The Domino Diaries Part 4

"But this is not protection. This is just instilling fear. This is just propaganda. Of course there is a risk to trusting your environment. There are bad people and accidents in life, some are avoidable and some are not. But if you don't trust there is a guarantee you will lose all things available to you only through trust. To sacrifice that for a false sense of security is protecting children?"

I shrugged.

"Well." Lesvanne shrugged back. "If you have something to lose, that is very logical. In Miami I saw many walls protecting houses. Here all the walls are falling down. The nice cars in Miami all had alarms. Here almost n.o.body can afford a car. There the division is very important in their society and the fear of the poor trespa.s.sing on the rich is on everyone's mind. Look at all the guns there people feel they need to defend themselves from their own neighbors. Miami has both extremes. Of course here we are nearly all poor. What is there to steal? Even the most moral believers in the values of the revolution must steal from the government with corruption to support their families, but there is little to steal from each other."

"If there was something to steal, would people steal here?" I asked.

"With this much difficulty and how much we rely on others to survive-I don't think so. Even if you could escape responsibility, you could not escape seeing the damage. There are no strangers for us in Havana."

"And in Miami?"

"In Miami everyone is your stranger. You would not know who lives next door. Look at the mansions protected from everyone. But I miss many things I saw in Miami tremendously. It is impossible to have anything I saw there here. That is why, when I'm ready, I will make Miami my home. When I am ready. And I could never leave without my wife. Let's go to Centro Habana and I can show you my photos from Gringolandia."

I offered to pay for a taxi, but Lesvanne insisted we hitchhike. We walked over to a busy street and he flagged down a motorcycle with a sidecar in minutes. He sat behind the driver and pointed for me to take the adjoining seat. Our engine snarled at stray cats darting across the traffic as we headed back to the Plaza and Che's monument.

We took a smoother road into the city with the Havana Libre's penthouse peeking over the palmy skyline as buzzards swerved above us in the early morning cool before the real heat of day arrived. Elin Gonzlez's face was on signs and T-shirts all throughout the city. Lesvanne pointed toward lone musicians serenading the jungle with trumpets. We drove past a bus station overwhelmed with lines snaking around the block. Hitchhikers were everywhere waiting for rides into work, students to the university, families trying to get home. After a b.u.mpy climb skirting the border of a columned monument worthy of a Roman emperor, Lesvanne mentioned the university was around the corner. The Napoleon museum was just behind it, he shouted. He leaned close to the driver's ear and mentioned Coppelia as our destination. The driver nodded and accelerated toward a red light at an intersection like a kamikaze and picked up speed as we swung past the grandeur of the front steps of the university until we screeched to a stop under the towering shadow of the Habana Libre, just across the street from a ballerina's crossed slippers on Coppelia ice cream stand's famous sign. Under the sign h.o.a.rds were already lined up to grab a bowl.

"It's a short walk from here to Calle Neptuno, where we can catch a ride into Habana Vieja. You can hail your first Cuban taxi. Hold out two fingers to the first old American car and if the driver has room and stops, you tell him 'Capitolio.' Say nothing else. I need some more guarapo for tonight. After the photos."

"What's tonight?" I asked.

"After we find you a trainer ... This woman who stole my heart last year just arrived on the island again from Oklahoma. This girl is amazing. I can't disappoint this girl. You must see the letter she wrote me."

"Aren't you married?"

"Of course. To the love of my life. I will show you photos of my wife with the photos of Miami. This area is Vedado, the edge of Vedado and Centro. Centro is very poor. My mother is in a bad part of Centro near the Malecn where many buildings are falling down. Many have no running water and blackouts happen with frequency. But it's very beautiful there, too."

As we walked toward the ocean and his mother's house, Lesvanne explained how he supported his family. He slept with wealthy American tourists-preferably middle-aged, large, divorced, and with children back home-for gifts provided they weren't from California. The women of California were to be avoided at all costs no matter how attractive they were. Lesvanne was a man of principle. Californian women never returned his love letters.

"You like this more mature type of woman because they are the most generous with you?" I asked.

"Never." He laughed. "Because I find this type of woman to be the most desirable! They are real women in their full expression of femininity! And with an American accent, too, that is the ultimate turn-on for me."

But Lesvanne's biggest problem as a jinetero with these female tourists was that he couldn't stop falling in love with his prey. He fell madly in love with all of them and spent most of his life licking his wounds from the heartbreak of them not writing him once they returned home.

"You want them to marry you so you can leave?"

"Never. I'm married already to the love of my life. They should move here until I'm ready to leave for Miami with my wife."

Lesvanne led us away from the leafy open squares and private homes of Vedado into the cramped, dusty streets of Centro Habana. Chinese bicycles jerked down the street over potholes as stray dogs and cats combed for sc.r.a.ps. Children played stickball with rocks. As we moved deeper into the neighborhood more and more eyes looked out at us behind the bars guarding front doors and windows. A hundred radios blared from apartments. Pedestrians stopped on the sidewalks and hollered "Oye!," only to have baskets lowered from balconies with a string offering a wrench or a battery or an article of clothing. The neighborhood gave every indication of being a slum yet the mood was entirely unlike any of the Western ghettos I'd visited in my life. Men hissed at women from all corners, yet the women would just smile coyly and laugh. n.o.body appeared to fear anyone else. I'd never seen women walk with such self-possession and pride. But then, of course, there weren't magazine stands anywhere to remind them of how ugly they were.

At Lesvanne's mother's apartment he introduced me to his mother, who had a cold and remained in her rocking chair without getting up. A framed portrait of her at fifteen was behind her, facing me, above a cupboard. The two versions of the same woman's face smiled at me before she turned back to the television. She was intently watching a roundtable discussion on Elin Gonzlez. They showed images of the boy's father and then cut to a million people gathered to listen to Fidel giving a speech about him.

"What do you make of this Elin Gonzlez thing?" I asked Lesvanne.

"There's a joke about when the Pope came to Havana a couple of years ago. Fidel rode with him in the pope mobile on the Malecn. It was such a nice day they opened the roof and the Pope's hat flew off from the sea breeze and blew into the ocean. Fidel jumped out and hopped into the ocean without getting wet. He walked on the water to grab the Pope's hat floating on the waves. After Fidel returned the hat to the Pope the next day's headlines about the event came in from Granma, our newspaper: 'Fidel proves he is a G.o.d. He walks on water.' And then the Vatican newspaper: 'Pope performs miracle allowing Fidel to walk on water.' And in the Miami newspapers: 'Fidel can't swim.'"

Lesvanne grabbed a scratched, beat-up digital camera, fetched some batteries from a drawer, and kissed his mother good-bye as we left her home.

As we made our way back to Calle Neptuno with him still searching through the camera to find his Miami photos, he was stopped in the street dozens of times. People hollered out from their homes and invited us in for coffee. Kids egged him on to kick a soccer ball around or play beisbol. Storekeepers left their shops to reach out and shake his hand and give him a hug. Old women selling sweets and flowers asked about his mother. He kept embracing people over and over with affection and warmth. Every time he tried to show me a photograph people came over to look and ask questions about his trip to Miami. Twice a policeman guarding a corner saw us walking together and asked Lesvanne to produce his ident.i.ty card. They asked me in broken English if he was following me and if I wanted him to leave me alone.

A few paces away from the police officer Lesvanne gently shook his head. "You see how shamefully we treat our own citizens here?" He returned to his camera and showed me a few photos of his common-law wife and a few hundred photos of the American tourist female "friends" he'd made since he was fifteen. "I love all of these beautiful women. I miss all of them." Finally he located Miami inside his camera. Nearly all of the photos were an inventory of the materialistic orgy he had partaken of in Miami Beach. There were hardly any people in his photos, just things. They were things Lesvanne saw that he was determined to own once he moved to America and got busy making a success of himself: Hummers, houses, pools, jewelry, plastic-breasted women on posters at gift shops, bars, boats, condos. Lesvanne's favorite outfit, which he bought in Miami, was what he wore nearly every day since his return, and he washed it every night until it was blindingly bright.

I asked him if his American "friends" presented any kind of problem with his "wife" and he asked why it should.

"Would you like to see a video of my wife?" he asked.

I nodded.

All I could make out from the camera monitor were blurs of undulating color.

"What am I looking at here?"

"That's her gallbladder. Isn't she beautiful?"

"Come again?"

"Isn't she beautiful?"

"I still don't know what I'm looking at," I said.

"You're looking inside my wife. This is from an operation I filmed."

Later, when I could breathe again, I asked him why he would film his wife on the operating table having her gallbladder removed.

"Because I love all of her, man. Inside and out. I want to know all of her."

I didn't say anything until he'd finished showing all the pictures.

I'd lost count of how many people he'd kissed and hugged h.e.l.lo on our walk. It threw me because after ending my first long-term relationship I went months before I realized that I was having no human physical contact. How did that happen?

"So you want all this s.h.i.t once you're settled in Miami?" I asked him.

"Of course I do. I've never had anything here. I'd like to work for these things."

"Okay. You get all that s.h.i.t-Hummer, house, pool, hot wife, jewelry, yacht. That whole photo alb.u.m of other people's stuff becomes your stuff. You're loaded. Then you're happier than here?"

"Why not? I could bring the things I love here over there and have the stuff to enjoy also."

"Okay, so you're loaded but maybe you're also afraid of losing everything all the time. You're afraid your wife is going to take you for half if she divorces you. You have to live in a gated community because you're afraid of everyone. You have no sense of community or even give a f.u.c.k about your neighbor. Your kids don't respect you and just want money to buy s.h.i.t to distract themselves from being bored all the time. All the old people you know are in old folks' homes because n.o.body wants to deal with them. You can't be friends with any kids because everyone will think you're a pedophile. You can't hug any guys because they're afraid you're gay or they're gay or everyone is gay. You can't really touch anybody without second-guessing it."

"If I couldn't touch anyone I'd die, man. I'd die. This country is a f.u.c.king cage. My island is a zoo. Without this contact life would be unlivable."

Once we crossed the invisible border of Paseo del Prado into Old Havana, Lesvanne led us south, away from the elegant entrance to the Prado promenade guarded by lion statues and past the Hotel Inglaterra, Graham Greene's old stomping grounds. A group of musicians were covering kitschy Buena Vista Social Club hits for sunburned European tourists smoking cigars and sipping mojitos outside the hotel, waited on by locals. Some older bachelors had young local girls at their sides fawning over them.

"This is the new Cuba greeting visitors with open legs," Lesvanne remarked. "Even if we had the money, ordinary Cubans are forbidden inside these hotels. Before the revolution, blacks could not visit hotels, some beaches, or even enter parks. Fidel changed that. Blacks became proud of being Cuban, too. But now this new tourist apartheid has begun to replace the money we have lost from Russia after their collapse. We call this resolver."

Lesvanne pointed across the street to Havana's Parque Central and the Esquina Caliente (Hot Corner), a group gathered near a giant statue of Jose Mart pointing accusingly in the direction of the United States. Esquina Caliente was a forum where the Cuban government had designated a small mob of fanatical beisbol fans "professional fans," charged with engaging in screaming matches of almost homicidal intensity about the merits of current players, teams, and other unresolvable historical debates. Several debates were going on at once inside the crowd of perhaps seventy-five men, their women and children seated nearby on benches relaxing under the shade and snickering at choice sound bites delivered by the men.

"This is for baseball?" I asked.

"They look like they're all ready to commit murder." Lesvanne smiled and shook his head. "But in all the years I have watched them, I have never even seen them come to blows. This is one of the only places in my country where you can debate everything in the code of baseball. Even defections can be discussed if done carefully."

Beyond the men, Lesvanne pointed, was Obispo and tourist alley. We walked to the edge of Central Park and crossed the boulevard so Lesvanne could buy a peso ice cream from a vendor. I noticed more policemen on the corners glaring at Lesvanne, who now walked a little less freely under their surveillance. "Do the police look at you like that because I'm with you?" I asked Lesvanne. He nodded before lifting his chin toward the Capitolio, Cuba's bizarro replica of Washington's Capitol Building that was built in 1926 by a U.S. construction firm. Dollar portrait photographers were setting up their hundred-year-old cameras just below the fifty-five great front steps leading up to the entrance of the Capitolio while a couple shriveled, dolled-up "authentic" old Cuban women with unlit baseball batsized cigars between their teeth waited to pose with some tourists.

A friend stopped Lesvanne in the street and asked him about seeing some boxing at Kid Chocolate the following day. A regional tournament was about to start.

"How close are we to Kid Chocolate?" I asked both of them.

"It's right beside us! Twenty steps."

Lesvanne started drifting up the sidewalk with his ice-cream cone as I followed. He pointed his melting cone toward the chipped mural of Kid Chocolate's face smiling teasingly behind an ancient, rusting fence locked with chains that looked as if they'd been recovered from the bottom of the ocean.

They had named the auditorium after one of Cuba's greatest champions. Eligio Sardias Montalvo was a boy who used to fight in the Old Havana streets for change back in the 1920s before he earned the nickname Kid Chocolate. As Jack Johnson had done before him in the United States, Chocolate learned to fight where the money was most available, mostly in battles royal paid for and attended by whites. A handful of blindfolded men, sometimes as many as ten, would fight until the last man standing could claim victory and the prize money. Before he'd left his teens, Kid Chocolate won every one of his 162 fights. In 1931, at the age of twenty-one, he became Cuba's first professional world champion. Chocolate was so popular with women he'd defended his t.i.tle dozens of times while suffering from untreated syphilis. He was such a confident champion he was often found in bars with a woman under each arm, freely drinking and smoking in the days leading up to his t.i.tle defenses. After victories in America, where he had a house in Harlem, Chocolate would return to the streets of Old Havana in a new car and shower the fans who swarmed him with flowers and coins. He'd died an alcoholic in grueling poverty in 1988, long after most of the world had believed he'd already died.

"Brinicito." Lesvanne laughed. "We have bad luck about seeing boxing here. Today there is none. But I think we have good luck with the man you're looking to train you."

"What?"

"Look in the grocery store beside us. You see the man in the Cuba tracksuit with his back to us? You see the man with the newspaper under his arm? Hector's always reading. That's him."

The grocery store across from the entrance to Kid Chocolate had a giant security guard working the front door. I couldn't see anyone past his bulk. Someone finished paying at the counter and as he left the store I saw the sleeve of a red jersey filled out with a broad shoulder and a flash of a shaved head. After another person was finished at the register, I watched this man reach into his back pocket and produce several plastic bags for the checkout girl to place the items he'd purchased. His face was sullen yet his body language was confident. He pointed eagerly through the gla.s.s counter at chewing gum and a small bar of chocolate. The checkout girl teased him, reaching over to tap his tummy. Millimeters before contact he s.n.a.t.c.hed her hand-savored her startled shudder for a split second-only to squeeze it gently with affection. She nodded and they kissed each other on the cheek good-bye.

"You see?" Lesvanne reached into his own back pocket and held a fistful of his own plastic bags. "A two-time Olympic boxing champion like Hector is just like any other Cuban who wants to go grocery shopping. He could have left and made millions anywhere else on earth, but here he has to wait in line and bring his own bags. We all carry those bags because none of our stores have them."

"That's Hector Vinent?"

"Claro que s. Maybe a little heavier than his fighting days, but that's Hector Vinent Charn. Watch-HeCTOR! CAMPEN! OYE!"

Hector looked out the window at us without smiling and reflexively held up a fist and winked.

"Jesus f.u.c.king Christ," I gasped. "It is him."

"He doesn't live any better than someone selling peanuts in the street."

As I looked on I couldn't help trying to imagine stumbling upon Joe DiMaggio at a supermarket or Jack Nicholson waiting in line to catch the bus. Maybe it was more like unearthing a Cezanne while rummaging through piles of used Ikea prints at a garage sale. This was a human being who represented a deliberately uncashed winning sweepstakes ticket. Like any of the elite Cuban athletes, Hector Vinent, in the bloom of his career, encompa.s.sed the most expensive human cargo left on earth. There were over twenty thousand boxers officially employed by Cuba. If a fraction of them along with the cream of the beisbol crop washed onto American sh.o.r.es tomorrow, they would be worth billions on the marketplace.

When I first saw him, Hector was twenty-eight, maybe thirty pounds over his fighting weight, and he was banned from competing for his country for the last four years by the most powerful political forces in Cuba. It happened after two of his teammates defected at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, leaving him to live out the rest of his life as a kind of living double-exposed photograph of the future he gave up in America versus the one awaiting the rest of his life in Cuba. Maybe his headline was a completely different cautionary tale depending on which side of the Florida Straits you told the story on, but staring at him, the fine print was completely illegible to me.

Hector shook the hand of the security guard who held the door open and glared at me with a mixture of curiosity and wariness.

"Hector?"

"Campen," he grunted, offering his hand. "Boxeador?"

I nodded.

Hector turned to Lesvanne, who turned to me. "I'll ask him if he'll train you. How much are you willing to pay?"

"Whatever he thinks is fair."

Hector proposed to train me at Rafael Trejo the following week for six dollars a day, nearly half his monthly wage for training children there. We could train as often as I liked, but there was also a daily surcharge of two dollars for the women who looked after the gym for the state. Palms had to be greased. Lesvanne shrugged and said it all sounded reasonable to him.

"What's the going rate for private lessons from two-time Olympic champions where you come from?" asked Lesvanne.

"Est bien?" Hector asked me.

"S," I answered. "Lesvanne, I don't know the word but please tell him it's an honor to meet him and I'm grateful for this."

Before Lesvanne could translate, a beautiful girl in a red dress pa.s.sed behind Hector, and he caught me following her movements. He laughed and quickly turned to look at her before crying out, "Oye! Mi amor! Mi amiga. Yaima!" The girl stopped, recognized Hector, and they embraced. Hector introduced Lesvanne and me to Yaima, who delicately leaned in to be kissed on the cheek by each of us. After I kissed her she leaned back and a.s.sessed me with a slowly curling smile. Hector took a step toward Lesvanne and his gruff voice whispered gently into Lesvanne's ear.

"He says you look a little lonely and if you'd like to have Yaima visit your apartment tonight or be your girlfriend while you stay in Havana, none of that would be a problem."

9.

LA LUCHA.

Don't try to understand me too quickly.

-Andre Gide A MONTH GOES BY and the best I can do to explain anything to myself is to admit how many things don't work here, but they don't seem to work the other way, either. In Old Havana, the names of the streets before the revolution provided a glimpse into the city's state of mind. You might have known someone who lived on the corner of Soul and Bitterness, Solitude and Hope, or Light and Avocado. After the revolution, they changed the names and put up new signs, but if you asked directions from a local today you'd get the old names. They all meant something personal to the people who lived on those streets. That avocado grew in the garden of a convent. That hope was for a door in the city wall before it was torn down. That soul refers to the loneliness of the street's position in the city. Sometimes these streets lead you to dead ends and other times you stumble onto cathedrals, structures built with the intention of creating music from stone. The sore heart Havana offers never makes you choose between the kind of beauty that gives rather than the kind that takes something from you: it does both simultaneously.

While guidebooks might tell you that time collapsed here, another theory says that in Latin America, all of history coexists at once. Just before the triumph of the revolution, progress took shape in ambitious proposals made by American architects to erect grand skysc.r.a.pers all along the Malecn seawall offering a fine view and convenient access to a newly constructed multicasino island built in the bay. To accommodate the gamblers, vast areas of Old Havana were to be demolished and leveled for parking access. In 1958, Graham Greene wrote, "To live in Havana was to live in a factory that turned out human beauty on a conveyor belt." Yet this beauty the people of Cuba unquestionably possess walks hand in hand with their pain. Whoever you might encounter in this place lacking the ability to walk or even to stand for whatever reason will inevitably remain convinced they can dance. When Castro was put on trial in 1953 by Batista's government and asked who was intellectually responsible for his first attempt at insurrection, he dropped the name of the poet Jose Mart. From the little I'd learned of it, the revolution's hold on Cubans resembled not so much poetry as the chess term zugzw.a.n.g: you're forced to move, but the only moves you can make will put you in a worse position. Cuba had become an entire population of eleven million people with every iron in the fire doubling as a finger in a dike.

I hitched a ride in a gypsy cab most of the way to the boxing gym with a black Cuban who gave me the dime tour of the greatest potholes in Havana. He was literally serenading the potholes before we could even see them. Out my window there were lineups and police icily keeping their eyes peeled. "ltimo?" someone shouted as they joined the line, followed by another "ltimo!" confirming who was the last person in the line. This was how people found their place in queues all over the city. The driver told me what was clearly an old joke: stop anywhere in Havana for five seconds and you'll start your own lineup.

I looked up at clotheslines strung between columns, women in curlers leaning against the railings of their balconies. I saw tourists snapping photos of the architecture of a building where Lesvanne took me to visit a friend. We had coffee while his family complained incessantly about the broken stairwell and leaky roof. Finally the harbor came into view with the waters that in the early twentieth century were banned to fishermen because of all the bodies being thrown from the Morro Castle by government thugs. Trumpet players on the Malecn blew at sea puddles on the pavement. A policeman checked a man's identification while staring at a cruise ship coming in on the horizon. We drove a little farther and the whole colonial theme park faded in the distance.

The driver lit a cigarette and reached back to press play on a little broken-down ghetto blaster in the backseat, and Nat King Cole's voice came overenunciating in Spanish through the speakers. The driver imitated it and grinned wide: "Pen-sannn-doh. I luuuv it. He recorded it in Havana. My father saw him in a nightclub perform before the revolution.

"My friend, did you know they needed three tries to find Havana before they got it right?" he asked me.

I looked at his face and asked him for one of his cigarettes.

"Did you know that originally Cuba was named 'Juana' after Juana La Loca, the insane daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella? They were Columbus's patrons. All of that little girl's relatives have been s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g with our lives ever since. We can stop for a beer and I could tell you more."

"I'm training at the gym very soon."

"But you're smoking."

"I'm a very complicated man."