Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that.
—J. D. Salinger, “A Girl I Knew”
PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING I’d lined up in Havana to complete my documentary fell apart almost immediately after we arrived. Split Decision was meant to explore all the reasons behind why Cubans remained on the island or fled, examined through the consequences endured by Cuba’s heroic boxers who turned down fortunes or, like Rigondeaux, escaped. Increasingly it became clear the only story I could tell was how I couldn’t tell that story. I wanted to interview as many notable Cubans and experts as I could find—artists, journalists, athletes, coaches—knowing meanwhile that all the interviews would have to be conducted illegally. There was no way to officially line anything up unless you knew the right officials to bribe. And everyone I spoke with assured me I’d have to bribe everyone who went on camera to get them to talk about how money had no value.
I wanted to shoot my footage as fast as possible and remain below the radar for as long as I could. I had an ambitious list of people to interview on camera. Banned authors like Yoani Sánchez, the controversial blogger whom Time magazine had named one of the world’s most influential people in 2008 and who’d interviewed Obama not long before. Yoani’s blog was translated into more languages than The New York Times and she was quickly beginning to symbolize a controversial role as something akin to Cuba’s Anne Frank.
I wanted Teófilo Stevenson to talk about his role in the revolution and Rigondeaux’s “betrayal,” which he’d ultimately spoken out in defense of. If Stevenson and Félix Savón represented Cuba’s past, and if Rigondeaux’s story was emblematic of its present, a young teenage boxer named Cristian Martínez caught my eye as someone representing the future. He’d starred in a documentary about elite young boxers on the island called Sons of Cuba, and many people viewed him as the next great boxer emerging to assume Rigondeaux’s abdicated role as Cuba’s dominant champion. Sons of Cuba was the first film for which foreign filmmakers were allowed into La Finca, the elite boxing academy where all of Cuba’s great champions had trained.
Last, if at all possible, I wanted to interview Rigondeaux’s wife and children: the collateral damage. Even knocking on their front door represented crossing a Rubicon. Or worse. An American, Alan Gross, had just been imprisoned for illegally working as a covert U.S. operative supplying satellite equipment to people on the island.
After we drove to meet Sofía’s grandparents near Playa del Este and unloaded all the supplies we’d brought, I went over to the Habana Libre to check on the status of the people I wanted to meet and discovered nearly all of them were spooked about the risks and asked that I make no effort to contact them again. At the other hotels around Havana where I’d arranged to discuss the possibility of other interviews, I was stood up by every contact I’d had lined up through journalists in New York. Cars began to drive past with strangers smirking and pointing up at the cameras hanging over the streets, heightening my paranoia. My desperation still had a step on my fear, but it was pretty evident that things were falling apart.
“Beeeg brother eez watching, gringo,” I was warned by the people renting me the apartment in Centro Habana, where Sofía and I were staying. “Welcome to Hotel California! Leezon to Mr. Henley’s words. ‘Check owwd aanee time bhat joo can never leave.…”
Any country takes on a sinister hue once Don Henley’s lyrics begin to carry any significance.
I made more calls around Havana to sort out something—anything—and salvage the two months I had already committed to being there. I’d borrowed a lot of money and maxed out every credit card and line of credit I had, and the only way out of bankruptcy was getting a story.
My attitude at that point was that my debts were an asset, because anybody else chasing after this story with a budget would steer clear. Bad cards or not, I was all in. Pretty soon the warnings I received from the people who were renting me the apartment escalated to begging on the lives of their children that I cease anything that could get their families in trouble. Everyone was petrified to talk about anything related to Rigondeaux or other defected fighters. “You’re on your own,” I was told repeatedly.
I heard the same things over and over: Security knows everything. Taps the phone. Checks your e-mails. Talks to your neighbor. When your boxer tried to defect, Castro wrote about Rigondeaux himself. This is not a man to ask questions about. Officially he is a traitor. Surveillance had escalated since Castro had stepped down from power. Cameras were on most of the street corners now across the entire city. More uniformed police. More secret police. The CDR on every block had stepped up their vigilance. More informants. The government was clamping down on everything, especially an issue as touchy as defecting athletes. Leave this situation alone. You can leave. We cannot. We live with the consequences of your actions. If you are not careful you will not leave or ever be able to come back.
After I went back to Playa del Este to pick Sofía up, the time with her grandparents had left her sealed off. They were two sweet people who lived in a small apartment after they’d traded in their house in Havana for two apartments in this suburb. Relatives lived in their other place. Sofía’s grandfather had been a wealthy man who managed three sugar refineries that were all seized by the rebels. A couple of strokes had left his speech very limited, but he was open to talking about the circumstances of the complete overhaul that his life and country underwent during that time. He acknowledged the many struggles and missteps of the government’s maneuvers.
When he touched on the impact of the U.S. blockade he was nuanced and explored it from several sides. The Cuban American vote in Florida had largely been responsible for the results of both of George W. Bush’s elections, while Castro had a scapegoat for his own blunders, he said. He had no bitterness about losing his own station in life prerevolution in exchange for the improvements he saw for so many others from how life had been pre-Castro. “Do you really imagine the Cuban people would hand over the wheel of our country and abandon our whole socioeconomic system to a pack of bearded kids if all the greed, corruption, and unspeakable cruelty hadn’t made life in this country a living hell for millions of our citizens? Castro was created by those conditions. The new generation never saw what was before. Those who did are dying off.”
After we left and headed back to Havana, Sofía was very quiet in the car. She stared out the window at the sea and finally shook her head. “After they’re gone I’ll never come back here. I hate returning to Havana more each time. It only reminds me I don’t belong here any more than I do where I live now. All of my beautiful memories just rot away while I’m in Toronto, but here the stench makes me sick. I’ll never ever come back after they die.”
This was the backdrop of our trial-run honeymoon from hell.
* * *
While the rest of the world’s attention had turned to the struggle against dictators in Syria, Egypt, and Libya, Sofía and I landed in Havana just as the celebrations on behalf of the fiftieth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs failed invasion were picking up steam. As a tidal wave of antigovernment protests swept the Middle East, Havana was caught in some kind of bizarro Fourth of July, collectively celebrating their greatest victory against imperialism and their maximum leader outliving ten U.S. presidents and counting.
I brought a camera along and we marched with the masses. It was a weird and convoluted mix of the deadweight of so many other things Cubans had endured along with that half-century’s opposition to the United States. But along with all the mandated hypocritical bullshit summed up on billboards proclaiming it was all ¡VAMOS BIEN!, thousands more people were lost in their pride like kites blown out of their souls scratching the sky. It was like being on the field for the Super Bowl with a hundred thousand players from one team. In between the little flags, blown whistles, and chants, I saw faces bracing all around me, struggling against an unknown future and turbulent past to create a spectrum of emotions that spanned from panic to exhaustion. The surreal spectacle was held in the Plaza de la Revolución with Russian MiG fighter jets straight out of Top Gun soaring through the clouds and scaring the hell out of a flock of vultures circling over our heads. Hundreds of thousands of habaneros took buses, hitchhiked, biked, or simply walked out their front doors and struck out across the city on foot to join the crowd in the square.
Once we got near the Plaza, thousands of immaculate, olive-uniformed and white-gloved soldiers marched in formation, row after row, with rocket-propelled grenade launchers slung over their shoulders. Behind them dozens of military trucks with forty red-tipped rocket payloads drove next to other bulky vehicles rumbling by, with .50 caliber cannons and gleaming tanks bringing up the rear. The huge building-high stencils of Che and the newly built Camilo Cienfuegos stared down over another procession of soldiers following the last pack, with automatic Russian guns held against their chests. Framing the festivities were hundreds of silhouetted citizens on the roofs of the various ministry buildings enclosing the square, waving diaphanous Cuban flags against the sky. Then the navy marched into view with their rounded hats and bayonet-tipped rifles pointed up at the sky. Far off, we could see Raúl Castro waving a beach hat in front of the José Martí monument surrounded by other government heads. Fidel’s name was chanted and posters featuring his face at various ages were held aloft. Some Cuban troops fired a cannon while the fighter jets made another pass over the throngs.
As we got closer to the crowds, Sofía and I were jammed in against everybody like a packed snowball. We saw a procession of schoolchildren in their colorful uniforms wave their scarves over their heads as a replica of the Granma, the leaky boat that brought eighty-two revolutionaries to the island, was pulled on a float behind them. The kids, as usual, caught my attention because innocence in Cuba does not resemble the Disneyfied kind that I was accustomed to back home. Cuban childhood has its own intricate character and coding. Fidel was welcomed by the children as a kind of cute grandfather figure compared with the hyperpaternalistic view their parents always seemed to have of him, whether they loved or hated him.
As we slowly churned toward the bottleneck of the main procession, with hundreds of home-painted placards held high—¡VICTORIA O MUERTE! and ¡SOCIALISMO! and ¡VIVA FIDEL! and ¡VAMOS BIEN!—next to Camilo’s smiling face, Sofía leaned over to me in the crush of the parade. She had been seething through all of this.
“Why did we come here, Brinicito? This is fucking excruciating. They’re just doing this to pretend that if Cuba can stand up to the United States it can deal with how much worse life is about to get after Raúl lays off a million government workers. Everybody’s only here because 80 percent of them work for the government! They have to come here. It’s the same old bullshit, scapegoating the U.S. for all our problems. It makes me sick to my stomach. Over fifty fucking years to turn one page from this same comic book they offer us. Let’s get out of here. I’ve had enough of all of this to last a lifetime. Please, I can’t be here anymore.”
* * *
After Raúl waved his hat over us from a platform surrounded by his entourage of stooped yet supremely powerful political old men, Sofía yanked me out of the parade and dragged me down a nearby side street where someone just turned a pickup truck’s engine. Another person waved us over to the bed of the truck and we climbed in and sat alongside a dozen Cubans eager to get back home after perfunctorily paying their dues at the great celebration.
After being rebuked for trying to console her, I sat holding Sofía’s hand while everyone in the back of the truck took turns bemoaning their flawed country with as many jokes as earnest complaints. Despite looking furious for the same reasons as everyone else in the truck, I noticed that Sofía didn’t bother to chime in or participate in the grousing. Nursing her own grudge brought on an agitation in her that was so overwhelming none of the people around us even tried to cheer her up with a joke. As much as was possible crammed into the bed of the truck, the others stayed clear. Instead they looked at me apologetically while Sofía closed her eyes and breathed heavily as the wind played with her hair. Without her having to say a word, they knew she’d endured what they had, but they also mysteriously determined she wasn’t staying long.
We drove back into town down a long, hilly street with the sidewalks mostly empty. I was trying to think of a place we could go to cheer Sofía up. Havana was all but abandoned, even more of a city of ruins than usual for the next few hours. We’d have the Hotel Nacional to ourselves for a drink or the Museo del Chocolate without the forty-five-minute wait to get in next to an open sewer or Coppelia for an ice cream. Maybe hitchhike out to Playa del Este on a deserted section of beach, with the tropical water and sand so bright it was almost neon. But one look at Sofía’s sullen face and it was obvious that I was to leave her alone for the rest of the drive in.
Like most of the Cubans on the flight over, Sofía had brought a huge amount of supplies to deliver to her grandparents and extended family: medicine, a walker for her grandfather who’d just suffered a stroke, vitamins, toothpaste, foot cream, tampons, an mp3 player, soap, and a slew of other basic necessities well beyond the reach of average citizens. Sofía had been hassled by customs officials, being forced to explain and then defend each item, as with many other Cubans returning home to help their families. It was clear that she’d been through the routine so many times already that the only emotion she had left was disgust. She told me after we got in the cab outside José Martí Airport that once her family had raised enough money to survive in Canada, all their resources went toward sending Sofía back to the island to deliver what they could provide back home to family members buried by increasing needs as things continued to deteriorate in Cuban daily life.
From the beginning, unlike most Cubans I’d met who had defected or found other means of leaving, for Sofía nostalgia for anything relating to home repulsed her. Her sentimentality was reserved only for the decidedly unsentimental stories she’d left behind. Mainly stuff she trotted out to demonstrate how elusive she was from my grasp and best to keep at a distance.
The first time I met her in a Toronto hotel lobby on King Street, she’d laughed in my face before confirming to herself the suspicion that she’d had since we’d begun writing each other: that she was completely out of my league. She announced this finding at such volume that most of the hotel staff took my measure and nodded agreement. Naturally, any hopes I had collapsed on the spot and I assumed at any second she would turn around and disappear forever, all with the indifference one might bring to throwing away trash. “Listen, Gypsy, maybe we can just grab a drink first since you came all this way, but don’t get any ideas.…”
Some snow was falling outside and clung to her hair and jacket collar, and the rest of her looked like some tropical princess. Before she’d left Cuba, all her life she’d wanted to see the snow, and on the day she finally arrived to Canada, Toronto was under siege, battling a blizzard. She’d traded one excruciating extreme for another, and that was before she had enough English to contrast Cuban men with their Canadian equivalents. Leaving home as a teenager, Cuba was like a bear trap where the only means of escape required amputating vital portions of her soul. Food and music were the only safe areas to remain connected. Everything else seemed to bring into focus how the two worlds she straddled had left her life completely off-balance. And because our meetings after this one had all been restricted to fleeting marathon fuckfests around Toronto—behind the backs of our respective partners—there was always a kind of wartime urgency compounded by a tacit prohibition of talking about the past or the future. Last Tango in Paris was for both of us a favorite movie, and so we re-created our own version in my home country each time I departed for her hometown.
But the good-byes were rigged with all kinds of explosives. The moment I’d raise the prospect of seeing her again she’d pull up her drawbridge and dig a moat around herself, informing me we’d never see each other again. “We’d only make ourselves miserable anyway,” she’d sneer. So I stopped asking permission and continued to lay over in Toronto for a few days every time I went to Havana with the express purpose of ambushing her. The more secure a setup she had with a man, the easier it was to entice betrayal.
Back in Havana Sofía finally smiled. “I know where I want you to take me,” Sofía said. “Let’s get off the truck and grab another car.”
“Where do you wanna go?”
“Quinta Avenida. Let’s go to Miramar and you can fuck this sadness out of me at Parque de los Ahogados. I’m tired of feeling grumpy. It’s my favorite park and where I lost my virginity. While you fuck me I’ll think about him.” She smiled.
“Hold on, I’m still stuck on ahogados. Park of the hanged?”
“Yeah, from all the suicides who hung themselves off these incredibly haunting banyan trees there. The park looks like someone’s nightmare.”
“This is where you lost your virginity?”
“Mhmm,” she said, waving at our driver in the rearview to stop the truck. “My old house isn’t far. I’ll take you to see where I grew up.”
* * *
We stopped an old Plymouth that was huffing its way over to Quinta Avenida, the avenue where the Malecón ends and dips under a tunnel and climbs to blossom into a six-lane avenue, divided by a lush, tree-lined island for pedestrians to stroll in the shade or relax on stone benches straight out of Santa Monica, California. When you exit that tunnel Miramar isn’t so much a different neighborhood of the city as a different world. The decay and despair of so many homes in Vedado give way to the abandoned, opulent mansions that run for miles, many converted into foreign embassies. At night the most expensive jineteras across the city strut in their Lycra catsuits looking to lure diplomats and other rich visitors until someone accepts their price.
We turned off the avenue down a side street just before the spooky suicide park Sofía had mentioned. A man from a group playing dominoes over a table on the corner glared at Sofía in her summer dress and then over at me. He muttered something and they all stared at us.
“¡Coño! These tourists steal the best of everything in our country,” one of them moaned.
Our visit to her childhood neighborhood hadn’t begun auspiciously.
Sofía turned and gave me a scolding look before smiling her satisfaction. “My people giving you shit definitely helps cheer me up.”
“It’s depressing as fuck,” I said.
“People like you are all the same. The ugliest thing you can find traveling around damaged places is always another tourist. That’s your biggest fear, isn’t it?”
“I can’t help where I’m from any more than they can help where they came from.”
“Why should you be depressed? According to them you’ve stolen the best mujer in all of Cuba. I bet they wouldn’t have said the same thing about Fidel Castro’s granddaughter. Who knows, maybe she’ll see us around Havana.”
This was an accurate forecast of my doomed last stretch in Havana. And after this she walked away emphasizing her triumph with each voluptuous step and wrecking-ball swing of her hips while the domino table full of men hissed and shrieked their approval. I followed her over to the park until she reached behind herself to pull up her skirt. We unpacked some much needed cheer and goodwill at the Park of the Hanged under one of the nightmarish banyan trees while Sofía sarcastically called out the name of the guy she lost her virginity to as a means of encouraging me to pick up the tempo before we got arrested.
Afterward, we wandered a few blocks off the avenue and turned up at a residential street littered with drowsy homes that wouldn’t look out of place in any suburb across the United States. Most had the familiar Cuban sausage dogs behind fences yelping “Intruder! Intruder!” until they abandoned their posts once we went over to pet them and applaud their ferociousness.
“The next house was ours,” Sofía said softly. “They painted it yellow. It was nicer pink. I wonder if the man my father sold it to still lives there now. Probably. I’ve heard he’s had a terrible time since he bought it ten years ago.”
“Who was he?”
“A Spanish businessman. Supplies the hotels in Miramar with various things. I don’t know him well. I don’t really know why I’m taking you here actually.”
Sofía opened the gate and I followed behind her into the front yard of her former home. As she walked she looked a little shaken glancing over at her neighbors’ properties. When we got to the front door we could hear what sounded like a sledgehammer coming from the backyard. We went around the side of the house and saw construction workers being overseen by an older, debonair gentleman who’d brought out a pitcher of mojitos and was pouring glasses.
“¡Oye, Mario!” Sofía cried out.
Mario turned around and smiled wide with his lips slowly parting.
“Still here?” Sofía laughed.
“I’ve been stranded ever since I bought the place. Look at you. You’re as beautiful as your mother. Come closer so I can give you a kiss.”
They talked for twenty minutes while Mario showed Sofía the changes he’d made to the house in an attempt to improve its value for a sale. In between Mario pointing out his changes and Sofía updating him on her family on the island and in Canada, she showed me where she’d taken her first steps, where she’d slept with her brother and aunt, and the room where she’d kissed a boy for the first time. It was as if we were viewing her past and the forgotten dreams she’d long since abandoned behind the glass of a pawnshop window. In every room we entered she made a face like her heart caved in.
“It’s a beautiful home,” I said to both of them. I turned to Mario. “Why are you trying to sell it?”
He sighed as Sofía shook her head.
“My friend.” Mario put his hand on my shoulder. “As I’m sure you know, to visit Havana is paradise. But to live in Havana is hell. And that’s before I could even begin to explain what doing business is like in this fucking country. Over the years they’ve come here and seized my car, my motorcycle. I’m harassed constantly. They’ve seized all kinds of things. You can’t do business here without dealing with the black market. Of course the government knows this. The illegal economy is bigger than the official economy. It’s all institutionally corrupt and I was just too naïve to think I could ever navigate such a hideously broken system. I need to go back to Spain and start over. I give up. I’ve spent everything I’ve ever earned here just to improve this property to sell it off so I can finally leave. I’m dying faster than even this rotting-away city.”
“Would you leave tomorrow if you could sell it?” I asked Mario.
“Por favor.” He laughed. “Would I leave tomorrow if I sold this place? I would leave tonight.”
“Brinicito is here trying to interview the family Guillermo Rigondeaux left behind.”
“A very beautiful boxer. What a sad face he had even before Fidel called him a traitor. A true Cuban champion for his time.”
“How dangerous is it to try to talk with them?” I asked Mario.
“Two government cameras are focused on his house twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Easily the most politically radioactive home in Havana. If you go, be prepared for a knock on the door any second and to be escorted to the airport by security. I wouldn’t go if I were you.”
“I don’t even know where it is yet.”
“Qué va.” Mario snickered. “We all know where it is. Boyeros. Near the airport. Everybody knows the little green house. His house was on the news here for weeks after he tried to defect. Stay here, I’ll go inside and get a pencil and paper and draw you a map.”
After he’d finished sketching the street and government buildings next to Rigondeaux’s home, I asked how he knew the directions were accurate.
Mario 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. After we’d left her old home, Sofía and I tried this twice back on Quinta Avenida. Both times drivers gave us an incredulous look before driving off. It was pretty evident this was a real danger in a land where, if there was a suggestion you were sympathetic to one of the most famous living traitors in any way, your whole life was in peril. Maybe not just your life, either; anyone close to you, also. While you aren’t likely to meet a people more generous, nobody can hold a grudge like Cubans.