The Domino Diaries (31 page)

“Shouldn't we be filming
your
Havana?”

“I don't have the stomach for it today.”

“This is the weirdest assignment I've ever been given.”

“Later this afternoon,” I said, “I'd like you to shoot an interview with a young boxer at my apartment and also film him exercising with his coach on my roof. I'd like you to film him with all of Centro Habana and the skyline behind him while he shadowboxes and trains with his coach. Until then I just want to get my mind off of a few things.”

“Why do you seem so sad?” she asked.

“I don't have much time left in Havana,” I told her.
Maybe even less time than you think
, I reminded myself. “What's the book under your arm?”

“My
favorite
book.” She smiled. “
The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
”

“Let's shoot for several hours, and then we can go somewhere before the interview at my apartment and maybe you can read some of it to me?”

“I told you that I have a boyfriend.”

“I'm not asking you to be my whore. You have a beautiful accent and I'd like to hear you read. Reading isn't cheating.”

“Reading
Kundera
to a stranger isn't
far
from cheating.”

“You don't have to read anything to me. You can think it over while we shoot your city.”

“You're just going to use me to get over someone else.” Ana Mar
í
a smiled.

“Not really,” I disagreed. “I'm just trying to use you.”

“That's sad, but I like that a little better.”

We spent the rest of the morning and afternoon filming all over Havana. After filming some famous graves around the cemetery, we captured kids enjoying rides inside Jalisco Park, communism's clumsy answer to Disneyland. Nearby, Ana Mar
í
a leaned over our old Ford Thunderbird's window to shoot a long line of teenage students eagerly waiting to be let into the Charlie Chaplin Cinema to watch a matinee of
City Lights
. I watched her lie back on the ground and film some Orson Welles angles of little boys picking off beer cans inside a corner shooting gallery. She filmed gasoline rainbows swirling over the puddles that glazed the gutters of Centro Habana. She caught a stickball homerun smashing a window from an intersection in Centro Habana while bootleg DVDs of
Annie Hall
and
Manhattan
were peddled behind an outfielder punching his ratty glove. Down the street from the Karl Marx Theater, some lunatic was high above us on his balcony, screaming obscenities about Fidel while collecting laundry from a line. “If the revolution had worked out, I ask you why are none of Fidel or Ra
ú
l's children in politics? How many of them have left? Answer me that!” Three teenagers laughed from a balcony across the street, passing around a joint they smoked in the peculiar Cuban style, through a nostril.

We went back to my old gym in Old Havana and filmed children following instructions from H
é
ctor, who remembered nothing from his drunken visit to my apartment. Ana Mar
í
a wandered with her camera around seniors assuming poses with yoga classes in the park, construction workers wiping the icy froth from their mouths at
guarapo
stands, fathers and sons window shopping at the Adidas store, tourists and whores leaving or entering hotels, Che look-alikes. Outside the Capitolio we filmed a man with a hundred piercings in his face sticking his tongue out at us while he posed with tourists being photographed by the portrait artists with their century-old cameras.

We got in the back of a Chinese taxi and peddled around the most desolate slums of Old Havana until we arrived ten minutes later in the most beautifully restored area of Plaza Vieja and her pristine fountains. Ana Mar
í
a filmed kids lounging in the courtyard of the university surrounded by palm trees and tanks. We rode past the statue of El Caballero de Par
í
s, maybe the world's most beloved homeless man who ever lived. Long before the revolution, when they installed the Caballero in Mazora, Havana's mental institution, there was such a protest across Havana that he was released by presidential order. He was invited to meet the president and his cape and mysterious belongings were returned to him. After the triumph of the revolution, he told the press that Castro and the other rebels had stolen his personal sense of style with their beards and grungy fashion. El Caballero died in 1985, and almost anyone I'd ever met who lived in Havana before that time, if you mentioned his name, produced such an incredibly thrilled smile recounting their interactions with him that it was impossible not to fall in love with him yourself.

Schoolchildren marched across the Malec
ó
n in their uniforms. For the first time, I noticed some of them wore headphones. Cell phones were in the hands of teenagers rumbling by on skateboards. Many didn't have enough money to pay for texting, let alone phone calls, but they clasped their phones everywhere they went as status symbols. Conspicuous consumption, too: the house band at El Floridita played “Guantanamera” and all the other deflated standards for tourists in Hemingway T-shirts, smoking Montecristos lit from red-uniformed bartenders waiting on blenders churning daiquiris.

Even after a little more than a decade of returning again and again to this city, it had changed completely on me, and was changing even faster now than I'd ever seen before.

“Of course it's coming,” Gary Indiana, an American writer and filmmaker who had spent many years returning to Cuba, wrote of one visit to Havana. “Coming here, coming soon, the gathering tsunami of Our Kind of Capitalism. iPad, iPod, YouTube, Buy It, Love It, Fuck It, Dump It, Buy Another One. The people who sell all this shit say it's what the people want, and they're not wrong. But if the people knew what they were in for their heads would explode.”

Yoani S
á
nchez, Havana's world-famous blogger, once described the Cuban people as birds in a cage, birds reduced to servility, living a life of limited liberties in exchange for the seed and water of the education and health care systems. “Cubans wish to fly,” she said. “Yet the cage is well made and the bars are thick. And, by the way, neither the birdseed nor the water is all that great.” The analogy had always echoed what Guillermo Rigondeaux's experience had been of Cuba and why he left. Yet as it turns out, he'd chosen, despite an offer to smuggle his family out with him to America, to leave his family behind in the “cage” of Cuban life. During my first interview with him after his escape from Cuba in 2009, I asked him why. He explained that, unlike Cuba, if he failed to succeed in the American system he would be left to die. He was bankrupt if anyone in his family got sick. He was thrown out of his home if he couldn't pay the rent. He would be hopelessly unable to support his children to pursue an education to give them a better life than he could have ever hoped for if boxing hadn't been his calling. He was more afraid to subject his family to the risks of America's system than to allow his family to live the rest of their lives without him, suffering the cost of his choice in Cuba.

“If I didn't think the water surrounded me like a cancer,” Virgilio Pi
ñ
era wrote in his poem “The Island Burdened,” “I could have slept easy … the weight of an island in the love of its people.” I'd heard so many people dismiss anything they saw sent back to them from Cuba that looked remotely positive as merely evidence of a Potemkin village. On the other side, three years in, the voters who'd put President Obama in office were suffering the effects of a hangover with what amounted to their Potemkin president.

We got dropped off at my apartment in Centro Habana and went up on my roof waiting for Cristian and his coach to arrive. Ana Mar
í
a lit a cigarette and took in the views across her city—the Malec
ó
n, the dome of the Capitolio, the decaying rooftops and azoteas—then she turned inward with her chin resting against her palm.

“Can I make you some coffee?”

“Do you have any rum to go with it?”

“I'll bring the bottle,” I said.

“Will you drink with me?”

“I don't drink.”

“You are a very
strange
person.”

While I made coffee over the stove and pulled the Havana Club from the icebox, I was sizing up the situation with this kid and the coach who loved him. Turning over all my preconceptions and what I'd learned about these Cuban boxers I'd met, I felt more uncertain than ever about what to really ask someone like Cristian, with so much of his life in front of him. Could his answers ever have a hope of revealing more about him than my questions revealed about me? I wasn't sure if I was doing him any favors letting him know that people internationally were already keen to bankroll his escape and start the same money drip they'd offered many of the fighters who'd left. Maybe the only reason he'd agreed to come to my apartment was to hear the offer. Did Guillermo Rigondeaux's fate in America, never seeing his family again, look more appealing than H
é
ctor Vinent's complete inability to support his own family after staying? And between them, who had the moral high ground? Or was life so hard for Cristian already that it didn't really matter anyway?

I came back outside with the coffee and rum and found Ana Mar
í
a crumpled up on the corner of the roof, with her back to Miami, holding her favorite book.

“
Yuma,
” Ana Mar
í
a said. “Would you still like me to read to you from Kundera?”

“Very much.”

“Today wasn't what I expected,” she said. “At first I thought it would be a
feo
day with you, but now all I have is this strangeness.”

“Why is that?”

“You're so obsessed with us as a people being torn between two horrible choices, but I have no desire to leave. And I don't know why we look so exotic to people like you in the first place.”

“You've never wanted to know what the rest of the world was like?”

“Everything about you tells me what the rest of the world is like.” She laughed. “Do you think that someone who sleeps with a thousand women understands more about a woman's nature than a man who only stays with one?”

“Depends on the guy, doesn't it? Both could be cowardly choices.”

“Yes, they could.”

“Why wouldn't you want to see other places?”

“Why?” she asked.

“Why
not
?”

“You are free to travel anywhere else and yet you keep coming back here. You think it's tragic I've never been on a plane in my life? You think I'm sad because I've never left this island?”

“I've met a lot of people who consider this island a prison.”

“Maybe it is for them. But wouldn't Miami be another kind of prison for them, too? From all the people who visit here from cities all around the world, all I learn is how much these other cities wish to be like one another. People do the same things. They have the same struggles. They have the same fears. I see how afraid these people and their cities are to be anything different, let alone unique. Isn't that why all these boxers who turn down all their money are so threatening to their values? Don't they seem scared to question any of their own values for even a second? These cities and their people aren't even stereotypes, they
aspire
to be stereotypes. El Norte has never wanted anything from us beyond reopening the casinos, fucking our women, having our men serve them mojitos with a smile, turning us back into their tropical resort. They tell us how fascinating Havana is with time standing still, but all I see is how everywhere else people rush to the point without spending any time wondering what the point
is
in the first place.”

“You don't want anything to change?” I asked.

“Havana couldn't be anywhere else if it tried!” She took a swig from the bottle. “I could have been born in any city in the world and made life
bearable
. This is the only city in the world where my heart is always in flower. Every day of my life something makes me laugh until I cry, whether from something sad or something beautiful. No one I've ever met or anything they've shown me inside their silly gadgets has ever convinced me I'd be in bloom anywhere else.”

“How do you think this boy coming over will view his future?”

“Like any other sixteen-year-old. He dreams of his chance to be in America like Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road headed for Oz.”

Right then Cristian and his coach, Yosvanni, stepped out into the glare of the sun on my roof, both panting from the climb up the stairs. Cristian was wearing a Yankees cap that shielded his eyes, a buttoned-up jean jacket with the collar flared, and jeans. Yosvanni was wearing a Cuban national team sweater and red track pants. Both had a gym bag slung over their shoulders.

In
Sons of Cuba
, Cristian had been shown as a sensitive boy devoted to his parents and his country. Now he had grown, just before the brink of manhood. He had an air of independence and detachment to his gaze that was absent from him during his years participating in the film. Yosvanni remained ever watchful of his star pupil, but had the easeful confidence and grace of someone who'd managed to walk between the raindrops of Cuban society.

Cristian came over and tapped my shoulder. “After you film us for a little while up here,” he said, smiling, his voice a couple octaves lower than I'd last heard it, “maybe you'd like to spar with me? I've sparred with heavyweights before. I'll go easy.”

I looked over at Yosvanni removing some mitts from his gym bag. Without looking at us he was beaming approval.