A Cuban Boxer's Journey

by Brin-Jonathan Butler

  A Cuban Boxer’s Journey

  Guillermo Rigondeaux, from Castro’s Traitor to American Champion

  Brin-Jonathan Butler

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  Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.

  “But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks.

  “The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.”

  Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting.

  Then he adds: “Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.”

  Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”

  —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

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

  —Fidel Castro

  Contents

  1. La Lucha

  2. Gimnasio de Boxeo Rafael Trejo, Havana, Cuba: 2007

  3. Castro’s Traitor

  4. Los Angeles, California: April 2, 2010

  5. New York, New York

  6. San Ysidro, California, U.S.-Mexican border, Tijuana: August 20, 2010

  7. Dallas, Texas: November 2010

  8. Dublin, Ireland: March 19, 2011

  9. Havana, Cuba: Spring 2011

  10. Miami, Florida: Summer 2011

  11. Radio City Music Hall, New York: April 13, 2013

  12. The Fight

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1

  La Lucha

  Treason for money is one of the favorite weapons of the United States to destroy Cuba’s resistance.

  —Fidel Castro

  Ninety miles off the shores of Cuba, in the United States, boxing’s story was always pretty easy to follow. Maybe that was the point. What’s more basic in exposing a man or a people than what they’re willing to stand for or stand up to? After Jack Johnson became the first African American heavyweight champion, one great white hope after another attempted to dethrone him and everything he represented. James Braddock was the workingman’s champion during the Great Depression. When Joe Louis took on Max Schmeling in the 1930s, it wasn’t lost on anyone that he was championing a moral war against Hitler and fascism. Prior to their two fights, when had white America ever cared so deeply and gotten behind the struggle of an African American? In the thick of the 1960s Muhammad Ali challenged the establishment over Vietnam. By the end of the twentieth century, there were few more suitable emblems of unfettered capitalism than boxing promoter Don King waving the Stars and Stripes and shouting “Only in America!” at one of Mike Tyson’s billion-dollar stimulus packages to the Las Vegas economy. In one of the most recent examples of boxing’s power to reveal the nation’s true character, the justice system itself postponed the incarceration of Floyd Mayweather Jr. for domestic abuse on the basis of his economic value to down-and-out Vegas.

  Boxing illuminates just as much about the country only ninety miles south of the United States—Cuba. Cubans have always been haunted by the sea. The 228 miles dividing Havana and Miami might constitute one of the largest graveyards on earth. The area is a minefield of fatal dangers many Cubans have crossed blindfolded: the force of the Gulf Stream, volatile weather, shark-infested waters. Estimates vary, but as many as 40 percent of those who have attempted to cross the Florida Straits have perished. Since Fidel Castro rose to power in 1959, ending four hundred years of colonialism, more than a million Cubans have abandoned their lives in their homeland. The most corrosive legacy that Castro will leave behind for his people might be that of the broken family. The waves lapping against Cuba’s shore have long felt as much like the bars of a prison cell as a gateway to freedom. The torment and longing of exile has irrevocably damaged the soul of the Cuban people, and this anguish over an impossible choice unrelentingly shadows them regardless of their choice to stay or to leave.

  Enter into this fraught dilemma the Cuban athlete, perhaps the most lucrative human cargo left on earth. The first slaves were brought to Cuba around 1520, and political failures on both sides of the Florida Straits have encouraged a thriving modern slave trade. Today, at bargain-basement prices, extraordinarily talented human beings are bought and sold in the marketplace. Contracts are signed with these Cubans under duress and in languages they can’t comprehend. Once “free” of Cuba, many of these athletes never come close to earning enough money to repay the debt of their sale, trafficking, and survival in the United States to their benefactors. Many of the athletes have been unable to endure the guilt of abandoning their families, let alone the horrific voyage inside the smuggler’s boat.

  Indeed, despite demonstrating bottomless courage by having had more than four hundred fights inside a ring by the age of twenty-seven, it was the journey to America, in February 2009, that Guillermo Rigondeaux would later describe as the most traumatic experience of his life. And that was long before he got around to discussing the toll of potentially never seeing his country, home, or family again. Compounding this tragedy is the irony that Rigondeaux is the most capable human being I have ever witnessed defending himself inside a ring while also remaining one of the most vulnerable and defenseless outside a ring—at least since he arrived in the United States. It was his tragedy even more than his talent that compelled me to drop everything and take the considerable risks I did to explore what I could of the depths of his story, as well as the broader, troubling realities his experience exposed about Cuban and American cultures and their values.

  The mantra of all Cuban boxers is la lucha (the struggle). Boxers across the country train under Fidel’s words, painted on gym walls: “Our athletes are and always have been an example for all.” For ordinary Cuban citizens, the struggle in the ring reflects their day-to-day struggle of survival. By Castro and the system’s design, it is impossible to discuss sport in Cuba without exploring life in Cuba. Boxing has always been a Rosetta Stone into the character of Cuban society. Cubans enter the ring in defense of their families, their neighborhoods, their society, and then—and only then—their self-respect. As the conditions of life grew more desperate and more Cubans lived what many considered a broken dream, an increasing number of boxers risked death or imprisonment, abandoning everything they knew for the chance to shipwreck into the American Dream. While Castro branded any defector a selfish traitor to their people and their revolutionary cause, each ordinary Cuban citizen was forced to confront the harsh truth of whether, in fact, it was Castro’s Cuba that had betrayed them. If historically the Cuban boxer refusing millions to leave the island was an example of all that had succeeded with the revolution, surely those boxers that accepted the bait to abandon everything they knew was equally an example of a decaying revolution.

  In the 1970s, in the prime of his youth, Teófilo Stevenson, Cuba’s most famous champion, was offered $5 million to defect and fight Muhammad Ali. Stevenson responded by asking of the offer itself, “What is one million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans?” While all Cubans were intimately familiar with Stevenson’s words, only those who agreed were permitted to speak openly about how they felt. For the rest, even in the privacy of their own homes, they had to whisper.

  In the 1980s and 1990s, Teófilo Stevenson’s successor, Félix Savón, also a three-time heavyweight Olympic champion, rejected Don King’s offer of $25 million to leave Cuba in order
to fight Mike Tyson. At the rate of pay the Cuban government extended to Savón at that time, he would have had to work roughly one million years to earn what America was offering him to fight inside one Las Vegas casino or another. “I’m already a millionaire,” Savón explained to me. “If I need to, I can knock on any door in my country and find a million friends to offer me a peso or a piece of bread. I would never trade the love of my people for all the money in the world.”

  After the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, where both Félix Savón and Guillermo Rigondeaux won gold, Savón retired and passed the baton of his captaincy of the Cuban national boxing team to Rigondeaux. At the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Rigondeaux scored another gold medal for Cuba and cemented the legitimate possibility that he be the first boxer in history to win four Olympic gold medals. Although Rigondeaux gave every indication of proudly carrying the torch passed on to him by one of the revolution’s greatest boxers, with his defection he was fighting for something more valuable than money and so used that torch to become a kind of Promethean figure, illuminating the possibilities and unseen dangers awaiting all Cubans in America.

  2

  Gimnasio de Boxeo Rafael Trejo, Havana, Cuba

  2007

  The president of Ecuador greets Fidel with the gift of a rare Galápagos tortoise, informing the dictator that they can live to nearly two hundred years. Fidel accepts the pet, then turns to his aide and says: “That’s the problem with pets. You get attached to them and they die on you.”

  —Miami joke

  My first trip to Havana was in February 2000, in the midst of the Elián González fiasco. This time, what was referred to as “political kiddie porn” entered into the civil war fought across ninety miles of ocean. In November 1999, at the age of five, Elián González and his mother, along with twelve other passengers, had left Cuba on a small aluminum boat. Tragically, the boat’s faulty engine had died after they encountered a storm while attempting to cross the Florida Straits. Only González and two other passengers managed to survive the journey. They were discovered floating at sea, and were saved by two fisherman. The fisherman handed the survivors over to the U.S. Coast Guard and all hell broke loose on both sides of Florida Straits. It turned out Elián’s mother had taken Elián from his father in Cuba without his father’s knowledge or permission. After some negotiation at the highest levels of government in the United States and Cuba, Elián was sent back to Cuba in June 2000. Elián’s return to Cuba, a high-profile loss for the United States, was yet another political feather in Fidel’s cap.

  On the flight over I was reading Pitching Around Fidel: A Journey Into the Heart of Cuban Sports by S. L. Price. Each elite athlete profiled in the book encountered the same hopelessly impossible decision as every other Cuban, only with a lot more money offered for their escape. Where Teófilo Stevenson had rejected $5 million in the 1970s, the rate offered to Félix Savón, Cuba’s latest heavyweight destroyer, to defect to America and fight Mike Tyson was in the neighborhood of $20 million. Even the act of writing a book exploring the ambiguity of that choice had caused Price to be banned from ever returning to Cuba. “You have penetrated an impenetrable system,” he was told by security agents. The bombshell of the book was Cuban boxer Héctor Vinent, a two-time Olympic champion, as Rigondeaux was soon to become, confessing to Price his desire to escape. No Cuban athlete, in Cuba, had ever before said this on the record. Yet Vinent never managed to escape. Maybe because he never tried in the first place was the only reason he wasn’t thrown in prison, either. Instead, Vinent began to train children to box at one of Cuba’s oldest boxing gyms. Two days after my arrival, I met Vinent at his gym, where he earned less than $20 a month. He offered to train me for $6 a day under the table, some portion of which was skimmed off the top by those who oversaw the gym.

  Years later I had the opportunity of asking Price about what first drew him to Cuba. Price looks like Jimmy Stewart and has the voice of Daniel Stern narrating The Wonder Years. In manner and presence, his warmth and generosity of spirit remind me a great deal of what foreigners love about Americans. Yet Price shook his head and confessed if there was anywhere in the world he could afford a second home, it would be in Havana. He quoted a key scene in Lawrence of Arabia by way of explanation:

  “‘What is it, Major Lawrence, that attracts you personally to the desert?’

  Lawrence answers him, ‘It’s … clean.’ The thing about Cuba is that it’s dirty. It’s not clean. And the relations between the families in Miami and the families in Havana, the relations between the families back and forth, they aren’t clean. The relations between the people who go back and forth between the two cities are not clean. It’s dirty. And I don’t mean dirty like filthy or corrupt, although all that is there. I mean it’s gray. It’s not black and white. It’s not easy. You will go there and all your preconceptions will be upset and if you’re any kind of human being you will allow them to be upset. There’s nowhere on earth like it.”

  When you first arrive in Cuba it’s hard not to wonder what Shakespeare would have done with a character like Fidel Castro. Then it doesn’t take long before you realize the better question is what Fidel Castro would have done with Shakespeare. Guidebooks and legions of tourists warn that Cuba is frozen in time, but Cuba has been reeling for years. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and its subsidies to Cuba, the choice Teófilo Stevenson and Félix Savón had made rejecting millions had become much harder for Héctor Vinent. Fidel called this dire time in Cuba’s history a “special period.” As blackouts and food shortages became commonplace and desperation grew, Vinent’s growing motivation to leave, compared to champions past, reflected the new realities and concerns all Cubans were confronting.

  Years later, in 2007, I met Rigondeaux at Gimnasio de Boxeo Rafael Trejo in Havana, not long after his first failed attempt at defecting in Brazil. At Trejo, the outdoor gym where I returned nearly every year to train under Héctor Vinent, two or three vaguely sinister-looking old women guarded the entrance from tourists. There were different sets of these old women, but they always reminded me of the Macbeth witches. The women were nestled up against a wall of photographs inventorying the great Cuban champions Trejo has produced. While each boxer’s face hanging on display belonged to a former world or Olympic champion, all were even more famous on the island for having rejected millions of dollars. Nothing drove the Cuban fuck you home more to Americans than demonstrating that Cubans fought for something more valuable than money. While the witches spoke about this information for free, naturally there was a charge of a couple of dollars to document any of this fascinating legacy with your camera. If you had the money to pay, lately you could document something else, too. Over the last couple of years the wall of champions had become an even more exclusive club. More athletes than at any other time since the revolution had responded to the siren song of the American Dream and risked everything, including their own lives, to escape.

  Past the entrance, the sun blazed down and there were rows and rows of bleachers behind and in front. For warm-ups, the students raced up and down the bleachers and their paces were as loud as a New York express subway until the coaches whistled them on to the next task. Car tires were set against an iron railing for boys to practice their combinations, snapping their punches. In place of bags, sacks were hung next to the tires. A tractor tire lay in the shade under the far-side bleachers, where an instructor swung a sledgehammer over one shoulder and then the other, plunging the hammer down and showing a kid the proper technique of incorporating the entire body with each swing and the mechanics of the weight transfer involved. The ring was the centerpiece of the gym, its canvas blood- and sweat-stained with a little neighborhood mud smeared here and there. There was a lucky child who lived next door, on the second floor of his building, who routinely spied with his friends on the action below from his window.

  During this last trip to Havana to train at Rafael Trejo, more than any other I’d had, whispers of sympathy were everywhere across Havana f
or those abandoning their lives in Cuba for an opportunity anywhere else. A hushed referendum was building with each high-profile defection. Maybe this was because it was also my first trip to Cuba since Castro had stepped down from power with a mysterious illness, the illness itself an official state secret. Castro handed over control to his brother. As usual, all the predictions of societal collapse or popular uprising were false, yet everywhere citizens watched nervously and waited. As with the rest of the world, all eleven million inhabitants on the island could feel the Castro brothers near-five-decade hold over Cuba coming to an end. Unlike the rest of the world, however, few bothered to speculate as to what came next. They knew full well who held the guns. They were not surprised riots never ensued after Fidel stepped down. The prevailing sentiment remained the sense that the treasure of their country continued to rust in the wrong hands. The joke on Fidel Castro had always been that if Spanish lacked a future tense, the man who could give a speech for seven hours straight would be silenced. What subject was there for him to discuss besides promises? Now nobody was sure what the future promised.

  Only a few months before, I had heard that the new captain of the Cuban national team, two-time Olympic gold medalist Guillermo Rigondeaux, had attempted to defect in Brazil with teammate Erislandy Lara and had been arrested. This amounted to the highest-profile attempted boxing defection in Cuban history, unavoidably symbolizing a massive turning point not just in Cuban sport, but in Cuban society as a whole. Rigondeaux’s attempt at escape had become an international news item and a national soap opera regularly appearing on Cuban television. Castro himself had personally spoken out in the state newspaper, calling Rigondeaux a traitor and a “Judas” to his 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.” Compounding the significance and ambiguity of Rigondeaux’s situation was boxing legend Teófilo Stevenson, probably the second most famous Cuban in the world for the fortune he had turned down to leave, defending Rigondeaux. “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.”