It is well known that curious men go prying into all sorts of places (where they have no business) and come out of them with all sorts of spoil. This story [Heart of Darkness], and one other … are all the spoil I brought out from Africa, where, really, I had no sort of business.
—Joseph Conrad
A WOMAN SITTING next to me on my first plane ride to Havana was underlining an entire passage from a story she was reading, La causa que refresca (A Cause for All Seasons) by José Miguel Sánchez. The story was about a Cuban male prostitute waiting at the airport for a tourist he would spend the next six weeks with. After reading just the first few sentences over this woman’s shoulder, I asked if I could copy it into my notebook:
I’m only a guide, but I’m like a priest in a way.… I absolve you, but I leave you with just enough guilt so that you will come back soon to this Cuba, which lies behind the picture postcards, to this game of masks that we play, and you play, too.… I absolve you and rekindle in your heart your faith in the cause, a cause for six weeks of the year of Latin love and forbidden fruits, of sex and idealism. A safe and cozy cause. Easy to carry around. A cause for all seasons.
The philosopher Slavoj Žižek once said that fantasy is for those who can’t cope with reality, while reality is for those who can’t cope with their fantasies. I’ve gone back and forth my entire life about which, between the two, really triggers the more lasting damage. Some people are homesick the moment they leave their front door, others are homesick from birth for a place they can never find. Some girls enjoy the walk to a new boy’s house more than they will ever enjoy the boy himself.
My first trip to Havana was in February of 2000, right in the middle of the Elián González fiasco. As with everything about Cuba, nobody could agree on anything. And now, what the press referred to as “political kiddie porn” had entered into a Cuban civil war fought across ninety miles of ocean. What was portrayed as a custody case by some (and a kidnapping by others) became an existential crisis for millions of Cubans on both sides of the issue. With Elián’s story, millions of Cubans saw their own family’s breakup writ large.
At the age of five, Elián González and his mother, along with twelve other passengers, had fled Cuba on a small aluminum boat. The boat’s faulty engine gave out after they encountered a storm while attempting to cross the Straits of Florida. Only Elián and two other passengers managed to survive the journey. Elián’s mother died—heroically, some in America said—trying to save her son from the horrors of a life in Cuba. To allow any child to live under Castro’s rule in Cuba was tantamount to child abuse, is what seemed to be implied. The survivors were discovered floating at sea by two fishermen. The fishermen handed the survivors over to the U.S. Coast Guard and all hell broke loose in Miami and Cuba. It turned out Elián’s mother had taken Elián from the boy’s father in Cuba, without his knowledge, let alone permission. After some negotiation at the highest levels of government in the United States and Cuba, Elián would be sent back. The young boy became yet another feather in the cap for Fidel against the United States.
For my own research, I was reading Pitching Around Fidel: A Journey into the Heart of Cuban Sports by S. L. Price. Price’s book was the most current, in-depth breakdown of Cuba’s enigmatic powerhouse sports machine. I wanted to learn how to locate boxers and how to properly approach them to see if any would be willing to teach me. I had no idea how to handle negotiation in Cuba or what the risks involved were. But I’d read that the black market economy in Cuba eclipsed its official economy. In the book, Price details how each elite athlete he profiled encountered the same hopelessly impossible decision to stay or leave as every other Cuban on the island, only with a lot more money at stake if they managed to escape. Whereas Teófilo Stevenson had rejected five million dollars in the 1970s to fight Muhammad Ali, the going rate offered to Félix Savón, Cuba’s latest heavyweight destroyer, was in the neighborhood of twenty million, to defect to America and fight Mike Tyson. Even the act of writing a book exploring the ambiguity of the choice involved had caused Price to be banned from ever returning to Cuba. “You have penetrated an impenetrable system,” he was told by security agents. The bombshell of the book was a Cuban boxer, Héctor Vinent, a two-time Olympic champion, confessing to Price his desire to escape. No Cuban athlete, in Cuba, had ever confessed such a thing on the record before. Yet Vinent never managed to escape. He was punished before he’d ever had a chance to try. Vinent only wished to leave Cuba after the government had banned him from boxing for the rest of his life. Price’s book didn’t say what became of Vinent, whether he remained in Havana or had returned to be with his family in Santiago de Cuba in the east of the island. If Vinent was living in Havana as I flew over, he was twenty-eight, and my guess was he could probably use some extra money training me at a local gym. It was as good a place as any to learn about his island, too.
My mother’s prediction about friends I hadn’t met yet came true before the plane ride was over. Across the aisle from me a middle-aged Latino, wearing reading glasses that kept falling off his nose, was devouring pages from For Whom the Bell Tolls nearly as fast as the rum and Cokes he was ordering. I noticed his hands were getting steadier with each sip of alcohol. There was a casual sense of doom about him that intrigued me. He was ordering rounds for the three people sitting next to him as if they were his friends, and then drinking them all himself. I’ve always spooked pretty easily around heavy drinkers. They tend to hold up a mirror that I have difficulty turning away from. And this guy was getting steadier the more he drank, not sloppier. In his novel Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry describes this sensation as “the shakes of too little and the abyss of too much.” As I looked across the aisle and tried not to think about the stranger who epitomized this, he smiled at me.
“You don’t even seem drunk,” I said.
“Drunk?” He held up his empty glass. “Why would I be drunk? This isn’t drinking. I’m in training.” He reached up and pushed the button for the flight attendant again. When she arrived he ordered another round. “My name is Alfonso.”
“I’m Brin. You’re Cuban?”
“No Brinicito, I’m Guatemalan, but I’ve divided my time evenly between Havana and Toronto for many years now. I need to get off this fucking plane and get something to drink.”
Alfonso wasn’t kidding. His cirrhosis, I’d find out later, was pretty far along already and his drinking on the plane was small potatoes compared to after we’d landed. After the flight attendant cut him off he asked me to start ordering drinks and pass them over to him.
“What are you looking for in Havana?” he asked me. “A girl?”
“I’d like to meet some of their best boxers and see if I can get some training and maybe meet the guy from The Old Man and the Sea. I heard he’s still alive over there.”
“Gregorio Fuentes! I’m reading Hemingway now. I love that America’s favorite writer is even more popular in his adoptive ‘state sponsor of terror’ home in Cuba. I mean the moment he had to go back to America he blew his brains out! But Gregorio is still there. Gregorio is a national treasure. You’ll love him. And you have the best boxers in the world to see over there and get to know. Cuba is a wet dream as much as it’s a nightmare. That’s why America has always been so obsessed with it.”
“Can you hire any of these Olympic boxers to train you? Is that done?”
“That’s easy. With a little money and perseverance anything is available to you in Havana if you know the right people. Heroes are for sale everywhere, but in Havana heroes make twenty dollars a month. You know anyone for that?”
“I don’t know a soul over there.”
“Order me two more drinks and I can help you. I know athletes over there. Not in boxing, but they all know each other. They all wear their Olympic Cuban tracksuits like uniforms on the street. Stick with me when we get off the plane. I can help you there. But they will hold me at immigration after the flight. They always do. They treat me like a criminal every time I arrive and leave. It’s just a routine thing for me over there. They are afraid I’m stealing treasures over there for peanuts and selling them back home for millions. They treat me trafficking books like I’m smuggling Cuban heroes off the island myself.”
“What do you buy?”
“Rare books. Cuba may be famous for old cars and sports, but they have collectibles in many other rare things, too. People are making fortunes off of baseball cards right now. But I love books. That’s the extraordinarily beautiful thing about a country that makes certain books illegal to read; it reminds you that books still mean something. If you enjoy gray, the paradoxes over there are like nowhere else on earth.”
“I don’t have a place to stay in Havana. I was just going to find something when I arrived.”
“That’s a bad idea. Jineteros—those are the hustlers and prostitutes, latterly ‘jockeys’—love people like you to ride. They will hiss at you all over the tourist areas. Let me take care of everything. Just wait for me after the police questioning and this drunk stranger you just met can give you some keys to open some interesting doors. Havana is my favorite city in the world. Whenever you return to Havana you will always find me here and have a friend. And all my friends will be your friends.”
When we got off the plane, just as he’d predicted, Alfonso was taken in for questioning in a private room and held for three hours by the police. Before we’d gotten off the plane Alfonso had given me some money to buy him a twelve-year-old bottle of Havana Club and a carton of Popular cigarettes from the little airport shop to resuscitate him. I waited for him in airport arrivals until midnight, when they finally released him. Alfonso trudged out of the holding room soaked in sweat, his face blanched, lugging two huge articles of luggage that I ran over to help him carry.
“Brinicito, don’t worry about my luggage. Where’s my fucking medicine?”
I gave him the bottle and cigarettes as he stumbled over to a chair in the arrivals section of the airport and collapsed on his stomach, moaning. His hands were trembling.
“Do we need a taxi or a fucking ambulance?” I asked him.
“Neither.” Alfonso rolled over and tried unsuccessfully to unscrew the bottle. “Can you do this for me, please? My hands shake too badly. Hurry, please.”
I took the bottle and unscrewed the cap and handed it to him. He slumped down over two chairs and held it over his head with one hand while tearing open the carton of cigarettes.
“I don’t need an ambulance or a driver. I have an eighteen-year-old nurse waiting for me where we’re going. And our driver has been waiting for us all this time in the parking lot. Just give me some time to recover from that ordeal. Maybe get me some Bucanero beer from the little shop. A twelve-pack, please.”
When I came back with the beer I saw he’d consumed half the bottle while chain-smoking his way through a twisted mass of cigarettes resting under his chair. He was upright now, with the color having returned to his face, eyes alert, hands steady. Miraculously, Alfonso looked almost energized.
“My friend, I’m sorry for how long you’ve had to wait before meeting this beautiful city. But now you’ll always remember your first meeting with Havana at night. That will put a spell in your heart always. Meeting a city for the first time at night is like making love to a woman before you’ve even spoken with her. I’m very envious of you tonight.”
I stepped outside into Havana’s muggy, tropical embrace. Before my eyes could adjust to see anything beyond palm trees swaying in the moonlight, the intensity of Cuba’s perfume entered my bloodstream and I dropped Alfonso’s bags on the ground. All at once the swirl of belched diesel fumes and cigar smoke, highlighted with the stale sting of oxidized alcohol, hit me before the stench of some nearby forever-unflushed toilet almost knocked me over.
“Even the smell of Cuba has the intensity of a priest giving in to sex.” Alfonso smiled, lighting another cigarette. “Don’t talk anymore until we’re inside the car. Let’s go, our ride is waiting for us.”
We walked out into the moonlight toward a mostly empty parking lot when something violently hissed at us. Alfonso laughed and an engine turned on a car about twenty yards off. A lanky, nervous Bill Cosby lookalike in a Cuban tracksuit quickly approached us and grabbed the handles of Alfonso’s luggage from me.
“Do I let him take them?”
“Of course. Montalvo is family.”
* * *
After we loaded the trunk of his small Lada with our belongings, I got in the backseat while Alfonso threw his arm around the driver. As soon as the car lurched forward it promptly stalled.
“¡Cubaneo!” Montalvo slapped the steering wheel. This expression, I later found, was used to describe the particular strain of bad luck indigenous to Cuba.
“¡Hermano!” Alfonso laughed, taking another slug from the bottle. “My brother, it is always so good to see you. But always so serious! Brinicito, this is Montalvo. Montalvo was a silver medalist in the hundred-meter dash from the Pan Am games. He’s an even better person than he was a runner. Forgive us, but I have some things to discuss with my friend in Spanish, so we can sort out where you will stay and all that.”
We were out on the highway now and it struck me that I had no idea who the two men in the front seat of the car were or where we were going. The Cuban night felt less like reality and more like the dreamscape of Fidel and his people. The Cuban highway was anarchy, with American cars manufactured in the 1950s, Russian-made Ladas, and military trucks with soldiers sitting in the back raging over the broken-down pavement while horse-drawn carriages and bikes drifted along the road shoulder. In addition to the nightmarish jumble of the scene, the highway lacked streetlights or any highway signs, and the only updates about our progress toward Havana were the occasional ghostly billboards that were illuminated in our flickering headlights, featuring political exhortations I couldn’t understand.
As we got closer to Havana I thought of Alfonso’s description of meeting a city at night for the first time. The silhouettes of palm trees whisked past us, and after a while I could see the dim copper glow of Havana spread out like broken glass shattered across the hulking darkness of the city’s skyline. We turned off the highway and entered a narrow, pothole-laden side street winding into a neighborhood like a hand reaching into a dark cupboard. Finally there were a few streetlamps and I could read some of the billboards on the side of the road. A painting of Castro’s beaming face was situated beside the words ¡VAMOS BIEN!
“What is that referring to?” I asked Alfonso.
“That everything is going well. It’s always going well.”
Alfonso translated what he’d said to me to Montalvo and Montalvo moaned in response, “Sí, sí. ‘Vamos bien.’ Cuarenta y un años y siempre ¡vamos bien! Dios mío.”
“There is a joke about the revolution, which says that literacy, health care, and sports are its great achievements. And its failures are breakfast, lunch, and dinner. When I first started coming here during the worst of the Special Period in the early 1990s, parents would name their pets Breakfast, Lunch, or Dinner to protect the children from attachment before they ate them.”
We passed another sign on the side of the road with a Che Guevara mural next to an illegibly scrawled sentence.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“‘Be like Che!’ You’ll find out how it is. Much is a lie here just as it is in America.” Alfonso laughed. “I think Cubans believe the bullshit less than you. Cuban advertising tries to help individuals get over human weakness, while American advertising encourages you to give in to it.”
“Does Montalvo have a place for me to stay?”
“We’re taking you to somewhere that should be available near the Plaza de la Revolución, the huge square where you will be able to see Castro give a speech while you are here. Seven-hour speeches sometimes!”
“Seven fucking hours?”
“This is what Americans always say. But in Lincoln’s time he did the same thing. The population was informed and had an attention span. Remember what Gore Vidal said about genius in America?”
“What did he say?”
“That if students year after year insist American history is the most boring subject, you need look no further than American history teachers to find geniuses at work. Look out your window, that’s the Plaza. We’re close to where you’re staying.”
The Plaza itself looked like one enormous vacuum of an empty parking lot surrounded by distant, stale government structures, and then I saw Che’s face glowing, six stories high, stenciled against the side of a building.
Cuba’s secular saint was once declared by America’s CIA as the most dangerous man in the world before they gave the order in 1967 to execute him in Bolivia. The man who pulled the trigger still proudly wore Che’s watch in Miami as a souvenir he claimed from the execution. This country’s adoptive hero was America’s terrorist distilled now into a mouse pad, T-shirt, the flotsam of kitsch. Out the other car window a three-hundred-foot-high marble tower, seemingly donated by the Klingon Empire’s most distinguished architect, loomed as a monument to the poet José Martí. Shadowy buzzards circled over the tower. In all of the darkness the junglescape felt like a nightmare predator ready to spring into action and blindside you.
That first night, watching the scenery slide by outside my window, every inch of the island I saw was accompanied by the reminder that this population had rallied behind a leader who had been instrumental in bringing the world closer to oblivion than at any point in human history. Castro had closed every casino and outlawed all gambling, yet this was a man who was willing to risk destroying the world itself rather than cave an inch against the American way of life.
“The monuments here mean nothing.” Alfonso laughed. “Fidel doesn’t have a statue or a plaque anywhere. There’s no cult of personality. It’s these fucking people themselves and their culture that are bigger than any pyramid or Empire State Building. If Cuba contributed the eighth wonder of the world it would be the Cuban people themselves. You’ll see. My friend lives close to here and you’ll be staying with him at the house of Jesús. Tomorrow I’ll send a friend over to get you who can be your tour guide, and I’ll sort out getting you in contact with the boxers.”
Montalvo turned off the Plaza and drove around a bend surrounded by groomed hills that merged with the jungle. Even in the shadows it was evident the area was heavily guarded by bereted soldiers either patrolling or staring out from treehouse-like towers. Motorbikes and a fleet of bicycles loaded down with girls passed by on the shoulder of the road as we turned down a quiet side street that Montalvo carefully navigated to avoid potholes and stray cats skittering across the pavement. I could see children playing stickball on the next street under a flickering streetlamp. As we neared, the streetlamp cut out and Montalvo stopped the car, his headlights the only illumination left for their game.
At night in a broken, new place it’s easy to lose your thoughts and find them drifting toward people you care about who are holding bad cards. Sometimes they have their own deck and sometimes they’ve invited someone else’s into their lives. You think about faces you’ve loved getting older. I was warned Havana was a heavy place on a lot of people. Many lives worn out searching for things they can’t find.
“You see the small man pitching to his son?” Alfonso asked. “Both are wearing the Industriales baseball caps. Industriales are the New York Yankees of Cuba. That’s Jesús and Jesusito. They’ll look after you. Jesús has a little apartment attached to their home.”
I got out of the car with my bags just as Jesús lofted his pitch well over his son toward me. “¡OYE!” Jesus hollered, as the kids laughed. “Think fast, gringo!”