The Domino Diaries

IN THE SUMMER OF 2007, two-time Olympic champion Guillermo Rigondeaux and his teammate, Erislandy Lara, had been arrested in Brazil after going AWOL from the Cuban team during the Pan Am Games. The defection attempt made international news and quickly became a national soap opera, regularly appearing on Cuban news and in round table discussions. Castro, though largely out of public view since stepping down from power because of his secret illness the year before, spoke out in the state newspaper Granma. Castro branded Rigondeaux a “traitor” and “Judas” to the Cuban people. “They have reached a point of no return as members of a Cuban boxing team,” Castro wrote in Granma. “An athlete who abandons his team is like a soldier who abandons his fellow troops in the middle of combat.” And then Teófilo Stevenson, despite his legend being built on the foundation of having turned down every offer to leave Cuba, defended Rigondeaux and Lara. “They are not traitors,” Stevenson declared. “They slipped up. People will understand. They’ve repented. It is a victory that they have returned. Others did not.”

Only a few months later, one afternoon in the autumn of 2007, I was training with Héctor at Trejo when I spotted someone out of the corner of my eye at the gym’s entrance.

“Mi madre,” Héctor whispered, dropping his hands slowly, looking in the same direction as me. “It’s him.”

When any Cuban refers to “him” in conversation, with little to no information or context provided, it invariably refers to Fidel.

Héctor remained frozen. It was one hundred degrees out that afternoon training in the open air of Rafael Trejo. I nudged him, but Héctor wouldn’t come to. I looked around us as the silence took hold. All the proud coaches refused to look at the problem straight on, instead glancing sidelong at the entrance to the gym. A profoundly disturbing thing you discover very quickly traveling in Cuba is that the most dangerous person for Cubans isn’t the police or even the secret police; it’s their neighbor. Anyone can report you for anything “outside” the revolution—even if you haven’t done it yet. Héctor himself had been banned from boxing before he’d ever attempted escape.

“It’s him.” Héctor repeated, this time even more softly, nodding in the direction of the entrance. “This is very dangerous for us.”

All I could see was a child near the entrance. Kids came in off the street all the time to watch or hang out at the gym. I hadn’t noticed anything special about this one.

“Claro,” Héctor grunted. “That child is twenty-seven and perhaps the greatest boxer Cuba has ever produced. Fidel has said he will never fight again. He has nowhere to go. Anyone in sports can no longer be seen talking to him. We could lose our jobs. You can talk to him.”

It was as if a Cuban version of Mr. Kurtz had stepped out of his own version of Heart of Darkness to haunt our gym. I’d never seen Rigondeaux’s face without it being obscured by headgear or a photograph of Fidel he was holding up after winning a tournament. Finally I saw him, only to recognize the saddest face I’d ever seen in Cuba. He stood aloofly in the shadows wearing a Nike ball cap and jeans, with a fake Versace shirt that had the sleeves ripped off.

Without realizing it, I started toward Rigondeaux. As I approached him, in the shade under the bleachers of the entrance to Rafael Trejo, I reached out a hand and introduced myself. He did what he could, under the strained circumstances at the gym, to muster a smile. Up close I noticed his right eye showed damage, slumping slightly from his left. Rigondeaux’s attempt at a polite smile betrayed the gold grill over his front teeth for a brief moment as he took another drag of his Popular cigarette.

Rigondeaux snickered, dropped his head, and smirked, taking a last long drag on his cigarette before flicking it on the ground and stamping it out with his sneaker. For a moment his face assumed the same hopeless expression as Lee Harvey Oswald bemoaning, “I’m just a patsy.” Then it vanished and he sighed. “Oh, you know, I melted down both my gold medals into my mouth.”

I met Rigondeaux that strange day in Rafael Trejo in November of 2007, and for the first time Cuba ceased to be an abstraction—it finally had a face.

Rigondeaux survived in Cuba as best he could—living under house arrest after his failed defection in Brazil during the Pan Am Games the previous summer—until his escape on a smuggler’s boat in February of 2009. After his escape, his father back in his hometown of Santiago de Cuba disowned him for betraying Fidel and the revolution. But his mother supported him. According to jokes told around the Trejo, he’d signed more contracts with foreign promoters promising to fight in the United States than he’d ever signed autographs for fans. Maybe he lived off a few foreign money drips secretly sent to him to help support his family and build some trust to take the leap of his life. He’d owe all those people every dime once he took the bait and at least physically left Cuba behind.

Rigondeaux and I arrived in America to start new lives at about the same time fifteen months after our first meeting. He was installed in Miami while I’d moved to New York. His journey required abandoning a wife while I’d found one. When I caught up with him in Los Angeles in March of 2010, he looked even more distraught than when I’d first encountered him in Havana. He finally found the stage he wanted. It was hard to imagine how anything in America could be worse than the situation he’d escaped back home. His sixth professional fight was the following week. He was making more money in a fight than he would have made in a lifetime fighting in Cuba.

But that wasn’t the issue. His mother had just died back on the island and he was forbidden to attend the funeral. He was told if he set foot back on the island he’d be arrested on sight. Back in Cuba, the eighteen months Fidel had taken boxing away from his life forged an overwhelming bitterness in his heart, but he would describe the voyage on a crowded smuggler’s boat to Cancún—surrounded by thirty other terrified human cargo—as the most traumatic event of his life. The boats capsized, smugglers threw their cargo overboard, people were held hostage at gunpoint until a ransom was paid. I didn’t have to pull back all that far to see that a badly wounded canary in the coal mine for Castro’s Cuba had emerged on the opposite side of the Florida Straits.

Boxers have a notoriously limited shelf life and Rigondeaux was making up for lost time, of which he had little left to cash in on his talents. Rigondeaux’s only path to success was to hurtle toward the American Dream like a runaway ambulance through traffic. I spent the next three years chasing my own version behind the hurtling ambulance of his life.

The first fight of his I witnessed was in Tijuana. His manager wanted publicity and had invited me down there for an interview and offered to let me inside the dressing room and enter the ring with Rigondeaux to soak up the atmosphere. The promise of total access at the ground floor of Rigondeaux’s professional career in the States, on the way to a world championship, was the bait. But gangsters had threatened the manager about entering Tijuana, where they had connections to the mafia. They could arrange police planting drugs, hire a hit man, or just have us kidnapped. For as little as fifty dollars, any of the three were at their disposal. So these were the risks and rewards about heading down across the border. Rigondeaux’s manager, Gary Hyde, got on a plane after leaving an entire family in tears begging him not to. My wife was too angry about my recklessness and stupidity to muster any tears when we said good-bye.

I was going to turn the offer down when my old trainer Ronnie Wilson found a pretty miraculous way to give me one final push out of my own way. I received a letter several months after I’d published a story about how Ronnie had helped me and others clarify our paths, while succumbing to his own addiction.

I’m not at all sure where to begin with this. I am Ronnie Wilson’s daughter. He did also have a son, my older brother Dean. Silly as it sounds, I Google my father’s name from time to time, looking for stories such as yours … yearning to know more about him. Your article touched my heart. He was such a kindhearted man, who would give the shirt off his back to anyone in need. However, drugs and alcohol are horrible friends to keep. They turned him into an ugly person … he was a totally different person when under the influence. I want you to know his family loved him to death and I personally time and time again tried to help him. I took him to rehabs and attended AA meetings with him, pulled him out of bars and got him home safe to get some sleep and food. I could go on and on. I’m still so saddened by his disease and refusal of any help. My husband and I have even offered him to come live with us on many occasions, but he has always declined.

I have three beautiful children, Ronnie’s grandchildren. It’s heartbreaking to know they will never get to know the wonderful man he used to be. I was always daddy’s girl and still feel that way at age thirty-four. He was my hero and I’ll forever wonder what I could have done to save him from this horrible addiction. I appreciate the time you took in describing the kind, selfless, gentle man he once was. Those are memories I cling to and choose to share with my children. If you do have any other memories you might have of my father I’d be extremely grateful if you shared them with me. I have very few articles and photos left of his boxing career. At one point when he began to clean up a bit, he asked me to send him what I had because someone was writing a biography about him. He soon ended up back on skid row in downtown Vancouver, so I don’t know what became of it all. I still have a couple of Ring magazines and some old black-and-white photos. Thank you for sharing such kind words about my dad.

Warm regards,

Jennifer

Jennifer lived in San Diego with her family, back where Ronnie began his professional career as a teenager. I tend to conflate a spiritual need for destiny with what’s on offer in horoscopes and numerology and other spiritual junkie track marks, but I’m a Gypsy mother’s son. I had watched my mother, whom all my friends told me was crazy, make a living for thirty years trying to heal people through means I could never accept for my own wounds, the ones that healed her. Jennifer’s message in a bottle—and the fact that she lived ten minutes from the border I was meant to cross—was enough of a karmic tap on my shoulder for me to push my chips in and agree to head down to Tijuana for Rigondeaux’s fight.

I wrote Jennifer back and she suggested we meet in Old Town the night before I crossed the border. I showed up in the spooky little neighborhood and quickly spotted the tall “slightly awkward” blonde she’d warned me she was. But the first thing I noticed about Jennifer from a distance was how she shared her father’s disarming confidence, the kind that reminds you that anyone who doesn’t feel safe in some essential sense could never be generous even if they wanted to. As she got closer, Jennifer had her dad’s same shy, caring eyes. I was so distracted, I didn’t even register that she was carrying a pair of her dad’s brown Everlast trunks in one hand and a folder of clippings in the other, until she held them up for me to see.