The plane began its descent over the last stretch of water that divides Cuba from the United States. Out my window the sunset glazed over the surface of the ocean and glinted off the slits of wave creases like fresh wounds. Up and down the aisles I heard the slap of shades yanked down over passengers’ windows while the rest of us eagerly took in the view. It’s this homestretch that fleshes out the tourists from the locals on flights to the island.
As the plane touched down at José Martí International Airport, I still wasn’t sure I would be allowed to enter Cuba. Would there be fallout from my interview with Félix Savón during my last trip? I had no idea. Movies released in Cuba never know until it’s too late whether they have violated the rules of the state censors. The rules are deliberately spelled out only in the vaguest terms.
Since Rigondeaux had escaped on a smuggler’s boat two years prior and become a permanent exile, his family had been living under twenty-four-hour surveillance and quasi–house arrest. Cuban state security wasn’t known to fuck around.
When it came to Rigondeaux’s abandonment of Cuba, there was an eerily similar precedent. The first African slaves were brought to the island as far back as 1520 by the Spanish, who found themselves in need of replenishing the native Indian population (three hundred thousand at the time Columbus first encountered them), which they had wiped out through a combination of genocide, disease, and brutal labor. Many Indians were so desperate to escape the calamity of their lives under Spanish rule that they attempted suicide by trying to choke on dirt. These attempts ceased after the Spanish threatened severe punishment of the family members of suicides.
One of the most famously courageous Indian chiefs, Hatuey, having been captured and tied to a stake to be set ablaze, was offered salvation by the Spanish if he accepted Jesus. Hatuey asked the man holding the flame if indeed any Christians were in heaven. He was assured there were. Hatuey replied that he would rather burn and be sent to hell than ever again encounter people as cruel as the Spanish.
“Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope!/Where is thy market now?”
—J. M. W. Turner, from “The Slave Ship”
Almost three hundred years later, on November 29, 1782, the events depicted in J. M. W. Turner’s famous painting, The Slave Ship, unfolded. First known as the Zong Affair, and decades later as The Zong Massacre, the story goes something like this: With a business disaster looming—slaves were dying at more than the usual rate during these voyages transporting slaves—English captain Luke Collingwood ordered some of the Zong’s human cargo (122 shackled African men, women, and children) to be thrown overboard into the shark-infested waters of the Caribbean. Another ten slaves threw themselves overboard in a display of defiance against the inhumanity.
These 132 deaths left the captain with high hopes of filing his insurance claim: lost-at-sea slaves would be insured, dead-on-arrival slaves would not.
At the trial for insurance fraud, England’s solicitor general stated:
“What is this claim that human people have been thrown overboard? This is a case of chattels or goods. Blacks are goods and property; it is madness to accuse these well-serving honorable men of murder…. The case is the same as if wood had been thrown overboard.”
In 2009, 228 years after the Zong disposed of its cargo in the Caribbean, another boat carrying human beings—who’d also been bought and sold on the marketplace—sped under cover of night across the same Caribbean waters. This time the boat was headed for Mexico, where a ransom masquerading as a fee was to be paid for the lives of the men, women, and children being transported. Three of the occupants on the smuggler’s boat were elite Cuban boxers. One of those boxers was Guillermo Rigondeaux. Despite his more than four hundred fights inside a ring against the greatest boxers in the world, Rigondeaux would describe this journey, with immense reluctance, as the most traumatic event of his life.
*
On May 2, 2011, while I was in Havana, the most dangerous man in the world was found and killed in Pakistan. Nothing about this event, however, was reported in Havana or across Cuba by the Cuban state. No interruption to the news and nothing in either of the two state newspapers. No celebration or protest in the streets. While it was true that few Cubans had access to the Internet, there seemed not to be even an acknowledgment of the event if anybody had found out. Not even Radio Bemba (Cuban slang for the rumor mill) had picked up the signal. Bin Laden’s death caused no ripples one way or the other.
Since the first day I arrived in Havana as a kid trying to track down the real-life 103-year-old hero from The Old Man and the Sea still living in Cojimar, or seeing if I could bribe an Olympic champion boxer Héctor Vinent to help me with my amateur boxing career, I’ve walked down the Prado promenade every chance I could get. Prado was the first name I recognized here, since I used to live a few blocks from the Prado museum in Madrid when I was twenty. I was living there when the Atocha train station was bombed down the street by terrorists some years later.
Havana’s Prado runs all the way to the sea, right up to the Malecón seawall, which the people of Havana consider both their collective sofa and enchanted windowsill on the world. Hundreds of years ago the most beautiful women in Havana could be glimpsed stepping in or out of carriages on this street. The first foreign writers who saw this phenomenon repeatedly pointed out just how incredibly beautiful their feet were.
Along the Prado they used to sell slaves on the auction block, too. Before Fidel, when segregation was in full swing, the Cuban apartheid meant many clubs and parks still refused black Cubans entry. Famously even Fulgencio Batista, the president of the country before Fidel, was forbidden membership to a country club because he wasn’t white enough.
Maybe this was one of the reasons Guillermo Rigondeaux’s own father, living on a coffee plantation in the rural east of the island, disowned his son after the first failed attempt at defection in 2007, blaming him for betraying a society that helped so many like their own family climb out of the vicious conditions that existed before the revolution.
Later that day I found the address for Rigondeaux’s wife and two children. It was easier than I’d thought it would be—even if going there might ensure that I’d be banished from the island for just daring to visit. Someone on the street drew me a map with directions—but only after telling me that to visit Havana was paradise, to live there was hell. He was trying to sell his house to go back to Spain.
“Would you leave tomorrow if you could sell it?” I asked him.
“Please.” He laughed, handing me the map after he was finished sketching. “I would leave tonight.”
I asked how he knew the directions were accurate and he smiled and asked me to stop any taxi on the street, secure a ride, and then ask them to take me to the address he’d written down. I tried this twice and both drivers gave me an incredulous look before driving off. Rigondeaux’s address was well known.
This was real danger in a land where, if it’s established that you’re sympathetic to one of its most famous living traitors, there’s going to be real trouble. Scores are settled here. While you aren’t likely to meet a people more generous, nobody can hold a grudge like Cubans.
I waited to visit Rigondeaux’s family until I’d lined up an interview with Teófilo Stevenson also. There was no going back after interviewing Rigo’s family, so why not push all the chips in and go for the second most famous man on the island after Fidel? I’d gotten Stevenson’s phone number from Félix Savón. I made several attempts on the phone with Stevenson to arrange a good day for an interview, but invariably he was so drunk he’d dodge me with the same confession, occasionally even in English: “I don’t even know what today is. How can I schedule another day? Call me back tomorrow.”
Finally the legendary Cuban champion agreed and gave me his address, so I made arrangements to find the little green house Rigondeaux had been given by the government for his achievement as an Olympic champion, and I knocked on the door. Farah Colina Rigondeaux answered the door and I could see the outline of their two children, Guillermo Jr. and Cesar, now eight and seventeen respectively, behind her in the living room.
I explained who I was, unsure of how she’d react. I told her that I’d spent a lot of time with her husband after his escape and respected him a great deal. After a pause she invited me in with a warm smile, as if I were a neighbor. Rigondeaux had spent fourteen years with this woman before he had escaped. The living room looked exactly the same as when the international news crews had filmed it while covering one of the most famous defections in Cuban history. Small TV in the corner, a couch, a few pictures on the wall of the family together, some medals and trophies from Rigondeaux’s career, blinds drawn.
She broke the ice by telling me about how she’d first met him at one of his fights. He had noticed her in the crowd while he was sitting on his stool between rounds. She laughed until it was clear she was about to cry.
Suddenly Farah’s expression changed as she assured me the police were tracking me and asked that I be very careful for the rest of my time in Havana. “Your phone, e-mail, movements, everything. Beeg Brother knows everything.”
The Cuban camerawoman I’d hired had visited a friend who had taken a trip to a central police station and told me that for every two cameras in Havana (which in many areas was nearly every block) there was one policeman assigned.
I told Farah that the reason I’d come was to bring footage of her husband to her family and to bring back footage of their family to Rigondeaux. I owed him that much for giving me access to his life.
With her children beside her, we looked over the photos and video of her husband I’d brought. Guillermo Jr. brought photos of his father over from the back of the apartment for me to look at. In the back of my mind I was wondering how much time we had before there might be an ominous knock at the door.
“He looks very sad, doesn’t he,” she said. “Obviously what affects us most here is his absence. Above all we miss his presence, especially our smallest child who needs him a lot. Above all, he’s a good father and husband. Regardless of what happens, I have confidence in him. And he will never abandon us for anything. The last time he sent some things to our son, my mother told him, ‘Now you should be happy because your dad sent some stuff.’ He told her, ‘I will only be happy when my dad comes to see me.’ Those were his exact words.”
Farah told me how on the last day she saw her husband in Cuba, he had stayed home from working some menial job he’d found so he could play with his small son. He told her he was going east to Santiago, but in fact he’d gone west to leave some days later. She told me that he called her the moment he arrived safely in Miami and that the journey—through a horrible storm—had been the most frightening experience of his life. She cried talking about how much Rigondeaux’s mother’s death had affected him shortly after he made it to Miami. Farah assured me he called regularly and sent money. She assured me he was a decent human being and the love of her life. She assured me again—and also her family at the same time—that he would never abandon them. Farah said Rigondeaux had never discussed the specifics or anything else about leaving, but she insisted the government had left him with no choice.
I asked Guillermo’s eight-year-old son what he thought of the father he hadn’t seen in more than two years. He gave me a hard look for a second and ran into his room. Before I could apologize to his mother he ran back out to the living room with a poster of his dad and opened it up for me to see. The poster was bigger than he was. He brushed his cheek against his father’s and looked up at me. “I miss him. I miss watching him fight. My father is my hero.”
Rigondeaux’s wife rubbed her eyes and turned away from her son to me. “He’s both our heroes.”
“Can I come back to speak with you once more tomorrow?” I asked.
“Of course. Just be careful.”
*
Harvey Milk said that although you can’t live on hope alone, without hope life isn’t worth living. I still believed it when I first met Rigondeaux in Cuba in 2007. Catching up with him in the United States made it harder. Something tells me that no matter what the restrictions were regarding baggage limits on that smuggler’s boat, none were traveling light. Rigondeaux and the rest of the people on that vessel had left everything they’d ever known behind, perhaps forever. The weight of their hope was their greatest vulnerability. Where could you hide it? Were the smugglers doing a favor making it nearly impossible to bring any hope? Were they expected to smuggle it on board?
The following afternoon, just before my interview with Teófilo Stevenson, Farah Rigondeaux wasn’t answering her phone as I was driving over to her home. Under the table I’d hired a translator and cinematographer from Cuban television to accompany me.
Both were dead certain “security” had gotten to her and was closing in on us.
“If she has not answered the phone, we should not be doing this,” my translator warned. “We will get arrested. We will lose our jobs. Our friends or family might lose their jobs. This is a vindictive system.”
The cinematographer agreed solemnly. “This is a very dangerous place to go right now.”
We arrived at Farah’s house and climbed the stairs. Her seventeen-year-old son peeked out the window and told me his mother had left Havana for La Lisa to visit a dying relative. He was a very bad liar. He immediately tried to shut the window before saying anything else. I managed to keep him for long enough to ask him if he’d like to talk for a minute. He subtly gestured in the direction of the camera pointed at their house. “You should leave now,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
We drove back down the hill and the driver let me out near the Prado. If the police were coming, they were coming. There was nothing left to lose and I had one stop still to make before the airport. I called Stevenson from a pay phone and he reluctantly agreed to meet. I stopped another gypsy cab and offered him a day’s fare to look after us with a return trip across town to Teófilo Stevenson’s home in Nautico, near the Marina Hemingway. The translator told me that the best chance we had to coax Stevenson into talking on camera was to bring him some suitably “respectful” vodka as a present. Stevenson was known to trick a lot of journalists into throwing him a party with everyone he could find on the street and when the time came to film anything curtly call the evening to a close. I didn’t have the time or money for anything like that.
When we drove past the Nautico sign on the side of the road, we turned off to grab a bottle from a kiosk and walk the rest of the way to Stevenson’s house. The neighborhood was green and lush, far more cheerful than Savón’s or Rigondeaux’s, but reports of Fidel giving Stevenson a “mansion” were nothing more than propaganda. Most of the two-bedroom homes on Stevenson’s street had fresh coats of paint, unlike most of Havana’s residences. There were Ladas behind fenced-in driveways—most Cubans, of course, had no money to own a car. My translator was very quiet the closer we got to Stevenson’s home. It was pretty clear that he was having second thoughts about being involved with this. He’d spent time with Stevenson while introducing diplomats he’d translated for who wanted to meet him.
“How bad is he?” I asked him.
“Have you ever spoken to him on the phone when he isn’t drunk?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then I think it’s fairly obvious how bad he is, isn’t it? He’s not meeting you for the pleasure of speaking with a foreign journalist. He needs the money. So do I. So does everybody in this country.”
“Do you even think he’ll talk with us?” I asked.
“I doubt on camera. He’s not well. There’s his car up ahead. There.” He pointed to a rusting, green, early-1990s Toyota behind a fence. “That’s his. He turned down five million dollars and he drives that. Do you think I’m proud of my country for that? That’s the house of Teó. By Cuban standards it’s nice, but in Miami he would have lived in a palace. You want to know how hard things have gotten? He doesn’t even have enough money to put tires on that car.”
In 1987, Teófilo Stevenson had been involved in what many assumed was an alcohol-related car accident that took a motorcyclist’s life. The crime, if indeed it was a crime, was swept under the rug to preserve Stevenson’s iconic status. He was never charged or convicted of any wrongdoing, and slowly he receded from public view as his figure became a lodestar for Cuba’s moral compass. Many Cubans still set their moral watches to Stevenson’s clock, and even those opposed to his socialist principles admired the man’s courage and conviction. I wasn’t especially looking forward to undermining that. Galileo wasn’t put in prison because he was wrong about anything he discovered looking through his telescope; rather, he saw what others didn’t wish to see.
When we arrived at Stevenson’s driveway we could see through the padlocked fence that his front door was open. My translator hollered out and a few tense moments later Stevenson, shirtless and in blue track pants, a cigarette dangling from his lips, wound his stiff six-foot-five frame into the doorway with care, bracing himself against the doorframe. I wasn’t sure if the fragility in Stevenson’s movements owed more to his boxing career or the booze. Nonetheless, he’d celebrated his fifty-ninth birthday ten days after Rigondeaux’s victory in Ireland and still looked lean and handsome.
Stevenson approached us, holding out the key to his gate while my translator turned to me with a look of dread.
Teófilo Stevenson won his first Olympic gold medal in 1972 and his last world amateur championship in 1986. He won 302 fights and once went eleven years without a single loss. The offer to fight Muhammad Ali came after Stevenson won his second Olympic gold medal in Montreal in 1976. Five million dollars were on the table and yet Stevenson asked, “What is one million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans?”
Muhammad Ali was a man highly adept at finding weakness in his opponents and cruelly exploiting it to his own advantage, yet he never saw weakness in Stevenson’s stand against turning professional and facing him. He admired a man standing up for what he believed in, as Ali had done, refusing to compromise his beliefs to fight in Vietnam. So much so, it seemed that in 1996 and 1998, Ali had donated a total of $1.7 million worth of medical aid to Cuba as a way of opposing the economic embargo against the island nation, which had contributed so much to the brutal economic crisis of the previous decade. Stevenson greeted Ali at Havana’s international airport and they were inseparable during both of Ali’s visits.
Stevenson pried open his lock and pulled back the gate until we’d entered and then proceeded to lock us in. There were rumors that he kept a pistol Fidel had given him personally for protection. He offered a warm handshake and smiled, yet his eyes were bloodshot and turned sad the moment he noticed my camera.
“Please come inside,” he said in English.
“You speak English?” I asked.
“And Russian,” my translator added.
Once we got inside his home—surrounded by photographs, mementos, and trophies—Stevenson pointed to a chair for me to sit in while he sat across from me, the street visible to him out the open front door. I quickly realized why this was: Every last person who walked by, spotting Stevenson, sang his name in joy, raising a hand of praise, and it lifted his spirits. I handed the bottle of vodka to Stevenson and he tilted his head in thanks, asking the translator if he could go back into the kitchen and bring out some cups and orange juice for us.
Even though at the time I had no idea that this was going to be the last interview of Stevenson’s life before his sudden death a year later in June 2012, I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. Suddenly it got considerably worse.
I turned and began attaching my camera to a small tripod. I was in the process of stretching out and unfolding it just as Stevenson lit another cigarette, turned to our translator, and said in Spanish:
“Tell him he has to pay or there is no interview. Make him come up with something.”
“How much do we ask for?” my translator asked Stevenson.
“You tell me,” Stevenson grunted. “You have experience in this. Give him a number.”
“I say we ask for eighty or a hundred. I’m broke.”
“Okay.” Stevenson shrugged. “But I’m worse off than you. If I say there is no interview—” Just then he noticed the camera pointed in his direction. “Don’t film me now. No camera! Put the camera away.”
I swung the camera away.
Stevenson was in an impossible situation. He not only had to rejection America’s millions, but he also had to pretend there was no consequence. Stevenson had to be just as defiant in his choice as Rigondeaux was in pretending he’d reached salvation in an American way of life with no lingering regret.
“Is it off?” Stevenson growled.
I turned it off.
The translator spread out three cups before Stevenson and placed a large bottle of orange juice next to the vodka.
“We can talk but I don’t want to be filmed.”
“If you grant me an interview I have to film. That’s why I’m here.”
“For one hundred dollars you can film the pictures on my wall and have the audio of our interview.”
“I’m sorry,” I told him, “On the phone I asked for a filmed interview. That’s why I came here.”
Stevenson put out his cigarette on the floor and looked for another in an empty pack. I offered him one of mine.
“What is this?”
“American Spirit.”
“You want Teófilo Stevenson to smoke American Spirit? Why did I ever let you in my house.”
With that, Stevenson went about preparing three drinks in the large paper cups. He filled all three cups to the brim, but two had nine parts orange juice to one part vodka, while the last had nine parts vodka to just a token splash of orange juice. Half the bottle of vodka was already gone.
“Okay.” Stevenson laughed. “How long you want for our interview?”
“An hour?”
Stevenson nodded thoughtfully and reached down for the suicide screwdriver and hoisted it up toward me.
“Fuck that shit.” I waved it off. “I don’t even drink.”
“My friend”—Stevenson snickered—“my deal is this. If you pay a hundred and thirty dollars, you can have forty-five minutes with me on camera and film my trophy walls and pictures with Fidel and Ali.”
“Done.” I reached over to my camera.
“Annnnnnnd,” Stevenson added, “The time starts now but you can only begin filming once you finish this drink. These are my terms.”
“Those are your terms?”
“Yes.” Stevenson smiled coyly. “Do you accept my terms?”
“Deal.”
I took the cup of vodka, chugged it in five or six excruciating gulps, struggled not to vomit in Stevenson’s living room for the next few moments, and once it had finally settled in my stomach, I reached over to turn the camera on to catch Stevenson’s reaction.
“Nooooo!”
“Deal’s a deal.”
The translator shook his head. “You’re both insane. What am I doing here?”
“Okay, one minute,” Stevenson pleaded. “One minute.” He staggered to his feet and wobbled his way into the dining room and found a shirt and cap after tossing aside some dominos on his dinner table. He returned in a Che Guevara T-shirt and gray cap as armor and stared at me like an old lion.
“Are you happy with your life in Cuba?” I asked him, my voice shaking. “Are you happy with the life you’ve had?”
“Happy? I’m happy. I’m very happy.”
“No regrets?”
“No.”
“Why is that so hard for people to believe?”
“There are people who become immoral. I would never do that. I endure until the end.”
“I’ve just come from Ireland, where Guillermo Rigondeaux had his last fight. He told me you defended him after he tried to defect.”
“The Cuban system helped him. Where he grew up in Santiago de Cuba? They did not have the conditions that the revolution has created today. He should have respected that.”
“Félix Savón told me he felt Rigondeaux betrayed the Cuban people.”
“I rejected all that money. Because they wanted me to stay out there in the United States like Rigondeaux and the rest of them. Rigondeaux decided to leave. He wasn’t allowed to box anymore in Cuba. He betrayed the Cuban people. And … he left.”
“What does this decision feel like to stay or to leave?” I asked Stevenson. “Is it a decision from the mind or the heart?”
“There are decisions that emerge from your heart and your soul and those decisions can’t be betrayed. Now please stop the cameras for a moment. I don’t want the children to see the champ smoking, please. It’s a bad example.”
