take on Napoleon and the most powerful army in the world invading and meeting their downfall in Spain. With Fidel's passing, I wanted to witness that impossibly strange atmosphere firsthand and see what the air tasted like for Cubans the first day Castro stopped breathing it. “It's not my fault I haven't died yet,” Castro once told Ann Louise Bardach, who'd flown over to interview him. She asked Fidel if he was the devil his enemies made him out to be. “If that is the case,” Fidel replied, “then I am a devil who has been protected by the gods.”

The world doesn't get to choose the destinations where its most colorful, important characters stain history's canvas. I've always played goofy games in my mind trying to imagine Shakespeare being born anywhere else, transplanting van Gogh to Detroit, or Napoleon to Mexico City, or allowing Hitler to fail at pastoral painting in a back alley in Shanghai. What impact could Fidel have had if he were born almost
anywhere
else but a small, impoverished island ninety miles off the shore of the most powerful civilization on earth? Even from such a meager stage, with such a humble role, he
still
managed to find a way of holding the world hostage and bringing it as close as it ever came to oblivion. What if he'd been born on third base? What would our world look like? What impact could he have had? Fidel didn't have a bust or a statue or so much as a plaque anywhere across the country, but his dent in history was undeniable. And unless Fidel died during my last twenty-four hours in his country, I'd be watching Havana on cable news the next day like everyone else. “All the glory in the world can fit into a kernel of corn,” Fidel quoted Jos
é
Mart
í
, after Bardach asked him how he wished to be remembered.

I was meeting a cinematographer named Ana Mar
í
a at La Milagrosa's grave, Col
ó
n's most popular. Ana María was a young girl fresh out of film school who worked for Cuban television. R
í
a had helped me find her. La Milagrosa's grave belonged to a girl named Amelia Goyri de la Hoz. Amelia was buried, along with her child, in 1903. They had both died as Amelia tried to bring the child into the world when she was only twenty-three years old. Inside their tomb, Amelia's infant son was placed at his mother's feet. When both bodies were exhumed, according to legend, the child was discovered in his mother's arms. Amelia's inconsolable widower returned to his bride and child's grave each day for the last seventeen years of his life. It was said that her widower never accepted their deaths and instead believed they were asleep beneath the ground. He installed a brass knocker over the grave and each day he brought flowers and knocked on the grave three times as a secret signal. After the knocks, he would cry out, “Wake up, Amelia! Wake up!” Since I'd first started coming to Havana and visiting Col
ó
n, the grave was guarded every hour of every day by a cult devoted to La Milagrosa. A sculptor had built a statue of Amelia clutching her child over the grave and I never once saw all the white marble of her tomb unadorned in fresh flowers and troves of offerings from people praying to her to look after their kids or to allow for them to be blessed with children.

As I approached our meeting place, Ana Mar
í
a was talking with a few old women guarding the grave next to the statue of Amelia cradling her child. I noticed Ana Mar
í
a had a book under her arm and was smoking an unfiltered cigarette. She was tall and wiry, wearing a man's white undershirt and torn jeans, her hair fastened in two wild clumps behind her ears. She had an alluring mixture of soft femininity in her features and masculine grace in her posture and movements.

“So?” she said in perfect English. “Would you like to shoot the cemetery?”

“Yeah,” I told her, handing over my camera. It wasn't a film camera since I'd been terrified they'd confiscate anything looking professional at customs. I had a shitty tripod with me also.

“This camera is
mierda
,
yuma
. R
í
a warned me about you. First she told me you had an affair with the granddaughter of Fidel.”

“Why would she tell you that?” I asked.

“I have a boyfriend,” Ana Mar
í
a declared.

“Because I slept with Fidel's granddaughter I'm a threat to the sanctity of all Cuban women in relationships?”

“Well.” She smirked, changing the subject by holding up the camera as though it were rotting meat. “This tourist camera makes me even more uncomfortable. R
í
a also told me your work is sensitive. So I'm guessing you have
zero
clearance to do any of the work you're doing here?”

“If you can explain to me how I can
get
clearance in this country to work on anything sensitive—”

“Are we shooting something sensitive today?”

I shrugged.

“Dangerous?”

“You don't have to help me.”

“
Ay
—”

“What?”

“We both know I need the money.”

“And I'm fifty thousand dollars in debt back home and desperately need this footage.”

“
Yuma
, will this put me in danger?”

I could see she was about five seconds from walking away, but I didn't know what to say.

From a pay phone the night before, I'd gotten as close to Te
ó
filo Stevenson as I ever had, with him not
outright
rejecting an interview. “Call me tomorrow,” he growled, before hanging up. Someone close to him had told me things had gotten so bad financially Stevenson didn't have enough money to put gas in the tank of his little car or replace a flat tire. But who knew how much money he expected to talk, let alone on camera. Who knew who was listening to our phone calls and might be closing in long before I ever had the chance to sit with him? Out of eleven million people in the country, three million were officially enrolled as CDRs spying on their neighbors.

Besides Stevenson, Cristian Mart
í
nez and his boxing coach, Yosvanni Bonachea, the stars of
Sons of Cuba
, a documentary that had won awards around the world on the film festival circuit, had agreed to come over to my apartment that afternoon to talk. Before I left Cuba for good, my Hail Mary was somehow managing to include H
é
ctor Vinent, F
é
lix Sav
ó
n,
and
Te
ó
filo Stevenson in my documentary defending their decision to remain in Cuba, the whole continuum of great Cuban heroes who rejected America's Faustian bargain. Then, with two years following Rigondeaux's journey toward a world championship and riches
in
America, I would offer Rigondeaux's life and reasons in defense of leaving. And then finally Cristian Mart
í
nez's role, just before his sixteenth birthday, staring down his first Olympic Games, seemed to offer a unique view on where Cuba's next generation on the horizon wanted to go.

Cristian had come of age just as Fidel had stepped down from power. “If the U.S.A. dares to attack us at this sad moment,” Cristian said the day after Fidel announced his state secret illness, “we'll run out to defend our country.” Fidel had rewarded Cristian's father with a car and an apartment for his contributions to the revolution. But that home was in shambles and the car had long since broken down and there was no money to repair any of the damage. Cristian, like the others, would have to weigh the life of his father, and the lives of all the great boxers who came before him, in order to determine the right path to take. Perhaps where he went, and his reasons for doing so, would point the way where all Cubans of his generation might easily follow.

There was some additional pressure on me talking to Cristian Mart
í
nez, as the manager who'd gotten Rigondeaux off the island was interested in doing the same thing with this boy. I'd been asked to feel the teenager out in terms of his receptivity to making the jump. To broach the topic of Cristian's defection meant prison time for me, and the certain death of Cristian's boxing career before it ever got started. Even creating the perception I was trying to help facilitate Cristian's escape was a serious offense against the revolution. “Cuban boxers fight for a better future,” Cristian had told the cameras as a child of twelve. “We Cubans are fighting from the moment we are born.”

“I think the next twenty-four hours are going to be pretty dangerous, talking to who I want to talk to,” I explained to Ana Mar
í
a. “There are risks. It's up to you if you want to help me or not.”

We looked at each other for a tense moment until we both smiled.

“I was expecting a womanizer from how R
í
a described you. A
romantic
is even worse.
Joder
. No more talking. If you like, we could shoot one of the funerals taking place here. R
í
a told me you play a lot of chess. We could shoot some of the famous graves and start with Capablanca, with his giant queen over the grave. I love that grave. Alejo Carpentier is buried here, if you are partial to writers. Dulce Mar
í
a Loynaz, if you like poets. M
á
ximo G
ó
mez, if you prefer military men. Chano Pozo, if you want a musician. Tell me where we should start.”

“Today I'd like you to shoot anything you want. We can go anywhere you think is special. Take me to your favorite places. Today let's just film
your
Havana.”