“Quizás.”
“Only maybe?”
“Maybe. But certainly not here. And when he leaves, he leaves behind a wife and two children with a troubled, difficult situation. Anyone associated with his reputation will suffer. The government likes to settle scores. They have eyes everywhere. Police, spies, neighbors. Employment opportunities. Everything can be driven into the ground. The home of Rigondeaux’s family can be taken. So he will have to watch his mouth if he makes it to La Yuma successfully. All Cubans are cursed from birth. Cursed if you stay, cursed if you leave. And this situation is no more sad than behind any other door we have walked past from Trejo until now,” he continued. “We’re all born into struggle in this place. It’s normal. Suffering is a way of life. There is nothing special in Rigondeaux’s tragedy except that he can escape it and create a new tragedy with fame and fortune but without his home, without his family and friends to share it with.”
I point out the obvious: Héctor is still here. He stayed. Does he consider Rigondeaux a traitor?
“A traitor to what? To who? The greatest pride for a Cuban is being a father, and a Cuban’s biggest disappointment is not having any ability to provide for his children. So what important principle is this Cuban boxer betraying? Who turned his back on who? You explain to me how I should be able to keep a straight face defending the country I love against Rigondeaux’s legacy? We can have a drink in Chinatown, and you can buy us some fortune cookies to answer all of your questions.”
We kept walking.
4
Los Angeles, California
April 2, 2010
We’re in a Special Period, one of the most difficult periods in our history. Why? Because we’re alone confronting an empire. Only a weak, cowardly people surrenders and goes back to slavery.
—Fidel Castro
Guillermo Rigondeaux is Cuba libre. 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. This is the only country in the world that people try to break in rather than to break out.
—Don King
If the choice between Cuba and America amounted to one between Fidel Castro and Don King, what kind of choice was that? This was boxing, one of the rawest distillations of capitalism America could dish out, always a poor man’s sport, so nearly every ugly question raised about this dynamic naturally had an even uglier punch line. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t? Maybe, maybe not. Before you had the chance to choose between King or Castro, what about Cuba’s version of Sophie’s Choice: in this case, the choice between what dollar value America could offer you versus the risk of never seeing your family again? And that’s only if you made it that far. Pushing your chips into that decision required accepting estimates of the gruesomely high mortality rate of the people who had attempted to cross the same ninety miles Guillermo Rigondeaux traveled as human cargo, along with thirty other men, women, and children, back in February 2009.
It’s hard to move without a path. Rigondeaux stepped inside a smuggler’s boat and washed ashore into a perilous new struggle he knew very little about. Boxers have a notoriously limited shelf life. There was very little time for Rigondeaux to cash in on his talents. Rigondeaux’s only path to success was hurtling toward the American Dream like a runaway ambulance through traffic. All I knew to do was to get as close as I could and tail him toward my own version of it.
Which led me to a parking lot outside the Wild Card gym in Hollywood, California, waiting for Rigondeaux to arrive. I was checked in next door at the Vagabond Inn, where Rigondeaux had also stayed for a few days when he first moved to Los Angeles. It was the common first stop for all fighters who traveled to Hollywood, and most never earned enough in professional boxing careers to cover their hotel bills. I had an interview and a photo shoot scheduled that I’d arranged inside Wild Card, one of the world’s most famous gyms, where Rigondeaux had recently begun training. This was the gym where Manny Pacquiao, the most beloved boxing champion since Muhammad Ali, had trained for years. Pacquiao’s success had made Wild Card the most famous boxing gym on earth and had made his trainer, Freddie Roach, an international celebrity. A billboard down the street advertised Roach’s new HBO reality show.
After only a year fighting in America, Rigondeaux had blown through all five of his opponents, knocking out four. Freddie Roach had agreed to train Rigondeaux and told reporters that meeting the Cuban defector reminded him of the first time he’d met Pacquiao. “He’s the most talented fighter I’ve ever seen,” Roach had told me the day before. “But he’s up against a lot. And I don’t mean anything inside the ring. If he can stay in L.A. and avoid everything over there in Miami that seems to swallow up all the other Cuban fighters who come over, he can make it. But how many great stars from Cuba have come over here and made it? Being the greatest amateur fighter who ever lived doesn’t sell tickets in this country. Americans hate the Cuban style. And Florida won’t sell out the front row of a dance hall to watch their best Cuban fighters. It’s not going to be easy for this kid. Politics and sports—it’s fucked.”
It had taken me a year to figure out a way to reunite with Rigondeaux in America. The best I could come up with was ambush. I was broke and I didn’t know anyone he was dealing with in Miami, where he had lived since the defection in February 2009 until this recent move to Los Angeles to train. One of his backers in Miami was known as “The Spam King,” who had traded a life of selling cocaine in the 1980s for a life sending out more than a quarter of a billion spam e-mails, some of which were sex related, daily for the “legitimate” endeavor of getting involved with Cuban boxers.
When I read that Rigondeaux had moved to Los Angeles to sign up with Freddie Roach as his trainer at Wild Card, I finally had an in. While I wrote for nobody, had zero credentials, and had never formally interviewed anyone, the only friend I had in professional boxing was a recently retired female world champion who, during her title reign, also secretly moonlighted as a stripper in Las Vegas. She and I had both boxed amateurs in Canada at the same boxing club when we started out in the sport. After she won her first title, she had flirted with being trained by Freddie Roach. Roach had a crush on her and they had remained friends. She offered me Freddie’s phone number and an introduction. During the conversation with Roach over the phone, I lined up an interview with Rigondeaux at the gym.
Having no money to undertake the enterprise, I pitched the idea to a wealthy, flamboyant boxing client of mine who aspired to get into photography. Mucho Macho had just turned fifty, resembled some kind of bizarro, heterosexual Oscar Wilde in midlife crisis who drove a custom-made Japanese sport bike, and had just come back from a three-week visit to Havana, where he was “bitten by the place.” Cuba had greeted Mucho, as it greets many visitors, with open legs. I offered him a full-access photo shoot with Rigondeaux in exchange for him footing the expenses to L.A. “Very gonzo.” Mucho Macho laughed. “I’m up for an adventure.” The following day he showed up with our plane tickets and fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of camera and lighting equipment, and on the flight over we read the instruction manuals about how to use everything. One amateur teamed up with another on the hunt for the greatest living amateur on earth.
With its Hollywood location, Wild Card gym was a fascinating intersection of poverty and egregious fortune. Everyday Hollywood celebrities and people with vast wealth looking to be seen poured into Wild Card’s parking lot in their luxury automobiles. The gym was also the centerpiece of a mini-mall that included a barbershop, Laundromat, an Alcoholics Anonymous office, a Manny Pacquiao gift shop, and a Thai “happy ending” massage parlor for anyone having an unhappy afternoon of sparring at the gym. (People from the gym have told me that this policy has changed.) Across the street, just off Santa Monica and Vine, a stampede of destitute men and women, many strung out, crammed their way into a Social Security office to cash their welfar
e checks.
It had been more than a year since Rigondeaux’s second defection attempt from Cuba to the United States—this time successfully—via a smuggler’s boat to Cancun, in February 2009, and just over two years since I’d met him in Havana after his first failed attempt at defection back in Brazil during the Pan Am Games. After the arrest in Brazil, Rigondeaux had been sent back to Cuba in disgrace. Any hope he had of resuming his life and boxing career ended the moment Fidel Castro himself personally branded Rigondeaux a Judas and traitor to his people. Rumors were everywhere about how exactly he had managed to escape the regime with so much heat on him back in Cuba. There were rumors that he signed more contracts with people trying to get him out than autographs. Since arriving in the United States via Cancun, Rigondeaux had refused to give any details for fear of reprisal by the Cuban government against his wife and two children, who were still living there. The choice to leave had already lost Rigondeaux one family member: Rigondeaux’s father, a staunch Fidelista, had reportedly disowned his son for Rigondeaux’s betrayal of a revolution that specifically benefitted rural Cuban families like theirs who had suffered the worst under Fulgencio Batista. In order to escape Cuba, Rigondeaux was forced to abandon his mother, wife, and two children. Only very recently had reports out of Cuba announced that Rigondeaux’s mother, who allegedly supported his efforts to leave, had died. Rigondeaux was forbidden to return and attend the funeral under threat of immediate arrest.
At one time or another, only briefly in most cases, I’d met a handful of the most famous Cuban boxers who’d rejected millions to leave and seen both the rewards and the toll of that decision up close. They were routinely carted out at the national boxing championships to take a bow or they visited Rafael Trejo while I was training. I wanted to understand why someone like Rigondeaux, a Cuban meant to carry the symbolic mantle of Fidel’s half-century struggle against America, had rejected his role. If Bobby Fischer had fought the Cold War on behalf of the United States against Russia on a chessboard, Rigondeaux was meant to do the same thing for Cuba, only in a boxing ring. Rigondeaux never wished to be a symbol for anyone or anything. He did wish to be an individual. As he made his descent from hero to traitor, then transformed from martyr to exile, it was clear all he had ever wished to be was a boxer.
As the Hollywood sign peeked out from behind the smog, I couldn’t help wondering what impression this scene, this city—this country—had made upon Rigondeaux when he had first arrived. Guillermo Rigondeaux Ortiz was born on September 30, 1980, and had grown up on a coffee farm in Santiago de Cuba with six brothers and sisters. There was no running water in his family home, so one of his daily family chores was walking a few miles to load up on water and transport it back to his house. He credited this task in developing his phenomenal balance and strength. The same year Rigondeaux was born, one hundred twenty-five thousand Cubans departed the country during the Mariel boatlift, the largest exodus since the revolution began. Cuba’s economy had dropped sharply, and more than ten thousand Cubans crammed into the Peruvian embassy, seeking asylum. Fidel responded with an announcement that anyone who wished leave could do so openly. A massive exodus by boat ensued. “Fidel has just flushed his toilet on us,” Mauricio Ferré, the Miami mayor at that time, famously remarked. Rigondeaux, barely in his teens, had then been discovered for his potential by the Cuban industrial sports complex and had been sent to train in Havana at La Finca, the most elite sports academy on the island.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it an end to billion-dollar subsidies sent to Cuba, Rigondeaux spent the remainder of his teens during the worst of what Castro described as a “Special Period.” Cuba was in free fall, with widespread blackouts and overwhelming energy shortages. Food became scarce, along with any available fuel. By some estimates, the black-market economy eclipsed the size of the regular economy. People were serving time in prison simply for possessing an American dollar. Not long after the media firestorm of Elián González had been messily resolved with González being sent back to Cuba, Rigondeaux won his first Olympic gold medal in Sydney on his twentieth birthday. Whatever backdrop accompanied Rigondeaux’s rise in Cuban society, his living in Cuba would always mean never being permitted to emerge as an individual, let alone the superstar he felt himself to be, regardless of how much he accomplished. By Castro’s design, there was only one superstar in Cuba, and that was the system itself.
Rigondeaux loved cars. Like nearly all boxers—most of who come from profoundly impoverished circumstances—he was materialistic. Castro had given him a Mitsubishi Lancer, Cuba’s rough equivalent of a Bentley, after he won his second Olympic gold medal. (He was awarded his modest home in the Boyeros section of Havana for his first gold.) When the government impounded it as punishment after the alleged defection attempt in Brazil, Rigondeaux had told the media that it was his favorite possession in the world. Other Olympic champions, such as 1992 gold medalist Joel Casamayor, had famously gotten nothing more than a Chinese bicycle. Another champion and Rigondeaux teammate, Yuriorkis Gamboa, sold his gold medal to a tourist in the hopes of scraping together enough money for his daughter’s birthday party. Yet I wondered if those Range Rovers and Bentleys in Wild Card’s parking lot were enough to overshadow all the suffering felt by the people who actually lived in the area and had fallen through the cracks of a society only to hit bottom with no safety net.
*
“Where the fuck is this guy?” Mucho Macho asked me. “You’re sure you had an interview lined up?”
Finally a Lexus SUV pulled into the parking lot and slowed down where we were standing. The driver’s side window rolled down and a man shouting into his cell phone put his hand over the phone and waved me over.
“You’re both here for the interview with my fighter?” the driver asked in a thick Irish accent. “You’re here for Rigondeaux?”
I nodded.
“He’s not here?”
“Nope.”
“I was afraid of this. Sorry lads. Cubans—what do you expect? My apologies. I’m Gary Hyde, his manager, and this is my son Tommy sitting next to me here. I’m trying to work this out right now. I have Miami on the phone. Lemme just park this thing.”
For the next half hour we waited with Hyde and his son while Hyde fielded one tense call after another.
“Gimme another second, lad.” Hyde held up a hand apologetically and answered his phone for the tenth time, pacing away out of earshot. He returned and closed his phone. “The Miami crew says they don’t know where he is but he’ll be here. He’ll be here. What a disaster. Isn’t this gym grand, though? The whole city. I’d love to live in a town like this. Do you like it, lads?”
Hyde and his son had both flown in the previous day from Cork. Hyde was tall and broad, a former amateur boxer himself, with a crew cut grown out slightly above his forehead and a little of it curiously slicked up into horns. Yet anything imposing about his presence immediately evaporated the moment he interacted with his boy. Seeing them together, with Tommy not much older than the small son Rigondeaux had left behind in Cuba, I wondered what the toll would have been on Hyde’s life losing someone so precious to him.
Almost as soon as I met Hyde and mentioned that I’d spent a fair amount of time in Cuba as an amateur boxer myself, Hyde forgot the immediate hassle with Rigondeaux and was giddy to swap tales.
“I’m the first man in history to ever actually go over there and pull off getting any of the Cuban boxers out.”
“They’ve been getting out for years, haven’t they?” I asked. “Decades, actually. 1967 was the first defection.”
“No.” Hyde laughed. “I was the first to go to Cuba with the explicit intention of signing a boxer to a contract, paving the way with the smuggler’s boat crossing, and launching their career in the professional game.”
In fact, Hyde would later explain, he had gotten out four. Rigondeaux was the first he signed and the last to leave. The other three Cuban boxers who had escaped were now living and fighti
ng in Ireland. However, Hyde no longer held their contracts. “They didn’t adjust well,” Hyde confessed. “In the ring, of course, they kept winning. But outside the ring they struggled to cope.”
“What happened to them?” I asked.
“Stopped training. Gained twenty-five pounds the moment they left Cuba. Attitudes changed. The sense of entitlement. You wouldn’t believe it, given where they came from. I mean—” Hyde stopped just short of calling it an outright betrayal. “Can you blame ’em though? They all want out of that horrible place and they expect to be fighting in front of fifty thousand people, making billions. Didn’t you see that over there?”
“Sure,” I agreed. “But most can’t imagine surviving without their family.”
“If I had my way,” Hyde said solemnly, “I would send ships and take everybody out. I really would.”
Hyde’s son grinned and shook his head. “He would, too.”
For a second things felt surreal, as if we were all on a Broadway stage, and I was waiting for father and son to break into an impassioned Disney musical number on saving Cubans and delivering them to the promise land.
“But the best boxers first?” I teased. “Is this business or altruism?”
“I already got the best of the boxers out,” Hyde corrected as his son nodded approval.
Where Americans were forbidden by law from facilitating the trafficking of anyone out of Cuba—including exceptionally talented athletes—Hyde capitalized on what he saw as a golden opportunity left to non-Americans like himself. The only risks involved were being locked up in a Cuban prison for perhaps upward of ten years per athlete you spoke with trying to line it up. During his trips, from what I could gather, Hyde had spoken to enough to spend the rest of his life in jail. He was fully cognizant of this also. Which raised an interesting parallel between Hyde and his favorite Cuban fighter: While Rigondeaux, with the desperation of a social pariah, had risked never seeing his family again in Cuba, Hyde, giving all the appearances of living in comfort, had risked the same with his own family to secure a champion.
A Cuban Boxer's Journey Page 3