The Domino Diaries Part 12

I asked Felix if I could speak to him after the fights and he gave me a strange look and took my notebook to write down his phone number. As he strode off toward the ring, he said he was free that evening and to call.

I went outside Kid Chocolate for some air. The portrait photographers who worked the front steps of the Capitolio with their century-old cameras were packing up for the night when a fleet of bicycles carting birthday cakes raced down the side of the road in front of them. Every kid in town was ent.i.tled to a free cake until they reached fifteen (plus a free cake on their wedding), and the state delivered the cakes to your door. It was always one of my favorite sights around town. But they also reminded me of a very strange day in my life, my twelfth birthday.

Months before that birthday, I had asked my parents for a poster of Muhammad Ali for my room. He was the bravest person that I knew and I wanted to see his face looking at me every day. When they took me to the poster shop, I couldn't decide between my two favorites. There were six or seven Ali posters in the store that I liked, but the choice was easy to narrow down to two. I had nearly saved up enough money on my own with my allowance to buy one, but I couldn't shake the premonition that I'd only end up obsessing over the one I didn't choose. I used to visit the shop all the time and drive the owner crazy asking him to unfurl the posters and hold each of them up for me. And then my bullying incident at school happened and I was afraid to leave my room, let alone step outside my front door. By the time my twelfth birthday rolled around, my family wanted to help cheer me up and gave me enough money to buy all the Ali posters at the shop. I didn't even have to choose anymore. After I handed over the vast fortune of $75 in my hand and bought all the posters in the shop, I felt something I'd never felt before. Maybe it was a child's version of buyer's remorse being channeled into something existentially more troubling that blew all my circuits. At first, I tried to pretend I was excited as I always imagined I was supposed to feel, not having to make an awful choice between the two things I most wanted in the world. In my magical thinking, the posters were going to fix everything that had gone wrong in my life. But the day after I put up all the posters in my room, I got so upset I tore them all down and threw them away. I took a pair of my mom's scissors and a rusty razor she used on her legs and cut off all my hair and shaved my head. I've never really let it grow back since.

Taking no chances on scheduling a visit with Felix in case, as everyone warned, phone lines were tapped, I paid Hector Vinent a visit at Rafael Trejo the next day and got Felix Savn's address. Talking to important figures privately aroused suspicion so you had to be careful. "Consistency is based on surveillance," billboards reminded you. Also, I wanted to film the interview, which made me even more paranoid about the consequences. As a further precaution, in case anyone was watching, I moved all of my belongings from the apartment I was renting in Centro Habana into another place two blocks away, one not officially registered to rent out rooms. I was curious to see if anything would happen at my old residence. I'd heard of journalists being escorted to the airport by state security for a lot less than unauthorized, illegally filmed interviews with notable citizens.

That night I hired a gypsy cab in Calle Neptuno and gave the driver Savn's address. The driver laughed and asked if I minded paying double the fare he'd originally accepted. While Fidel Castro's residence was a state secret, every Cuban knew his address, along with all the other people foreigners might wish to pay a visit to. I agreed to the fare hike. Maybe every major name in Cuba had a camera trained on their house by that point. A lot of the neighborhoods were under constant watch by cameras already.

Savn lived in a humble suburb of Havana, just a few minutes away from the airport. He shared a modest, three-bedroom home with his wife, mother-in-law, sister, and a handful of kids. Nothing about his house stood out from any of the others on his block; it looked like any residential, suburban home you might find in Edison, New Jersey. Evander Holyfield, about the same age but with about half the punching power of Savn, had been able to purchase a 109-room mansion in Atlanta. Keeping that mansion, however, was a different story, since he lost hundreds of millions of dollars in earnings and promptly went bankrupt, his home going into foreclosure.

Savn had grown up in Guantnamo, the son of a bricklayer. Boxing hadn't come naturally to him, but he worked at it. He was turned down three times by the Gitmo boxing school before they let him in as a teenager. Savn went on to win 362 amateur fights for his country, 6 world championships, and 3 Olympic gold medals, never suffering a defeat that he didn't avenge. According to Cuban media reports, he used to shadowbox while staring out at the U.S. naval base, dreaming of victories against Americans. Some Cubans joked that if the United States gave Guantnamo Bay back to Cuba, then they could have Miami back.

I opened the gate of the rickety fence outside Savn's front yard just as his front door opened and music splashed out into the neighborhood. A child spotted me from inside the foyer and ran down the main hall, only to return holding the enormous right hand of a smiling giant.

"Oye, campen!" Felix howled.

He insisted that he had some things he could sell me. He said he had a book and a film others had helped him with about his career and life. He had an agent I should talk to. I must have raised an eyebrow at the prospect of a man who'd turned down a multimillion-dollar career hiring an agent to look after his financial interests, because Felix laughed.

"An agent?" I asked. That was an interesting occupation in a communist state.

"A friend who helps me with things," he clarified.

"Okay."

"Come inside. How much time do you need?"

"Not long."

"Is a hundred dollars for thirty minutes okay for you?"

"Yes."

"Then I start my watch now." Felix reached over to fiddle with what looked like the world's first digital watch. Finally it beeped to his satisfaction and he winked at me. "Please come into my living room."

Savn's severe speech impediment was probably not helped much by the effects of twenty years of boxing, which made each syllable of the words he spoke remarkably difficult for him. His mouth and jaw worked impossibly hard just to complete brief sentences in less than thirty seconds, so I wasn't sure how much ground we could cover in thirty minutes.

Savn's living room sat next to his extensive, gla.s.sed-in trophy room. He refused to allow me to look it over and tapped his finger on his watch.

"We're on your time, my friend. What would you like to talk about?"

I took a deep breath as I set up my small camera on Savn's coffee table and began filming him.

"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." Savn 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, 'Felix is more revolutionary than Fidel.'" As I laughed with him, Felix looked back at his wife, they smiled to each other, and she went back into the kitchen to be with their children.

"Entiende?" Felix 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." Savn 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." Savn 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 Savn'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 Savn 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 IN 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 Tefilo 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 Hector at Trejo when I spotted someone out of the corner of my eye at the gym's entrance.

"Mi madre," Hector whispered, dropping his hands slowly, looking in the same direction as me. "It's him."

"Him?" I asked.

"S," Hector confirmed, then repeated gravely, "el."

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

"Mi madre," Hector groaned again.

"Cmo?" I asked. "Quien?" Who?

Hector remained frozen. It was one hundred degrees out that afternoon training in the open air of Rafael Trejo. I nudged him, but Hector 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. Hector himself had been banned from boxing before he'd ever attempted escape.

So what was this?

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

"It's him." Hector repeated, this time even more softly, nodding in the direction of the entrance. "This is very dangerous for us."

"Cmo?" 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," Hector 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 circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.sumed 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 Cancn-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 succ.u.mbing to his own addiction.

h.e.l.lo 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.

Warm regards, Jennifer Jennifer lived in San Diego with her family, back where Ronnie began his professional career as a teenager. I tend to conflate a spiritual need for destiny with what's on offer in horoscopes and numerology and other spiritual junkie track marks, but I'm a Gypsy mother's son. I had watched my mother, whom all my friends told me was crazy, make a living for thirty years trying to heal people through means I could never accept for my own wounds, the ones that healed her. Jennifer's message in a bottle-and the fact that she lived ten minutes from the border I was meant to cross-was enough of a karmic tap on my shoulder for me to push my chips in and agree to head down to Tijuana for Rigondeaux's fight.

I wrote Jennifer back and she suggested we meet in Old Town the night before I crossed the border. I showed up in the spooky little neighborhood and quickly spotted the tall "slightly awkward" blonde she'd warned me she was. But the first thing I noticed about Jennifer from a distance was how she shared her father's disarming confidence, the kind that reminds you that anyone who doesn't feel safe in some essential sense could never be generous even if they wanted to. As she got closer, Jennifer had her dad's same shy, caring eyes. I was so distracted, I didn't even register that she was carrying a pair of her dad's brown Everlast trunks in one hand and a folder of clippings in the other, until she held them up for me to see.

21.

WRITING IN THE Sc.r.a.pBOOK OF A TYRANT.

I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan.

-George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia FOR THE NEXT THREE YEARS I dropped down the rabbit hole, following Rigondeaux around the world for each of his fights while spending the rest of my life chasing down everyone I could find in journalism, film, boxing, academia, and publishing who contributed definitive work on Cuba. I b.u.mped into Leon Gast, director of When We Were Kings, filming a Manny Pacquiao doc.u.mentary while Rigondeaux was on his undercard. Leon said he hadn't seen footwork like Rigondeaux's since Muhammad Ali.

Ann Louise Bardach had interviewed Fidel Castro for Vanity Fair and written Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana. "Maybe the most corrosive legacy that Fidel Castro will leave behind is that of the broken family," Bardach told me.

Larry Merchant, a former boxing writer and longtime HBO boxing commentator, invited me over to his home in Santa Monica. "Boxing is every man for himself in and out of the ring." Merchant laughed. "It's a slightly more civilized version of the jungle. It itself symbolizes the rawest form of free enterprise. You're on your own. To come here just to be a fighter and not be able to go back to the ground where you came from is something relatively new and strange. Of course in America where the streets are paved with gold..."

Carlos Eire, author of the National Book Awardwinning memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana and Learning to Die in Miami, had his office at Yale. Eire had left Cuba, along with fourteen thousand other children, during the Operation Peter Pan exodus of 19601962. He said when he'd heard the first reports of Elin Gonzlez's arrival in Miami, he "lost his mind" reliving his own childhood trauma. "There are many, many people who admire Fidel Castro and who think his revolution was a good thing. Including just about every professor down my hallway." I was fascinated that such a confession in no way gave this man pause toward his convictions for even a second.

Steve Fainaru, the Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist and author of The Duke of Havana, was in Oakland. "It's just such a difficult choice. I think the fact that people are forced to make that choice-that there's this either/or-it says so much about the Cuban government and their political situation. And it says so much about the United States government, frankly, and our continuing ridiculously anachronistic views toward this small island. It's really sad."

His partner on the book, Ray Snchez, the only U.S. newspaper reporter based in Havana at the time of Rigondeaux's defection, now lived five blocks up the street from me in New York. He had a child of his own in Havana. "If the Cuba story is about anything," Sanchez began, echoing Bardach, "it's about the separation of families. For the last fifty years we've seen this tug-of-war that has just torn families apart and plays out every day, in virtually every Cuban household."

Several months later Leon Gast mentioned that Don King, who'd offered tens of millions to Felix Savn and Tefilo Stevenson to defect, was pa.s.sing through Brooklyn and offered me an introduction. King repeated the same lines from a script he'd said at a press conference for one of Rigondeaux's fights several months before: "Rigondeaux is Cuba libre, and that's fighting for freedom from Cuba. He had to get on the boats, the rafts, and brave the hazards of the ocean and the shark-infested waters to seek freedom. Where did he seek that freedom? Old Glory right here." King pointed down to an American flag b.u.t.ton on his jean jacket. "This is the only country in the world that people try to break in rather than to break out."

Enrique Encinosa, the Cuban American author, radio host, and boxing historian, lived in Miami. Before I flew out to interview Encinosa, he told me over the phone that the greatest pleasure he could ever experience in his life would be putting a gun to Fidel's head and pulling the trigger.

Just over a decade since I'd read his book on my first flight over to Cuba, journalist and author S. L. Price pa.s.sed through New York City and we arranged to meet at his hotel room, across the street from Madison Square Garden, at two in the morning. I'd brought along a bottle of some vile coffee-infused tequila. Price looks like Jimmy Stewart and sounds like he narrated The Wonder Years. He had spent four years working for the Miami Herald and traveled to Cuba repeatedly to work on his book Pitching Around Fidel from 1991 until he was told he could never return, shortly before I first arrived in 2000.

"Cuba-" I laughed a little nervously, setting a gla.s.s before Price and reaching over for the tequila to fill it for him. There wasn't another chair in the room so I flipped over his hotel wastebasket and sat on that. Before I could hit record on my tape recorder, Price was off and running.

"I moved to Miami in 1990. I grew up in Connecticut, went to school in North Carolina, I lived in New Mexico, lived in Memphis, lived in San Francisco and Northern California, and then I moved to Miami and it was literally like moving into a different world. There are many Americans who will say, 'Ugh, Miami is a foreign country.' Many Anglos from all over the country have that opinion. I actually look upon that as a great plus. I thought, 'Fantastic!' You know, I get to go to a place where Spanish is a majority language, where there's an entirely different culture. It was an amazing transition. I went to work for the Miami Herald, which of course is sort of the enemy of Castro. I found it fascinating that there were plans in place for when Castro would die, what the Herald would do-the game plan for covering the story. And in some ways I realized the most important person in Miami was Fidel Castro. Not the mayor. Not the President of the United States. But Fidel Castro. What I love most about Miami is that it's a city still in the state of becoming. So when I got down there, I suddenly realized that the second capital of Florida was Havana; that psychically Havana was in the mind of Miami almost all the time. I didn't want to wall myself off from that. I thought it was fascinating.

"I got the opportunity to go to Cuba for the first time in 1991 for the Pan Am Games. You have to understand, a journalist wants a story, and Miami's one of the great news towns in the world-you can't write a bad story about it. It's simply too extreme and colorful and interesting and conflict-ridden.

"So I get to Cuba for the Pan Am Games and in Miami I'm told everybody's miserable in Cuba. Everybody wants to get out and everybody hates Castro. Then when I get to the Pan Am Games, it's not just that Fidel was doing the wave. His boxers are having a record-setting day against the Americans, the sworn enemy of the Castro regime. Fidel is standing up and throwing up his hands like any boozy fan in the cheap seats. But the fans are really proud. The fans, the people in the street, they're telling me 'This has got to change here. I don't like it ... but we kicked your a.s.s.' And then they'll go on to detail to me the problems with the U.S. Congress. And of course the literacy rate there is over the top.

"This was 1991, and I still have never been to a place like Cuba. Cuba disturbs you. It's funny, because as a traveler you often think, 'Well, I want to relax. I want to go on a trip and in a sense, just be.' Cuba doesn't let you just be. You go down there and you are heartbroken. You feel intensely both positively and negatively every single day, sometimes hour by hour, and minute by minute. By the time you leave, you're exhausted and you never want to see the place again. And then about a month or two months go by-it depends on the last time you were there-and you start thinking about it again. I've never felt that way about anywhere else.

"It's so easy if you stay in Miami or in Havana to have a black-and-white view of the world. I happened to live in Miami and be entranced by Cuba, but I wasn't in love with the system. It isn't like I went down there and thought, 'Oh, communism is great; socialism is the way of the future.' But when I went to Cuba, it confirmed for me probably more than anything else the idea of the gray area and of living in the gray. There were people who criticized Castro, who were incredible critics of the regime. They wanted Castro to die tomorrow and they couldn't leave. But they couldn't bear to leave Cuba. Couldn't even think about getting on a raft. And then there were people who left and actually believed in many of the principles in Cuba, but left because of financial reasons. They wanted to take care of their family, so they left. And when they got to Miami they said, "down with Castro." There are people who-who just didn't fit into any of the boxes.