Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
—George Orwell
TEÓFILO STEVENSON WAS A CHAMPION of the Muhammad Ali–dominated 1970s, before my time. Mike Tyson was my era’s champion. The most mysterious opponent who was ever mentioned to challenge Tyson for the heavyweight championship was the Cuban boxer Félix Savón. Most of the world was only able to watch Savón every four years when he steamrolled through competition with a stunningly lethal right hand.
One afternoon I was sitting in the bleachers next to a father and son for the first of three sets of boxing competitions taking place all day at Kid Chocolate. My high school gym might have cost more to build, but with hundreds of millions of dollars you couldn’t re-create what Chocolate looked, let alone felt, like the afternoon when I saw Félix Savón enter the place. For a second he was framed by the murals and quoted passages from Fidel, the chipped paint and haywire scoreboards, the rafters and leaky ceiling … but then some of the faces in the crowd spotted him and smiled, nudging more and more people to share in the fun of spotting Savón.
The father next to me had just offered me a cigarette and was telling me that one day his son would fight here and make him proud. His boy was around ten and rolled his eyes.
“You need a light?” the father asked me.
Cuban tobacco in most cigarettes off the street is obscenely strong and vaguely sweet. I felt a little self-conscious smoking in front of his son, but I had forgotten that self-consciousness hadn’t been invented in Cuba yet.
He asked if I was a boxer myself and flexed his muscles while his son laughed. The boy raised his fists to his face and glared menacingly at me until my laughter obliged him to give me a friendly shove.
Just then I heard the cheering subside for the fight that was going on and noticed an enormous, towering man in Cuban track pants stroll across the gym floor alone. I didn’t have a good look at him.
“¿Quién es él?” I asked the dad, to make sure it was who I thought it was.
“Oh that’s just Félix. He’s a good friend.”
“Savón?”
Savón, like Teófilo Stevenson, was a three-time heavyweight Olympic champion. Don King had offered him a lot more than the five million Teófilo Stevenson rejected to fight Muhammad Ali, for Savón to turn pro and fight Mike Tyson. The figure was somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty or twenty-five million. He turned it down flat. I’d seen an interview with him where he slowly made his way, speech impediment and all, to explain, “I may not be a millionaire because of what I turned down, but it’s possible I made a million friends with my decision here.”
Félix Savón was famous for being a little slow, but also the sweetest and baddest man in the country. There he was, all by himself, waving graciously to a few people who called out his name.
“Félix is working with one of the teams?” I asked.
“Claro.”
“He’s a friend of yours?”
“Familia.”
“¿Familia?”
“Jes,” the father broke into English, to emphasize his point. “I will introduce you. FÉLIX! ¡OYE!”
“Fuck! Man, don’t. What are you doing!”
“¡OYE! FÉLIX!” Then leaning over to me, “Familia. My berry goo’ frien’. Berry goo’.” Félix, still in stride toward an empty chair near the ring, raised his hand to acknowledge the piercing scream of the man sitting next to me in the stands. Clearly he had no idea who he was looking at.
“I really think Félix wants to be left alone.”
“¡Qué va! Bullshit. Félix i’ like my hermano. Let’s get him over here and you can have a photo with Félix. Félix! ¡OYE!” The pitch of this oye was pleading and defiant at the same time.
“Man, I don’t even have a camera,” I pleaded. “Let’s leave him alone.”
“I have a camera.”
Félix waved again, but you could tell he dreaded what was to come next. Though it was unlikely he dreaded it half as much as I did.
The father abandoned his son’s hand and got to his feet, shoved both hands in his mouth, and whistled with such ferocity Félix stopped, turned, and glared in our direction. It was a glare I had never seen Félix offer any opponent during the fourteen years he was flattening everybody in his boxing career. Right then Félix flashed the Lenny dreaming-of-the-rabbits grin.
“Please God stop,” I pleaded with this man. “For the love of your child.”
“¡OYE!”
“Your son.”
“MADRE MIA, ¡FÉLIX!”
Félix squinted until he spotted us and frowned.
The father waved him over and grabbed me by the arm. “Coño, grab my fucking camera.”
I did as he instructed, though I didn’t even want a photograph with Félix Savón.
“¡FÉLIX! ¡OYE! Don’t pretend like Miguel Antonio Torres has not known you since you were a child of seven! Get over here, you!”
Félix Savón, all six-foot-six and 240 pounds of him, one of the greatest fighters the world had ever produced, dropped his head and began the walk of shame over to us. The child of Miguel Antonio Torres could not have been more pleased with this glorious day, the day his father regained the heavyweight championship for daddies everywhere.
“Miguelito, wait here for us. Papi must take care of this.”
I was grabbed by the elbow and hauled down the stairs toward the first row. We were on a platform as Félix arrived, so I was eye level with the Cuban legend.
Félix sheepishly apologized and Miguel, five-four in sandals, reached up and slapped his cheek gently. I was introduced as a close family friend and Félix extended his hand, which looked as though it could palm a beach ball. As we shook hands I tried not to feel like a Muppet in the exchange.
Félix asked softly how I’d liked the tournament. His speech impediment wasn’t quite a stutter, though he did have trouble enunciating his words.
The father mentioned a photo, and Félix warmly put his arm over my shoulder, which cued me to put mine over his. We had a considerable section of the crowd enjoying my awkwardness over holding Savón hostage. Miguel Antonio Torres stood before us with his camera pointed, and both Félix and I smiled at him. Our fixed smiles extended to nearly a minute until Félix, not breaking his grin, asked if there might be a good time to take the photo.
“¡Hijo de puta! ¡Mierda!” Miguel screamed.
I asked if the disposable piece-of-shit camera was broken. Félix looked over at me and clenched his massive jaw, striations spread out over the cheek like a cracked windshield.
Click …
The comedian Mitch Hedberg once opined, “I think Bigfoot is blurry, that’s the problem. It’s not the photographer’s fault. Bigfoot is blurry, and that’s extra scary to me.” So are certain freakish moments in your life. Miguel’s blurry photo of Félix and me standing together captured the moment crystal clear.
I asked Félix if I could speak to him after the fights and he gave me a strange look and took my notebook to write down his phone number. As he strode off toward the ring, he said he was free that evening and to call.
I went outside Kid Chocolate for some air. The portrait photographers who worked the front steps of the Capitolio with their century-old cameras were packing up for the night when a fleet of bicycles carting birthday cakes raced down the side of the road in front of them. Every kid in town was entitled to a free cake until they reached fifteen (plus a free cake on their wedding), and the state delivered the cakes to your door. It was always one of my favorite sights around town. But they also reminded me of a very strange day in my life, my twelfth birthday.
Months before that birthday, I had asked my parents for a poster of Muhammad Ali for my room. He was the bravest person that I knew and I wanted to see his face looking at me every day. When they took me to the poster shop, I couldn’t decide between my two favorites. There were six or seven Ali posters in the store that I liked, but the choice was easy to narrow down to two. I had nearly saved up enough money on my own with my allowance to buy one, but I couldn’t shake the premonition that I’d only end up obsessing over the one I didn’t choose. I used to visit the shop all the time and drive the owner crazy asking him to unfurl the posters and hold each of them up for me. And then my bullying incident at school happened and I was afraid to leave my room, let alone step outside my front door. By the time my twelfth birthday rolled around, my family wanted to help cheer me up and gave me enough money to buy all the Ali posters at the shop. I didn’t even have to choose anymore. After I handed over the vast fortune of $75 in my hand and bought all the posters in the shop, I felt something I’d never felt before. Maybe it was a child’s version of buyer’s remorse being channeled into something existentially more troubling that blew all my circuits. At first, I tried to pretend I was excited as I always imagined I was supposed to feel, not having to make an awful choice between the two things I most wanted in the world. In my magical thinking, the posters were going to fix everything that had gone wrong in my life. But the day after I put up all the posters in my room, I got so upset I tore them all down and threw them away. I took a pair of my mom’s scissors and a rusty razor she used on her legs and cut off all my hair and shaved my head. I’ve never really let it grow back since.
* * *
Taking no chances on scheduling a visit with Félix in case, as everyone warned, phone lines were tapped, I paid Héctor Vinent a visit at Rafael Trejo the next day and got Félix Savón’s address. Talking to important figures privately aroused suspicion so you had to be careful. “Consistency is based on surveillance,” billboards reminded you. Also, I wanted to film the interview, which made me even more paranoid about the consequences. As a further precaution, in case anyone was watching, I moved all of my belongings from the apartment I was renting in Centro Habana into another place two blocks away, one not officially registered to rent out rooms. I was curious to see if anything would happen at my old residence. I’d heard of journalists being escorted to the airport by state security for a lot less than unauthorized, illegally filmed interviews with notable citizens.
That night I hired a gypsy cab in Calle Neptuno and gave the driver Savón’s address. The driver laughed and asked if I minded paying double the fare he’d originally accepted. While Fidel Castro’s residence was a state secret, every Cuban knew his address, along with all the other people foreigners might wish to pay a visit to. I agreed to the fare hike. Maybe every major name in Cuba had a camera trained on their house by that point. A lot of the neighborhoods were under constant watch by cameras already.
Savón lived in a humble suburb of Havana, just a few minutes away from the airport. He shared a modest, three-bedroom home with his wife, mother-in-law, sister, and a handful of kids. Nothing about his house stood out from any of the others on his block; it looked like any residential, suburban home you might find in Edison, New Jersey. Evander Holyfield, about the same age but with about half the punching power of Savón, had been able to purchase a 109-room mansion in Atlanta. Keeping that mansion, however, was a different story, since he lost hundreds of millions of dollars in earnings and promptly went bankrupt, his home going into foreclosure.
Savón had grown up in Guantánamo, the son of a bricklayer. Boxing hadn’t come naturally to him, but he worked at it. He was turned down three times by the Gitmo boxing school before they let him in as a teenager. Savón went on to win 362 amateur fights for his country, 6 world championships, and 3 Olympic gold medals, never suffering a defeat that he didn’t avenge. According to Cuban media reports, he used to shadowbox while staring out at the U.S. naval base, dreaming of victories against Americans. Some Cubans joked that if the United States gave Guantánamo Bay back to Cuba, then they could have Miami back.
I opened the gate of the rickety fence outside Savón’s front yard just as his front door opened and music splashed out into the neighborhood. A child spotted me from inside the foyer and ran down the main hall, only to return holding the enormous right hand of a smiling giant.
“¡Oye, campeón!” Félix howled.
He insisted that he had some things he could sell me. He said he had a book and a film others had helped him with about his career and life. He had an agent I should talk to. I must have raised an eyebrow at the prospect of a man who’d turned down a multimillion-dollar career hiring an agent to look after his financial interests, because Félix laughed.
“An agent?” I asked. That was an interesting occupation in a communist state.
“A friend who helps me with things,” he clarified.
“Okay.”
“Come inside. How much time do you need?”
“Not long.”
“Is a hundred dollars for thirty minutes okay for you?”
“Yes.”
“Then I start my watch now.” Félix reached over to fiddle with what looked like the world’s first digital watch. Finally it beeped to his satisfaction and he winked at me. “Please come into my living room.”
Savón’s severe speech impediment was probably not helped much by the effects of twenty years of boxing, which made each syllable of the words he spoke remarkably difficult for him. His mouth and jaw worked impossibly hard just to complete brief sentences in less than thirty seconds, so I wasn’t sure how much ground we could cover in thirty minutes.
Savón’s living room sat next to his extensive, glassed-in trophy room. He refused to allow me to look it over and tapped his finger on his watch.
“We’re on your time, my friend. What would you like to talk about?”
I took a deep breath as I set up my small camera on Savón’s coffee table and began filming him.
“Guillermo Rigondeaux,” I said, naming the most recent and highest-profile defection in Cuban boxing history.
“The same boxing promoters interested in him came here.” Savón smiled, lifting his fist and poking his index finger toward his carpet.
“The same ones?”
“The same.”
“What did you tell them?”
“My wife answered the door when they arrived.” His wife came over and stopped for a second at the doorway to listen. “My wife told them, ‘Félix is more revolutionary than Fidel.’” As I laughed with him, Félix looked back at his wife, they smiled to each other, and she went back into the kitchen to be with their children.
“¿Entiende?” Félix asked coyly, grinning.
“Rigondeaux left this country. What are the reasons that you stayed here and turned down the money?”
“I have many reasons why I’m a Cuban boxer.” Savón lifted his chin and pondered them fondly. “The love of my family. My love of the motherland. In Puerto Rico I was offered five million to leave. In Mexico ten million. Even more later—”
“These offers were to fight Mike Tyson?”
“Yes, that was part of it. But none of it mattered to me. They tried other times to convince my wife to speak with me. But I’ve always said I’m not a millionaire in Cuba, but I have millions of friends that can always lend me a peso or a piece of bread if I need it. ¿Entiende?”
“How do you feel about Rigondeaux?”
“As time goes by, the younger generation loses values.” Savón paused and gathered himself. “They lose the will we had in my time. When Rigondeaux was a boxer here, I was the captain of our team. Due to the confidence I had in him, I left him as a captain of the Cuban national team. He betrayed his principles. I’m sure he had his reasons for doing that. But life’s motives for most people nowadays are giving more value to money than honor.”
After another fifteen minutes Savón’s watch sounded its alarm and our time was up. He shrugged sheepishly and indicated for me to shut off the camera. Once the camera was off he reached over to collect the agreed-upon price for the interview. I paid and Savón smiled and spoke the only two words I’d ever heard him speak in English: “Thank you.”
When I got back to my apartment I packed up the rest of my belongings along with the footage from the interview and caught the next flight out of Havana.