The Domino Diaries (35 page)
Read The Domino Diaries Online
Authors: Brin-Jonathan Butler
“So you knew him while you grew up?”
“Of course. But I was ⦠I was a little terrified of him. I could not speak to him
ever
. It was
Fidel
! But always I would ask my father if we were somewhere with Fidel in attendance. âPlease, can I speak to him?' And my father would ask Fidel to come over and he always would and I had no power of speech. It annoyed my father. But I just could never speak to him.”
“Do you ever think about the kind of life you could have had if your father had taken all that money to leave?”
“Money is very nice.” She smiled, caressing the shoulder she'd slapped before. “But I wasn't raised that way. I had a beautiful life in Cuba and I'm very happy with my life now.”
“You don't think your father ever regretted his decision?”
“
No
. Was it an
easy
decision? No. Not for anyone. My father lived the life he always wanted to live on his terms. Maybe he lived it too much and it cost him an old age. But he had a beautiful life and gave me a beautiful life, also. He was exactly who he wanted to be.”
Helmys and I passed by the Casablanca, the dingy strip club Katz had mentioned, cigarette butts and bottlecaps studded into their dirty driveway. We could hear Britney Spears singing inside, but no light was visible. The club was hidden from the little road by a hedge, a bit like a double chin hidden by a beard.
“Do you know about Yasiel Puig?” I asked her. “The baseball player who has become so famous in Los Angeles.”
“Sure. Many Cubans come to this island or Canc
ú
n every year. Some, like him, are athletes who come for all that money waiting for them in the United States.”
“You don't feel strongly one way or the other about his choice?”
“He has to live with his choice and whether it was right for him. I judge no one. It's none of my business.”
“What about when people judge your father's choice? What about the people who don't believe anyone could do what he did, turning down all that money?”
She shrugged. “Just because someone does not agree with him or his reasons does not mean they have to accuse him of being a liar.”
I only had the chance to meet Helmys's father once and I was sorry from the first minute that our exchange wounded a great man's pride, that for many it would reduce him. It took about the same amount of time with his daughter to realize he must have been as proud of his legacy, raising her, as he was of anything he accomplished inside or outside of a ring on behalf of the revolution.
“I brought some photos to show you of my father that I carry on my phone. I thought you would appreciate them. Some photos of my father and Fidel. My father and me. Many have never been published. Would you like to see them?”
She stood next to me, her hair in my face, and warmly flipped through the photos of her father's life. While there were no boxing photos in her collection, everything she showed me illumintated all things I'd imagined he fought for. From his honeymoon to intimate moments with his family, to being introduced to Nelson Mandela, to doing
the wave
with Fidel at the Pan Am Gamesâall of it was bigger than life and handled with a coy smirk worthy of any iconic Hollywood movie star.
“Jesus, your dad was a handsome guy,” I said.
As she stared at her father's face on the screen she corrected me, “He wasn't handsome. My father was
beautiful
.”
Two years before, I had watched Helmys at her father's funeral as nearly a thousand Cubans in attendance collectively broke down in tears to mourn his loss. I watched her comfort her brother, a little younger than her, as Stevenson's coffin was lowered into the ground and every face in view grieved a beloved hero. I included footage of this event in my documentary as a means of contrasting how the prospective funerals of defector Cuban boxing champions might look in America, so far removed from friends and family back home.
I wasn't looking to vilify or judge either decision; what I wanted put on trial had always been the insiduous choice itself, something Puig and Stevenson and so many others know so well.
Trying to understand Stevenson's life and death, I asked my father to watch my interview with him. It was a tense hour; he saw a bit of himself in Stevenson, as did I.
When the film ended, my father referred me to a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. In 1905, Rilke was working as a secretary to the sculptor Rodin and confessed he was no longer writing. The artist sent him to the zoo and told him to look at an animal until he
saw
it. Rilke imagined the view from captivity, from the inside out.
“The Panther” came as close as anything to help me bring Stevenson and Cuba's blur into focus:
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else.
It seems to him there are a thousand bars;
and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietlyâ.
An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
Â
BRIN-JONATHAN BUTLER
is a writer and filmmaker. His work has appeared in
ESPN The Magazine, Vice, Deadspin, The Wall Street Journal, Salon,
and
The New York Times
. Butler's documentary,
Split Decision,
is an examination of Cuban-American relations and the economic and cultural paradoxes that have shaped them since Castro's revolution, through the lens of elite Cuban boxers forced to choose between remaining in Cuba or defecting to America. His e-original,
A Cuban Boxer's Journey,
is also published by Picador. You can sign up for email updates
here
.
Â
ALSO BY
BRIN-JONATHAN BUTLER
A Cuban Boxer's Journey: Guillermo Rigondeaux, from Castro's Traitor to American Champion
(e-book)
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CONTENTS
1. How Did This White Motherfucker Get Inside My House?
12. If Spanish Lacked a Future Tense
17. Chasing the American Dream from a Smuggler's Boat
21. Writing in the Scrapbook of a Tyrant
25. Whistling Past the Graveyard
Â
THE DOMINO DIARIES
. Copyright © 2015 by Brin-Jonathan Butler. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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“The Panther,” translation copyright © 1982 by Stephen Mitchell; from
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke,
translated by Stephen Mitchell. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Random House, LLC. All rights reserved.
Cover design by Henry Sene Yee
Cover photograph by Fernanda Preto/Aurora Photos
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-04370-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-04371-9 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781250043719
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First Edition: June 2015
