Hands of Stone

by Christian Giudice

  “The poor people from where he comes from, they don’t care that they abused Duran,” said Panamanian boxing personality Daniel Alonso. “They interpret it as the possibility of having something of all that Duran has earned, someone from their own family. To me, Duran has one of the noblest hearts. He always trying to go out and help people. When you put everything he’s done in a balance, the satisfactions that Duran gave us against his bankruptcy, mistakes, failures, the result is very favorable for Duran.”

  A common theory that some hold as absolute truth is that Eleta skimmed a lot of money from his fighter. After I interviewed Eleta for this book, several individuals sent warnings of his motives. With white, receding hair, and a stylish dress shirt, Eleta, eighty-six, came across as a classy gentleman who didn’t let age stop him from continuing to work. Yet he kept retelling the same stories, as if he were convincing himself of his innocence during Duran’s career. “I want this to be known. I tried to preserve his money,” he said. “They say that Eleta is stealing Duran’s money. Duran believed everything that the people told him. I wanted to save his money. The people here are against anybody who makes money. They are not hypocrites but are envious.”

  Although Eleta seemed to care more about his own image than Duran’s ultimate fate, he has an insight into the man that few people have. With the autograph signings dwindling and the flow of money having stopped, there was a ubiquitous feeling in Panama that Duran would end up right where he started. “I was in a restaurant and he came and embraced me,” said Eleta in 2004. “He said, ‘I know that you are mad with me. I will not talk bad about you anymore.’ I said, ‘It’s about time.’ Some people have lost respect for him but they pardon him. They know that he is crazy and he talks too much. What he says, they don’t pay any attention to. But they know what he did for Panama.

  “He will end with nothing; he will end up worse than that. He tells me that he will come to my office but he will not ask me for money. I will help him in my way when he has nothing left. I don’t know if it will have a sad ending. I don’t know how sad. I know that he’ll never lack to eat or to sleep because I’ll be after him.”

  DURAN’S FAMILY finds it easier to look back to happier times than face the present. The beer flowed at parties; women were everywhere; cash was abundant and everyone dipped into the money pot for any need or want – some more than others. Now, for most of the extended Duran family the gleam of the glory days has turned to rust.

  A man once told Clara Samaniego, “There has not been another woman here in Panama that has given birth to a man like Roberto Duran.” From almost since he was old enough to walk, she relied on her son. Now La Casa de Piedra is a memory, replaced by a crumbling apartment building. Chorrillo is a dark place, an epicenter of drugs and crime, and there is no sign that Duran ever lived there. A vast army of unemployed wander the streets. Scarred children with sunken eyes hang out of broken windows draped with washing, staring down on empty futures. It will perhaps never be as dangerous as the appalling Colon, but violent death is a constant threat.

  During his adolescence, Duran often turned to his stepfather Victorino Vargas for advice. However, by the time Duran had reached his mid-twenties, Vargas and his mother had split. Today it is only possible to reach Vargas’s home in Guarare Alto by traveling along several winding dirt roads. There he sits on his porch, cornered by filth. A flattened barbed wire fence lies on the ground, almost inviting one of the several small children running around the yard to step on it. Neglect is a feature of his home. Broken glass substitutes for a window. Clothes are scattered around the yard.

  Victor was once slim and powerful; now his full belly rests on his thighs. He has trouble remembering all his five children’s names, and he no longer speaks with Clara or any of her offspring. When he asks an interviewer to tape a recorded message for his daughters Anabelle and Isabelle, he purposely leaves out Clara. But he strongly defends Roberto’s wife.

  When he was earning millions in the early Eighties, Duran helped his family. Whether paying their electric bills or helping to buy a house for grandmother Ceferina, he knew that he was in a special position and felt responsible to spread the wealth. However, many have noted that the fighter would buy drinks and steaks for the manzanillos before he would consider helping his family and close friends.

  “After winning the championship, he started opening some businesses. A grocery store, then a boutique, and he then bought a couple of buildings. He did not buy any more, he just kept these things,” said Vargas. “He did not want to go on with this. He bought a car, a big screen for movies because he likes movies very much, and that is about all. He also bought a piece of land with cows around here. He contacted me and asked me to go and take care of those cows. But in the meantime he got me a job at INTEL, the telephone company, so I did not go there. He talked personally with the manager there and succeeded in getting me a job. I worked there twenty-two years. Till today I am thankful to him for this job. I retired after working there.”

  Vargas is one of the few family members who didn’t charge Duran with not doing more with his money. Although Vargas left his mother, Duran continued to help his stepfather. “One day Justiniano [Vargas’s son] was stabbed. Fula was around, and he was taken to hospital,” Vargas recalled. “They had a kiosk and a couple of criminals tried to rob him and stabbed him. He had to be urgently operated on because his stomach was badly damaged. And Duran paid for it all. I was once in the hospital myself and Duran paid for the operation. I had to be operated on several times because of a cyst but the operations had not been properly done. So Duran talked to Eleta in order to find a place where I could be operated on properly. I was sent to San Fernando. I got in on a Sunday, and on Monday I had already undergone surgery. He paid five hundred dollars for my stay there. So I can say nothing bad about him, for he always helped me out whenever I was in trouble.”

  Vargas also staunchly defends Felicidad. He claims he would sometimes go to casinos with her and “she would never lose. On the contrary, she would always win two or three hundred dollars. People used to say she was wasting his money at the casino but since I would go with her and be present, I saw she did not waste the money as people liked to say. I do not believe it was her who spent the money. After winning her money, she would say, ‘Let’s go home.’ And we would go back home.”

  Toti Samaniego, Roberto’s older brother, also defends Felicidad. “If he is married to his wife and he decides to give her money, then she may spend it on whatever she likes, right?” he said. “If he knew that she would go to the casino, did he give her money? This is the way he was. He did not care about the money. He would just give it away for her to do whatever she pleased. And since she lacked nothing at all, what could she do with the money? She would just go into the casino and use it all there.”

  Living with a woman in Nuevo Arreglan, in a house that Roberto bought for him twenty-five years ago, Toti has had little contact with his family over the years. He has the impish quality of a cartoon character and emotion resonates on his large face. He doesn’t look like his brother and the world seems already to have passed him by. His smile is sad and his wrinkles suggest a lifelong struggle. He survives with an energy touched by exasperation.

  Duran’s uncle Moises was an accomplished folk singer, but it is Toti’s voice that the family raves about. While money flashed signs of freedom and autonomy for Roberto, it didn’t affect his brother. Although Toti currently lives a twenty-five-minute cab ride from Duran’s home, it is in a community way off the beaten path. He has no phone and to find him visitors travel through a thick forested area and ask for “the house of the brother of Duran.” Toti sits nervously in a café off the main highway in Nuevo Arreglan and speaks about his love for his brother. Little seems to connect the brothers anymore. While Roberto constantly travels abroad, Toti rarely leaves the small town he calls home.

  “Whenever I asked for money, it was because I was in real need of it. He would always give us money, his fa
mily,” said Toti. “His friends would also ask for money but they would end up taking his things away, stealing the money from him. He once held a party in his house and he had a wallet with six hundred dollars in it that he left on the table. The wallet got lost in the middle of the party and since those were all hundred-dollar bills he could have asked to search everyone in the party for the money. But Duran said he did not care about the money, he only wanted to get back his ID and the other documents. And the wallet turned up, without the money, which meant the thief was still there at the party. Those were the manzanillos.

  “Yes, they did take everything. Whatever was left there: things, money, shoes, anything. They would take whatever they found. They were his friends and he would not hear a word against his own friends, even more when it was not possible to point at one of them in particular. Besides, it was his home. I cannot tell him what to do. It is his house and he is the one to decide.”

  Before Toti moved to his current house to live a more primitive lifestyle, he shared in his brother’s financial success. Nor has he been pushed aside. Roberto and Felicidad have tried to accommodate a move back to Panama City.

  Toti fidgets with his matches as he lights a cigarette. There is work to be done at his home, he says and motions to leave. Like Clara and Victorino, he lives in near poverty. Still he doesn’t complain about his lot. He doesn’t blame Roberto for anything and lauds him for being a great brother. “I must admit that we used to be a lot closer in the past. At present we are not that close. It is nothing like it was at those times when we were together all the time. I do not go to Panama now. He still treats me well when I go to visit him, but it is not the same. He used to be nicer with us then. When I go there we do talk. He always advises me to come where he is and to stop drinking. But I am not used to luxury places. I do not like this.”

  Moises Samaniego lives several miles from Toti. Moises is Duran’s uncle on his mother’s side. Back in the Seventies, when life was good, Moises had a minor following as a folk musician. Stylish and good-looking in old photos, Moises, whose wife Rosina has passed away since then, seems content. Back in the 1950s, he spent time working with Margarito Duran in the Panama Canal Zone and still reserves a special place for his friend. Moises looked after young Roberto for long periods of time when Clara needed to get away. However, Samaniego doesn’t hold Roberto in the same regard as he used to. There is a sense that Moises is even angered by Duran’s careless nature with money.

  “Sesenta millones, sesenta millones or sixty millions,” Moises repeated over and over again as if he couldn’t believe what he was saying. Although it might be an exaggerated sum, Moises holds Duran responsible for the state of the immediate family. “Something happened to my sister Clara. Now she is too poor.”

  When Moises needed Duran to get his son out of jail for gun possession, he was left waiting. There was no money at the time. “My son was in jail for having a gun without a permit,” said Moises. “I asked Roberto to help me get him out of jail, but he was waiting for a million dollars that was coming from Argentina. He never got it, and my son is still in jail [in April 2004]. I can’t get him out.

  “[Roberto] hardly did anything for his family. He never cared as much about helping his family as he did for the chombos, or blacks. I was trying to help my friend get a business started and he needed some money to start it up. Roberto didn’t want to help. He never did anything for this family. I want this to be told.”

  Jairo Ivan Garcia is another who sounds a critical note. Tears come down his face, the tears of a man who felt spurned by a member of his own family, of a man who wants to be part of something again and not be treated as a stranger. Garcia lives on 4th Street in Guarare, next to the green house where Ceferina lived. He says that he is Duran’s uncle, though that is disputed amongst family members. In the tangled genealogies of Panama, anything is possible. Certainly he is related to the boxer and did play a role in raising Roberto.

  “Roberto used to come here when he was little. That boy would eat anything,” said Garcia. “He would even eat iguanas. My brother Socrates was very good with him and taught him how to box. Socrates was a very big man and was always with Roberto. That is where Roberto inherited his power from. My brother challenged Ali to a fight one time but he said no.”

  Garcia was at La Cantina Choco Choco when Roberto flattened the horse. Choco Choco is still in Guarare across from the park. “When he used to come to stay here, I would get out of my bed and sleep on the floor,” said Garcia. “I would give Roberto my bed to sleep in. He loved to watch cartoons and wrestling. Even back then he would fight anyone in the streets.” Although Garcia claims to never have seen Duran lose his temper, there was always the threat. “He talks very loud and strong when he got mad.”

  One time, when Duran was famous, Garcia went to his house to drop off something, and some money disappeared. “He accused me of stealing five thousand dollars,” said Garcia, “and he wouldn’t talk to me after that. We haven’t spoken in twenty-two years. When he comes here to Guarare, he never stops here.” Garcia uses the back of his hand to dry his tears and looks next door for more evidence of Duran’s hard-heartedness. There is a huge crack in the concrete and the house looks abandoned, a small toy car the only hint that anyone has been there in years. Decades ago, Ceferina ruled that same house with a strong fist.

  “Look at that house,” said Garcia. “He never even helped repair that broken down house. That is the house that he grew up in. I would have liked that house to be open for people to see the help Duran would give his family. Duran used to help strangers but not his own family. When people would ask him about the needs of his family in Panama, he would always pride himself on the help he would offer. But that was a lie. He only helps his friends, not his family. Please write this because it is the truth about Roberto. He did not help his family to live.”

  To stress his own generosity, Garcia points to the floor, “This is where I slept when Roberto came to stay, right here.”

  “All families have differences,” shrugged Mireya Samaniego, Clara’s sister and Roberto’s aunt, “Jairo says that he is Roberto’s uncle, but he is only a cousin because he isn’t a brother to Margarito or Clara. No one in the family talks to Jairo because he talked rudely to my mother. Also, Roberto bought a lot of things for Jairo to help him at his house.”

  Jairo did spend some time with Roberto during his career. Like always, the money flowed. “He had seven cars, seven. But he only needed one. Why seven?” The sadness turned to anger.

  Mireya Samaniego is unlike many of her relatives. She is married to a doctor and lives in a well-kept, one-story home in Guarare, across from the Escuela Juana Vernaza school where young Roberto and his sister Marina were briefly enrolled nearly four decades ago. Mireya has two sons, one named after Roberto, and quickly shows her fist and recalls the time when her mother, Ceferina, knocked out husband Chavelo with one punch and then helped deliver Duran hours later. She also recalls a time when Duran argued in the street with Ceferina and threw a $100 bill at her.

  Mireya has a round face and an engaging laugh. “Many people became rich taking advantage of Duran. Many indeed,” she said. “And Roberto knows it. But he says, ‘I owe to God all I have.’ He has not been an ambitious person. I believe this is because he knew what it is like to be poor. And he will also die in poverty. This is what Roberto is like. He has always had an enormous heart and has never been ambitious. He did not like to show off either. He would come to visit us in his BMW and he would give away the keys for others to drive it. If he had been different he would not have let others touch his car. But he is a person with very good feelings. He loves his kids very much, and has never abandoned them.”

  THERE HAS ALWAYS been an affinity for Duran in Guarare, his mother’s birthplace in the Los Santos province, bordered by the Pacific Ocean on one side and the Bahia de Panama on the other. Everyone there who was alive at that time can remember where they were or how much they won when Duran won the li
ghtweight title in 1972 or dethroned Leonard in 1980. “I was watching that fight on a big screen that they set up in a field here in Guarare,” says resident Daniel Peres, sat in a local bar. “All the lights were on in the town and when they announced that Duran was the winner, a man next to me flung a child very high in the air. That’s all I can remember from that night.” And when he lost to Leonard? “The city was dark that evening.”

  Traveling through Guarare to the several apartments and homes that Clara used to rent near La Plasita del Toros, along with Duran’s old hangouts, it is clear that the people recall him with great affection. “I remember he used to steal coconuts from El Rio. He used to come around here to the house as a young boy,” said Lesbia Diaz, who lives a block off the Carretera National. “He would walk in and ask my mother, ‘Mama, mama, tengo hambre?’ She used to feed him rice, beans, patacones and anything she put on the table he would eat. The whole town would be lit when Duran won.” Lesbia’s late father, Arquimedes, was Duran’s biggest fan, and would travel from Guarare to Panama City to congratulate him after victories. Diaz can pull out an entire photo album from a parade the town had after Duran won the lightweight title. Duran was their hope.

  Clara Samaniego still lives in the house that her son bought her in the Seventies. It is in Los Andes No. 2, a district in the town of San Miguelito. When Duran bought the house, Los Andes was a safe place to live. It no longer is. Cab drivers refer to it as a red-light district, another name for a low-income housing project. It is the same house where Clara sat with a local reporter to watch her son defeat Sugar Ray Leonard in 1980. She was also there for the rematch, and she remembers hearing people yell, “Cholo, perdio, Cholo perdio,” after he walked out. Euphoria and joy encompassed the house when Clara’s son was still great.