A Cuban Boxer's Journey

by Brin-Jonathan Butler

  I was riding in the passenger seat of the rental vehicle Gary Hyde had picked Mucho Macho and me up in from LAX. As we crawled forward, a sign out the window told us we had ten miles to go before the international border that divides San Ysidro, California, and Tijuana, Mexico. We had two hours before Rigondeaux had to weigh in at the Auditoro Municipal, thirty minutes across the border. Hyde kept fiddling with the radio while our suicide mission’s official photographer, Mucho Macho, suggested which lenses might be put to best use from ringside while he shot the fight.

  “Any ideas, Gary?” Mucho Macho asked.

  “Many ideas,” Gary replied calmly. “I’ll make sure to come over and discuss them with you after the two of us in the front seat aren’t assassinated in the fuckin’ ring during the fuckin’ Cuban national anthem before a few thousand Mexicans in the crowd and everyone watching at home on fuckin’ FOX Deportes.”

  “Did you pay anything to Rigondeaux to sign your contract?” I asked Hyde. “Like a bonus or something?”

  “You can’t ask for directions down there without expecting to pay.” Hyde laughed.

  “How much did he want?”

  I didn’t bother asking whether the contract was in Spanish so Rigondeaux had a hope of understanding its contents.

  “Rigondeaux didn’t have so much as a bank account. But he was worldly enough to know with a contract there was a signing bonus. At the time Rigo was having some hassle with his wife. I asked him how many girlfriends he had. Instantly he says, ‘Seven.’ So I offered him ten dollars for each one.”

  “You signed the greatest amateur boxer on earth for seventy dollars?” (In other interviews this figure has varied.)

  “I handed over the money along with the pen and he signed right there.”

  “If this guy was born in any other country on earth how much would he have signed for after his first gold medal at the Olympics? What, ten thousand times that amount?”

  “But he wasn’t from any other country. He was from Cuba.”

  “Yep.”

  “But I kept sending him money after that until he was ready to leave. A lot of money, too.”

  *

  Before Rigondeaux, the most famous defection in Cuban history by an athlete was when Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez escaped the island on Christmas Day 1997. After nearly thirty years of being banned by the state, the Christmas holiday had been reinstated that same year at the pope’s request. Hernandez was the most successful pitcher in the history of Cuban baseball. American agents and scouts had salivated for years over El Duque’s potential. They shadowed his movements around the world as he pitched for the powerhouse Cuban team internationally. However, Duque was known as a true believer. He had every chance to leave with a vast fortune awaiting him. As inferior American pitchers like Kevin Brown signed contracts with Major League Baseball for $105 million, El Duque survived on $105 a year. With his prime fading, staring down the million years it would take to earn the same amount in Cuba, Hernandez defended his reasons for remaining on the island with arresting statements like: “I know the prettiest word in the world is ‘money.’ But I believe that words like ‘loyalty’ and ‘patriotism’ are very beautiful as well.”

  However, after Livan Hernandez, El Duque’s brother, abandoned Cuba, it was Duque who was left to face the music. He was banned from picking up a baseball on any field in the country. He was banned from even stepping on any baseball field. “I don’t know why they’re doing this to me,” Duque said at the time. “I’ve had every opportunity in the world to defect and I never did…. I don’t know why I have to pay for my brother’s sins.” Finally, after years of loyalty, Hernandez was finally pushed too far and defected. Fidel had found it in his heart to pardon Santa Claus, but no pardon was offered to the revolution’s most successful pitcher. Yet even after signing for millions and winning the World Series with the New York Yankees in his first year in the United States, Orlando Hernandez would always maintain, despite the immense hardships he faced in Cuba and even after the state’s betrayal, that he never wished to leave.

  The specifics of El Duque’s escape quickly became a big-fish story with the American media. There were dozens of versions. New sensational details were added to the myth with each telling. Sharks gnawed at the raft. The little fishing boat took on water the minute it left Cuba and nearly sunk. Biblical storms thundered as the ocean roared and heaved. Certain death was avoided only after El Duque himself took a makeshift oar and rowed his way to freedom. Yankees owner George Steinbrenner would even claim that Duque had left the island in a “bathtub.” All these myths naturally made El Duque even more marketable in New York, sold more jerseys and newspapers, put more asses in seats, and upped the ratings on television.

  S. L. Price attended El Duque’s first press conference in Miami. It was at this same press conference that Price watched Hernandez cry uncontrollably as he reunited with his brother Livan for the first time in America. As most journalists penned their cover stories of an American Dream triumphing over the same stale Cuban nightmare, Price remembered the moment differently in his book Pitching Around Fidel: “Mine is an unseemly standoff between head and heart, a logical mess. I applaud Duque’s escape, but I’d rather see him pitch in Havana…. I know what everyone knows: Cuba is the worst place on the globe to be an athlete today. But I’m sure I know something even stranger. It is also the best.”

  After the World Series victory, Fidel Castro, against expectations, agreed to make the remarkable gesture of putting Duque’s mother, ex-wife, and two daughters on a plane to reunite with him. It was just in time to have them join Duque and his team for the ticker-tape parade marching up Broadway’s “Canyon of Heroes.” After that year there were three more World Series victories for Duque, millions more earned, and a comfortable retirement in Miami that he devoted to working with children and introducing them to baseball to offer what he could to help them succeed.

  Of course there was an interesting catch to all this. When Ray Sánchez and Steve Fainaru, for their book The Duke of Havana, caught up with Orlando Hernandez at the height of El Duque mania in New York, he was living in a lush hotel on Lexington Avenue. “The room was stuffed with gratuitous perks of El Duque’s new fame: designer sunglasses, compact-disc players, unwrapped sweaters, athletic shoes, cigars—boxes and boxes of free stuff. ‘Look at all this,’ he said finally to Sánchez. ‘Look at how much I make, and I get all this shit for nothing. You make a fraction of what I make, and you can’t afford it. There’s something wrong there. There’s something wrong with this system.’ Sánchez asked him what he meant. El Duque backed off. ‘Ah, you’re still better off here,’ he said.”

  To reinforce the ambiguity of his legacy, Duque maintained his assertion that despite all his newfound riches and the Hollywood ending of being reunited with his family, had Castro not forced him out, he never would have left. All reporters I interviewed about El Duque—S. L. Price, Steve Fainaru, and Ray Sánchez—who had known him closely on both sides of the Florida Straits, confirmed that Hernandez in America was an irrevocably changed man from whom they’d met in Havana. And not for the better.

  *

  And let’s have no displays of indignation. You may not have known, but you certainly had suspicions. If we’ve told lies you’ve told half-lies…. And a man who tells lies—like me—merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half-lies…. has forgotten where he put it.

  —Mr. Dryden from Lawrence of Arabia

  *

  “Can I push record now?” I asked Gary Hyde, our progress toward Tijuana stymied by another traffic jam, this time at the border.

  “When it comes right down to it, in Rigondeaux’s story I’m probably the best of a bad lot …”

  George Orwell once pointed out that all the characters of Dickens, unlike Tolstoy, have one thing in common: no inner life. None of his characters grow. Tolstoy’s characters are “struggling to make their souls, whereas Dickens’s are already finished and perfect.” It’s impossible
to imagine having a conversation with a character from Dickens. It’s impossible to imagine them straying from their script. No interior life exists with his characters. “They never learn, never speculate,” Orwell goes on to explain. “Tolstoy’s characters can cross a frontier; Dickens’s can be portrayed on a cigarette card.” I wanted to learn from Hyde’s dealings in Cuba which camp Hyde identified with.

  In the past, the architects who helped Cuban baseball players escape the island had been hailed as “liberators” by conservative hardliners in Miami and much of the American media, who supported tightening the embargo against Cuba even further. They were praised for having assisted in destabilizing Castro and the evil regime where it symbolically hurt. The policies behind the embargo still made sense to many of these people, while others saw politics as little more than a smoke screen for what amounted to venture humanitarianism. El Duque, at his lowest, most desperate point after Castro came down on him, reached out to Cuban American Joe Cubas, who had helped Duque’s brother Livan Hernandez escape. Cubas, bitter about the fact that his exorbitant fees had exploded his relationship with what he deemed an ungrateful Livan, is quoted in The Duke of Havana as having replied, “Let that nigger drown.”

  Right at the outset during Hyde’s interview, it was obvious we were wading into the deep end of human nature with a fascinating undertow of denial.

  “Can we start from the beginning?”

  Hyde nodded.

  As I pressed record on my iPhone and lay the device inside the rental car’s cup holder, Gary Hyde began to unfold his adventure of hunting down the best of the nearly twenty thousand boxers officially employed by the state to fight on the island of Cuba:

  *

  Gary Hyde: Back in 2007, Michael Flatley saw a show I put on back in Ireland. He liked the show but told me, “You’re missin’ a superstar in the making. Somebody we can all get a feel for and follow through to big titles, especially world titles.” I said, “Where you gonna get one of them?” He says, “Maybe go to one of the poorhouses of the world and get one.” So I thought, where else would you go? Why skip Cuba? [Laughing.] That was February 17, 2007. By the beginning of March I was in Cuba.”

  Brin-Jonathan Butler: That was the first time you’d seen him?

  G.H.: I first saw him on television, like everyone else, when he won gold at the Sydney Olympics in 2000.

  B.J.B: When did you first meet him?

  G.H.: The 2001 World Championships in Belfast, where he won the bantamweight championship. I met up with him personally there. He snuck off from the team with a few others and we met in a pub. The Cubans were always a big attraction. I was keeping an eye on the Cuban team. They were all there lined up in a row from one weight class to the other. Like sitting ducks. Rigo just kind of shouted out to me. Very, very special like. He was just a baby, twenty years old. And, of course, no human being could want to stay in that system. But they never said at that time that they wanted to leave.

  B.J.B.: Did you have an idea then about getting involved with Cuban fighters?

  G.H.: [Laughing.] The same idea I had of getting out Félix Savón. I’m sure anyone involved in boxing would say, “I’d love to have a Cuban like that as a professional.” But it was just way out there. I never thought I could have put a plan like that, you know, into motion. I wasn’t out to prove any point. I wanted these fighters. Nothing was going to stop me.

  B.J.B.: So after Michael Flatley suggested Cuba, you were there by March of 2007. During that month between him suggesting it and you going, what was your research into trying to figure out, I dunno, “How am I going to do this shit?” Nobody had ever done it before, right?

  G.H.: I’m the first. My research into how I was gonna do it didn’t start until I had a chance to talk with those kids. First I met the kids in Havana, got a feel for them, and after that I started looking into a plan about how to get them out.

  B.J.B.: How do you find the best boxers in Cuba?

  G.H.: It was actually really easy. I found an interpreter who found the Finca [the top boxing school in all of Cuba] and contacted Rigondeaux at the Finca, and he arranged to meet us. We met him, didn’t spend too much time with him. He knew what we wanted from him straightaway. But we never told him if he was right or wrong at first. That happened a few days later. Rigondeaux was the first one I met. All boxers over there were very paranoid. I met Rigo in Central Park in Havana. He had a swagger, everyone was stepping out of his way. There were obviously huge risks involved. But I never paid attention to them.

  B.J.B.: How did you start that conversation?

  G.H.: I told him I was a writer working on a book doing research about Cuban fighters. That was my angle over there, that was the angle I was going at. He said, “Professional boxing?” He was on it straightaway. He knew straightaway what was really going on.

  B.J.B.: Did he ask for anything in order to make that happen?

  G.H.: No, he was kind of reserved the first week I was there.

  B.J.B.: Where did everything go from there?

  G.H.: I got nervous and got to thinking he could be a little too big a fish in his little pond and maybe get us into trouble. He was a bit wiser than what I thought I would be working with. He was twenty-six then. So I looked at some other boys at the Finca instead.

  B.J.B.: Had anyone made an attempt to help Rigondeaux, up to that point, to get him out?

  G.H.: Nothing that I knew of. Nothing reported or on record, as far as I know.

  B.J.B.: What were the risk of going into Cuba and trying to do this? What happens if this goes wrong?

  G.H.: Being incarcerated by Fidel indefinitely, I suppose.

  B.J.B.: But you decide to do it anyway.

  G.H.: It was an adventure. For me it was just an adventure. I was out of my mind that I wanted three or four fighters—Rigo number one. I wanted to manage them in Ireland, run up a brilliant record, and bring them back to the U.S. for HBO and championships and all that.

  B.J.B.: Rigondeaux and everyone else over there live in desperate circumstances. This risk at least makes sense for them to make. You’re successful. You’ve been married twenty years with kids. Why are you risking so much for this?

  G.H.: When I want something on my mind, I get it. I saw Rigo and I done it. Put my family to one side because I never really believed I’d get caught. I was cute enough in the way that I done it. Thinking back on what I did, it was very, very dangerous.

  B.J.B.: Knowing what you know now of the risks, would you do it again?

  G.H.: [Shrugs.] In a heartbeat.

  B.J.B.: Were there risks even if you succeeded from Miami? Before smuggler’s boats and all that, all the Cubans who’d escaped had gone there, presumably because people there were funding people to get out, no?

  G.H.: I didn’t worry about none of that. I knew I could get him fights. I knew I could get him a good stage. The only risks, as far as I cared, were logistics. Logistically my problem was just getting him from his island to my island, Ireland. I never even dreamed of him wanting to go to the States no matter who was there. Even after a few days Rigo was very friendly with me. All the boxers I met down there clung to me. They were more interested in my relationships with them than becoming champions in pro boxing. I was, you know, coaxing them into the boxing side more.

  B.J.B.: Logistics.

  G.H.: I was, like, sitting on the Malecón one day looking at the moon and thinking, like, this is the same moon that I look at when I’m looking up in Ireland. How can I get from here to there without going through airports, without going through security? There must be a way. I researched everything. I researched from going there on a raft, going there on a speedboat, going there in a submarine, a Jet Ski—I tried everything I knew. All we had to do was get them twelve miles, once you were twelve miles off the coast of Cuba you were in international waters. You were safe enough. I didn’t think about the consequences after that. I just wanted them out of Cuba. Rigondeaux, and a couple other fighters I had my eyes on at that point, we
re being financed by me. I was sending money there regularly. If I sent five hundred euros over there, it cost me one thousand euros because of how hard it was to get money there. I sent money in sports books, through DHL. I’d have a five-hundred-euro note glued in on page seventy-nine, enclosed, and once he got it he was to call me. DHL wouldn’t deliver money for you, but they’d deliver a book. That kinda stuff. It was all kind of cloak-and-dagger stuff, really. It was just so slow and difficult to get money over there. But the feeling I had inside me, the minute the money was offloaded and collected? The feeling I’d get the minute I knew when they got the money? The feeling I had when they got their hands on the money and the unbelievable feeling of achievement that they were so comfortable now and they were so happy with me. It just binded us together even more. It’s hard to kind of explain it. If I sent one thousand euros and it came back to me, I’d have been gutted. But if I’d sent one thousand euros and I’d phone ’em and hear their whole family cheering, “Miguel! Miguel! Miguel, you’re the best!”

  B.J.B.: Miguel?

  G.H.: They all knew me as Miguel down there. That was the name I traveled under. But when everything worked out and they had the money I’d feel like the greatest person in the world. This is an achievement that they’d collect my money and everyone is happy and the emotion from that lasted—well—it lasted for the length of that phone call. [Laughing.]

  B.J.B.: What other ways did you send them money?

  G.H.: I left my daughter’s debit card with them. They’d take out money and I’d fill it back up in Ireland.

  B.J.B.: What happens next?

  G.H.: By April I was under unbelievable pressure from these boxers to get them out. I was always expecting to hear sirens and the security coming after me. Even with the money I kept sending all of them the pressure built up. When I went back to Cuba I was stopped at the airport. I had brought all kinds of gifts, you see. They knew something was up. But I got through. I went to see Rigo at his house. I think it was his house. It had all kinds of trophies and medals. I think it was. Every Cuban refers to every house they step into as their house, whether it’s their brother-in-law or their cousin or their friend. But I think it was his house. Everything was getting very dangerous. I was staying at the Habana Libre, what used to be the Havana Hilton until Castro took over. Every time I came down from my room to make a call at reception, I saw security make calls. They was just standing normal until they saw me then made calls every single time they saw me. I’d supplied three different boxers I was looking at down there with cell phones but I was getting scared down there.