Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.… Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,” and he would have meant the same thing.
—John Steinbeck
JUST BEFORE DAWN MY APARTMENT was caught in the crossfire of roosters on the rooftops scattered across the block declaring morning. There was a knock on the door; completely disoriented, I opened it to find Jesús still wearing his Industriales baseball cap from the night before, holding a tray of sliced fruit while his son handed me a thermos of coffee. Jesusito was wearing the same cap as his dad and might have been eleven, but they were nearly the same height at around five feet. They shared the same kind face and intelligent eyes.
“My friend, breakfast is early at our house. My English no goo’. No baa’, but no goo’. I have to go work soon.”
“Where do you work?”
“I am an engineer. First I wanted to introduce you to your barrio. Finish breakfast and we go meet our neighborhood before your friend come to show you Kid Chocolate and boxing in Habana Vieja.”
“Do you guys sleep with those Industriales hats on?” I asked them.
His son looked up at his father for clarity.
“Industriales is our team, my friend. Cubans love boxing, but baseball is life and death in my country. The stadium is five minutes from here. We go. You understand everything. Last night there was a riot in the sixth inning. The government sent the military over to Latinoamericano stadium. Today when you go into Habana Vieja, you ask your friend to take you to Esquina Caliente where they discuss the béisbol.”
“How far are we from Old Havana?”
“An hour walk. But your friend will explain and show you how taxis work here in Havana. Much easier. The Ladas are for tourists and expensive. Ex-lawyers and doctors drive them and pimp jineteras—prostitutes—for tourists. The Cuban taxis are cheap, but you need Cuban pesos and some more Spanish. If policía stop a Cuban taxi with a tourist, they can lose their car. Be careful. Any Cuban on the street who walks with you can be stopped by the police and taken in for questioning. If he does not carry an ID card to show the policía he can be taken to the police station for the night.”
“Are you serious?” I asked Jesús.
“Claro,” Jesús said gravely, but cracked a smile almost as quickly. “But we Cubans say that life itself is a joke to be taken very seriously. You’ll see how the game is played. Eat and we meet my family and the rest of the block.”
“Everybody is already awake?”
“Of course. This neighborhood is your home now while you stay with us.”
My mother has lived in the same house for the last thirty-two years (we moved there when I was three) and we hardly ever knew our neighbors, let alone anyone on our block. When FOR SALE signs went up and new people moved in around the neighborhood, nobody ever welcomed them. I have a close friend that I’ve known since I was five. He lived two blocks from me during our childhood and I visited his family home hundreds of times and was never invited for dinner. A lot of homes I visited as a child sounded a kind of silent alarm when you stepped through the door that seemed to say, “Welcome! When exactly are you leaving again?” And here was my first taste of Havana, where you were supposed to be trespassing safely into the tragedy of Cuban lives caught beneath the wreckage of a broken system. Maybe Cuba was frozen in time, but this first glimpse into the human cost I was warned about instead mirrored the breakdown of families and neighbors and support systems where I came from.
As dawn broke, Jesús, holding his son’s hand, their small family sausage dog in pursuit, escorted me to each front door on the quiet, leafy street. From every home I could hear radios or televisions talking about Elián González and returning the boy home to his country and family. More marches were planned. More speeches. From what I could gather, Castro had found yet another winning angle, by making his adversaries in Florida look like fanatics defending a kidnapping. The best argument made against sending the boy back to his father and country was that doing so amounted to child abuse. How could any child wish to live in such a society inflicting so much harm? And this protest against child cruelty offered from the wealthiest nation on earth that also permits one child in five to grow up below the poverty line.
We knocked on the front door of the home across the street belonging to Cucho, a Ricardo Montalbán lookalike eighty-one-year-old who had received his house from a state-run lottery many decades before. Cucho was the patriarch of the twelve family members residing in his home. We were invited in for coffee served in shot glasses as I was introduced to his family, each female leaning over to give and receive a kiss on the cheek. Cucho had worked at the Hotel Nacional in the 1940s, when it was run by gangsters like Lucky Luciano, and moved over to the Havana Hilton at the end of the ’50s, right up until Fidel Castro rolled in and set up his government headquarters in the top two floors at the newly named Habana Libre. Cucho was also the neighborhood CDR (Committee for the Defense of the Revolution), a neighborhood watch program that escalated in darker times into spy operations that reported to the government on fellow citizens.
Cucho’s neighbor was a frail young doctor with a failing heart named Jorge, married to a Penelope Cruz–sumptuous wife named Nancy. Ernesto lived in the next home, 250 pounds of seething bitterness as he stared down a government-required year’s wait to join his wife, Blanquita, who had just left to join some of her family in Spain. Cuba’s answer to Doogie Howser, Manolo, a surgeon in his forties who looked like a teenager, lived by himself after a divorce. As we had another cafecito with Manolo, there were three separate deliveries of produce, freshly butchered chickens, and cement brought over in a little dragged wagon. “Have you heard the word palanca before?” he asked in perfect English.
I shook my head.
“Palanca is slang for offering a helping hand. Since you literally cannot survive in this country without breaking the law, corruption is institutional. The black market economy is larger than the traditional economy. We all offer something to someone in exchange for something. So don’t be surprised to see deliveries at all hours of the day of things that may seem very strange to you.”
There was a knock at Manolo’s door and Jesús got up to answer it. He returned to the dining room with a linebacker-sized dark-skinned Cuban, not much older than me, dressed in matching canary-yellow dress shirt and pants. He stared at me with such warm anticipation I felt like I was meeting a pen pal I’d been corresponding with for years.
“Hello, my friend! I’m Lesvanne.” I was quickly discovering that every Cuban deserved his own eponymous sitcom. “You must be the writer boxer I have heard so much about. Obviously Hemingway helped bring you here, I take it? Of course he did. Montalvo and Alfonso asked me to show you around and help you with finding your way in our city. Today I take you to Rafael Trejo gym to find a trainer, too, no?”
“I would love that,” I said.
“Also transportation.” Jesús grabbed my shoulder. “Walk around until he has more of a tan and then show him our taxis and get him some Cuban pesos.”
“Of course.” Lesvanne smiled.
“Where did you get these clothes?” Manolo teased him, pinching a sleeve. “These are not from Calle Obispo.”
“What’s Obispo?” I asked.
“Obispo is a street for tourists,” Lesvanne explained casually. “I was just in Miami and brought back some clothes. Only three weeks in Miami visiting some family.”
For both Jesús and Manolo this was a bombshell they endured in silent shock. I was fairly confused by how matter-of-fact Lesvanne was about a journey such a high percentage of his countrymen had died trying to make. His tone suggested that of a man taking a whirl on the Staten Island ferry. Who exactly was this person that Alfonso had lined up as my guide? Who exactly was Alfonso?
Suddenly Lesvanne’s face twisted in agony. “¡MariCÓN! I gave my ass a paper cut this morning. Cubaneo. The first luxury I miss from Miami and Gringolandia is the availability of toilet paper. A page from José Martí’s poetry slit me open this morning and I am still bleeding.”
Lesvanne put his hand on my shoulder and turned his wide, conspiratorial smile toward me. “Obispo is the Hemingway tourist street. The El Floridita bar where Hemingway would have drank himself to death, if not for the suicide. La Bodeguita del Medio for the mojitos is five minutes, but every Cuban knows he never drank mojitos there and the owners just made it up. There are no better capitalists than communists. And the Ambos Mundos hotel where he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls is near the bottom of Obispo. Fidel carried that book with him in the mountains to help learn guerrilla warfare. At Obispo there is much shopping, too, if you have tourist dollars to spend. The high-end jineteras work Obispo for the lonely tourists who wish to pretend they can seduce all the pretty Cuban girls.”
Jesús laughed. “Should we arrange a girl for him tonight?”
“He doesn’t need a pimp.” Manolo smiled. “I’m sure you can find the right girl on your own. You come back and tell us everything or we’ll report you to Cucho.”
As soon as we left our block, Lesvanne informed me he needed a couple glasses of guarapo for energy and led us zigzagging down a few streets to find some. “A girlfriend from Texas leaves tomorrow so I must have energy for her so she is faithful back home. I’m so madly in love with this woman. If you heard her accent calling my name! And she’s big as a Texas woman should be. I love that. She’s forty. So beautiful.”
He pointed out the direction of some peso fruit markets and another supermarket for American dollars that had a security guard out front. “The tourist apartheid is everywhere. I can’t walk with you into a hotel or a nice bar. It used to be illegal for us to carry even one American dollar.” Lesvanne shook his head. “During the awful Special Period, one market existed that had actual supplies and good food while everything else had nothing. People were starving. We called this market with everything ‘God’s Market’ at that time. Things are better now since that period, but still very difficult.” Finally we arrived at an open garage that was surrounded by sweaty construction workers huddled in the shade wiping the foam from their lips and patiently holding out glass cups waiting for refills.
“This is a guarapotería. Guarapo was what the African slaves who first came to Cuba drank. Good for energy to work or to fuck really good if you meet the right girl. We love it. It’s very good and fresh. You can find them all over Havana and have a glass for only a Cuban peso. There are twenty Cuban pesos to each converted peso for tourists. These two currencies are very important to be aware of because you will be cheated if you are not careful. So be careful to get your change and to keep it when you first use the converted peso. Until you write a bestseller or win the heavyweight championship, Cuban pesos are good to have to use for transportation or food that tourists are not allowed to use. I’ll show you how our taxis work soon.”
I watched as a dwarf woman jammed huge stalks of sugar cane into a massive metal grinder that she worked over with a crank when the stalks were inserted deeply enough. She had the sneer of a male porn star as she worked. The dwarf’s coworker was a woman who looked like she was born a hundred years before when the Platt Amendment was signed. She collected the juice from a pail and dumped it into carafes full of ice. Once the carafe was full with the milky-yellow juice she refilled the cups of the eager construction workers on their break. We waited our turn for a glass and I watched Lesvanne wipe the chilled foam off his lips before my glass arrived.
“You just came back from Miami?” I asked.
“Yes.” He grinned shyly. “My first time.”
“Your first time?”
“The first time I have traveled anywhere in my life outside of this … place. Miami is paradise. For a nonbeliever, it is the closest thing I have ever seen to heaven on earth.”
“We’re going to have a strange day together, aren’t we?” I asked.
“What is a normal day in a place like this, which no one will ever believe existed two weeks after it’s gone? Pick up a newspaper this morning in Miami, and things have never been worse here. Pick up our newspaper and things have never been better. That is the reality we live with every day of our lives. This is normal to us.”
He was right: the only place where normal seemed halfway as slippery as here was in America. Guidebooks spoke of Havana as frozen in time like wreckage, but that was only true if you looked everywhere but at the people. When Napoleon first encountered the Sphinx he measured every inch of it. I didn’t know how to do that here. I didn’t have the right equipment. For the Cubans I saw, time had slowed in an entirely different way than I’d been told it would, along the edge of a blade. Life at the extremes is always slowed down, magnified, surreal. It was as if, all around me, forty-one years’ worth of Cuban society was in the backseat of a car Fidel had used to run through one of the world’s most profound red lights, and instead of finding oblivion as its consequence, it created a different kind of tragedy by just keeping going and going. It wasn’t long before that Fidel was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and was having charges brought against him in Spain as a war criminal at the same time. Communism had petered out everywhere else and given way to the real revolutionary force with legs that swept the planet: capitalism. But here everyone was popping a tire on communism’s last bend of memory lane.
Still, I wasn’t sure how to approach the obvious question: Why hadn’t Lesvanne stayed in Miami? How had he gotten out? Why wasn’t Cuba’s answer to Sophie’s Choice something that devastated Lesvanne the way it seemed to everyone else?
Just then Lesvanne’s name was hollered from down the block. We looked over and saw a large woman smiling as she held the hands of four little girls wearing red scarves and school uniforms at her sides. As I finished another glass of guarapo, Lesvanne patted my shoulder and headed in their direction to say hello. “I come right back. This is a close friend of my mother. I love this woman.” The construction workers and I watched him kiss the cheek of each member of the group and offer a bear hug to the woman that lifted her off the ground until she squealed and playfully flailed her arms to be put down. The girls all reached over to take Lesvanne’s hands as they walked back up the street toward me. Lesvanne introduced the group and each child stared up until I bent down to say hello and offered a cheek for them to kiss. I kissed the cheek of Lesvanne’s mother’s friend and she apologized before insisting the children were late for school and they had to leave. The construction workers around us waved at the children and the children smiled and waved back.
“Is everyone here so comfortable with strangers?” I asked.
“But you’re not a stranger, you’re a visitor to our home.”
“One of the first things I was taught as a kid was not to talk to strangers. Stranger equals danger.”
“But this is not protection. This is just instilling fear. This is just propaganda. Of course there is a risk to trusting your environment. There are bad people and accidents in life, some are avoidable and some are not. But if you don’t trust there is a guarantee you will lose all things available to you only through trust. To sacrifice that for a false sense of security is protecting children?”
I shrugged.
“Well.” Lesvanne shrugged back. “If you have something to lose, that is very logical. In Miami I saw many walls protecting houses. Here all the walls are falling down. The nice cars in Miami all had alarms. Here almost nobody can afford a car. There the division is very important in their society and the fear of the poor trespassing on the rich is on everyone’s mind. Look at all the guns there people feel they need to defend themselves from their own neighbors. Miami has both extremes. Of course here we are nearly all poor. What is there to steal? Even the most moral believers in the values of the revolution must steal from the government with corruption to support their families, but there is little to steal from each other.”
“If there was something to steal, would people steal here?” I asked.
“With this much difficulty and how much we rely on others to survive—I don’t think so. Even if you could escape responsibility, you could not escape seeing the damage. There are no strangers for us in Havana.”
“And in Miami?”
“In Miami everyone is your stranger. You would not know who lives next door. Look at the mansions protected from everyone. But I miss many things I saw in Miami tremendously. It is impossible to have anything I saw there here. That is why, when I’m ready, I will make Miami my home. When I am ready. And I could never leave without my wife. Let’s go to Centro Habana and I can show you my photos from Gringolandia.”
I offered to pay for a taxi, but Lesvanne insisted we hitchhike. We walked over to a busy street and he flagged down a motorcycle with a sidecar in minutes. He sat behind the driver and pointed for me to take the adjoining seat. Our engine snarled at stray cats darting across the traffic as we headed back to the Plaza and Che’s monument.
We took a smoother road into the city with the Havana Libre’s penthouse peeking over the palmy skyline as buzzards swerved above us in the early morning cool before the real heat of day arrived. Elián González’s face was on signs and T-shirts all throughout the city. Lesvanne pointed toward lone musicians serenading the jungle with trumpets. We drove past a bus station overwhelmed with lines snaking around the block. Hitchhikers were everywhere waiting for rides into work, students to the university, families trying to get home. After a bumpy climb skirting the border of a columned monument worthy of a Roman emperor, Lesvanne mentioned the university was around the corner. The Napoleon museum was just behind it, he shouted. He leaned close to the driver’s ear and mentioned Coppelia as our destination. The driver nodded and accelerated toward a red light at an intersection like a kamikaze and picked up speed as we swung past the grandeur of the front steps of the university until we screeched to a stop under the towering shadow of the Habana Libre, just across the street from a ballerina’s crossed slippers on Coppelia ice cream stand’s famous sign. Under the sign hoards were already lined up to grab a bowl.
“It’s a short walk from here to Calle Neptuno, where we can catch a ride into Habana Vieja. You can hail your first Cuban taxi. Hold out two fingers to the first old American car and if the driver has room and stops, you tell him ‘Capitolio.’ Say nothing else. I need some more guarapo for tonight. After the photos.”
“What’s tonight?” I asked.
“After we find you a trainer … This woman who stole my heart last year just arrived on the island again from Oklahoma. This girl is amazing. I can’t disappoint this girl. You must see the letter she wrote me.”
“Aren’t you married?”
“Of course. To the love of my life. I will show you photos of my wife with the photos of Miami. This area is Vedado, the edge of Vedado and Centro. Centro is very poor. My mother is in a bad part of Centro near the Malecón where many buildings are falling down. Many have no running water and blackouts happen with frequency. But it’s very beautiful there, too.”
As we walked toward the ocean and his mother’s house, Lesvanne explained how he supported his family. He slept with wealthy American tourists—preferably middle-aged, large, divorced, and with children back home—for gifts provided they weren’t from California. The women of California were to be avoided at all costs no matter how attractive they were. Lesvanne was a man of principle. Californian women never returned his love letters.
“You like this more mature type of woman because they are the most generous with you?” I asked.
“Never.” He laughed. “Because I find this type of woman to be the most desirable! They are real women in their full expression of femininity! And with an American accent, too, that is the ultimate turn-on for me.”
But Lesvanne’s biggest problem as a jinetero with these female tourists was that he couldn’t stop falling in love with his prey. He fell madly in love with all of them and spent most of his life licking his wounds from the heartbreak of them not writing him once they returned home.
“You want them to marry you so you can leave?”
“Never. I’m married already to the love of my life. They should move here until I’m ready to leave for Miami with my wife.”
Lesvanne led us away from the leafy open squares and private homes of Vedado into the cramped, dusty streets of Centro Habana. Chinese bicycles jerked down the street over potholes as stray dogs and cats combed for scraps. Children played stickball with rocks. As we moved deeper into the neighborhood more and more eyes looked out at us behind the bars guarding front doors and windows. A hundred radios blared from apartments. Pedestrians stopped on the sidewalks and hollered “¡Oye!,” only to have baskets lowered from balconies with a string offering a wrench or a battery or an article of clothing. The neighborhood gave every indication of being a slum yet the mood was entirely unlike any of the Western ghettos I’d visited in my life. Men hissed at women from all corners, yet the women would just smile coyly and laugh. Nobody appeared to fear anyone else. I’d never seen women walk with such self-possession and pride. But then, of course, there weren’t magazine stands anywhere to remind them of how ugly they were.
At Lesvanne’s mother’s apartment he introduced me to his mother, who had a cold and remained in her rocking chair without getting up. A framed portrait of her at fifteen was behind her, facing me, above a cupboard. The two versions of the same woman’s face smiled at me before she turned back to the television. She was intently watching a roundtable discussion on Elián González. They showed images of the boy’s father and then cut to a million people gathered to listen to Fidel giving a speech about him.
“What do you make of this Elián González thing?” I asked Lesvanne.
“There’s a joke about when the Pope came to Havana a couple of years ago. Fidel rode with him in the pope mobile on the Malecón. It was such a nice day they opened the roof and the Pope’s hat flew off from the sea breeze and blew into the ocean. Fidel jumped out and hopped into the ocean without getting wet. He walked on the water to grab the Pope’s hat floating on the waves. After Fidel returned the hat to the Pope the next day’s headlines about the event came in from Granma, our newspaper: ‘Fidel proves he is a god. He walks on water.’ And then the Vatican newspaper: ‘Pope performs miracle allowing Fidel to walk on water.’ And in the Miami newspapers: ‘Fidel can’t swim.’”
Lesvanne grabbed a scratched, beat-up digital camera, fetched some batteries from a drawer, and kissed his mother good-bye as we left her home.
As we made our way back to Calle Neptuno with him still searching through the camera to find his Miami photos, he was stopped in the street dozens of times. People hollered out from their homes and invited us in for coffee. Kids egged him on to kick a soccer ball around or play béisbol. Storekeepers left their shops to reach out and shake his hand and give him a hug. Old women selling sweets and flowers asked about his mother. He kept embracing people over and over with affection and warmth. Every time he tried to show me a photograph people came over to look and ask questions about his trip to Miami. Twice a policeman guarding a corner saw us walking together and asked Lesvanne to produce his identity card. They asked me in broken English if he was following me and if I wanted him to leave me alone.
A few paces away from the police officer Lesvanne gently shook his head. “You see how shamefully we treat our own citizens here?” He returned to his camera and showed me a few photos of his common-law wife and a few hundred photos of the American tourist female “friends” he’d made since he was fifteen. “I love all of these beautiful women. I miss all of them.” Finally he located Miami inside his camera. Nearly all of the photos were an inventory of the materialistic orgy he had partaken of in Miami Beach. There were hardly any people in his photos, just things. They were things Lesvanne saw that he was determined to own once he moved to America and got busy making a success of himself: Hummers, houses, pools, jewelry, plastic-breasted women on posters at gift shops, bars, boats, condos. Lesvanne’s favorite outfit, which he bought in Miami, was what he wore nearly every day since his return, and he washed it every night until it was blindingly bright.
I asked him if his American “friends” presented any kind of problem with his “wife” and he asked why it should.
“Would you like to see a video of my wife?” he asked.
I nodded.
All I could make out from the camera monitor were blurs of undulating color.
“What am I looking at here?”
“That’s her gallbladder. Isn’t she beautiful?”
“Come again?”
“Isn’t she beautiful?”
“I still don’t know what I’m looking at,” I said.
“You’re looking inside my wife. This is from an operation I filmed.”
Later, when I could breathe again, I asked him why he would film his wife on the operating table having her gallbladder removed.
“Because I love all of her, man. Inside and out. I want to know all of her.”
I didn’t say anything until he’d finished showing all the pictures.
I’d lost count of how many people he’d kissed and hugged hello on our walk. It threw me because after ending my first long-term relationship I went months before I realized that I was having no human physical contact. How did that happen?
“So you want all this shit once you’re settled in Miami?” I asked him.
“Of course I do. I’ve never had anything here. I’d like to work for these things.”
“Okay. You get all that shit—Hummer, house, pool, hot wife, jewelry, yacht. That whole photo album of other people’s stuff becomes your stuff. You’re loaded. Then you’re happier than here?”
“Why not? I could bring the things I love here over there and have the stuff to enjoy also.”
“Okay, so you’re loaded but maybe you’re also afraid of losing everything all the time. You’re afraid your wife is going to take you for half if she divorces you. You have to live in a gated community because you’re afraid of everyone. You have no sense of community or even give a fuck about your neighbor. Your kids don’t respect you and just want money to buy shit to distract themselves from being bored all the time. All the old people you know are in old folks’ homes because nobody wants to deal with them. You can’t be friends with any kids because everyone will think you’re a pedophile. You can’t hug any guys because they’re afraid you’re gay or they’re gay or everyone is gay. You can’t really touch anybody without second-guessing it.”
“If I couldn’t touch anyone I’d die, man. I’d die. This country is a fucking cage. My island is a zoo. Without this contact life would be unlivable.”
* * *
Once we crossed the invisible border of Paseo del Prado into Old Havana, Lesvanne led us south, away from the elegant entrance to the Prado promenade guarded by lion statues and past the Hotel Inglaterra, Graham Greene’s old stomping grounds. A group of musicians were covering kitschy Buena Vista Social Club hits for sunburned European tourists smoking cigars and sipping mojitos outside the hotel, waited on by locals. Some older bachelors had young local girls at their sides fawning over them.
“This is the new Cuba greeting visitors with open legs,” Lesvanne remarked. “Even if we had the money, ordinary Cubans are forbidden inside these hotels. Before the revolution, blacks could not visit hotels, some beaches, or even enter parks. Fidel changed that. Blacks became proud of being Cuban, too. But now this new tourist apartheid has begun to replace the money we have lost from Russia after their collapse. We call this resolver.”
Lesvanne pointed across the street to Havana’s Parque Central and the Esquina Caliente (Hot Corner), a group gathered near a giant statue of José Martí pointing accusingly in the direction of the United States. Esquina Caliente was a forum where the Cuban government had designated a small mob of fanatical béisbol fans “professional fans,” charged with engaging in screaming matches of almost homicidal intensity about the merits of current players, teams, and other unresolvable historical debates. Several debates were going on at once inside the crowd of perhaps seventy-five men, their women and children seated nearby on benches relaxing under the shade and snickering at choice sound bites delivered by the men.
“This is for baseball?” I asked.
“They look like they’re all ready to commit murder.” Lesvanne smiled and shook his head. “But in all the years I have watched them, I have never even seen them come to blows. This is one of the only places in my country where you can debate everything in the code of baseball. Even defections can be discussed if done carefully.”
Beyond the men, Lesvanne pointed, was Obispo and tourist alley. We walked to the edge of Central Park and crossed the boulevard so Lesvanne could buy a peso ice cream from a vendor. I noticed more policemen on the corners glaring at Lesvanne, who now walked a little less freely under their surveillance. “Do the police look at you like that because I’m with you?” I asked Lesvanne. He nodded before lifting his chin toward the Capitolio, Cuba’s bizarro replica of Washington’s Capitol Building that was built in 1926 by a U.S. construction firm. Dollar portrait photographers were setting up their hundred-year-old cameras just below the fifty-five great front steps leading up to the entrance of the Capitolio while a couple shriveled, dolled-up “authentic” old Cuban women with unlit baseball bat–sized cigars between their teeth waited to pose with some tourists.
A friend stopped Lesvanne in the street and asked him about seeing some boxing at Kid Chocolate the following day. A regional tournament was about to start.
“How close are we to Kid Chocolate?” I asked both of them.
“It’s right beside us! Twenty steps.”
Lesvanne started drifting up the sidewalk with his ice-cream cone as I followed. He pointed his melting cone toward the chipped mural of Kid Chocolate’s face smiling teasingly behind an ancient, rusting fence locked with chains that looked as if they’d been recovered from the bottom of the ocean.
They had named the auditorium after one of Cuba’s greatest champions. Eligio Sardiñas Montalvo was a boy who used to fight in the Old Havana streets for change back in the 1920s before he earned the nickname Kid Chocolate. As Jack Johnson had done before him in the United States, Chocolate learned to fight where the money was most available, mostly in battles royal paid for and attended by whites. A handful of blindfolded men, sometimes as many as ten, would fight until the last man standing could claim victory and the prize money. Before he’d left his teens, Kid Chocolate won every one of his 162 fights. In 1931, at the age of twenty-one, he became Cuba’s first professional world champion. Chocolate was so popular with women he’d defended his title dozens of times while suffering from untreated syphilis. He was such a confident champion he was often found in bars with a woman under each arm, freely drinking and smoking in the days leading up to his title defenses. After victories in America, where he had a house in Harlem, Chocolate would return to the streets of Old Havana in a new car and shower the fans who swarmed him with flowers and coins. He’d died an alcoholic in grueling poverty in 1988, long after most of the world had believed he’d already died.
“Brinicito.” Lesvanne laughed. “We have bad luck about seeing boxing here. Today there is none. But I think we have good luck with the man you’re looking to train you.”
“What?”
“Look in the grocery store beside us. You see the man in the Cuba tracksuit with his back to us? You see the man with the newspaper under his arm? Héctor’s always reading. That’s him.”
The grocery store across from the entrance to Kid Chocolate had a giant security guard working the front door. I couldn’t see anyone past his bulk. Someone finished paying at the counter and as he left the store I saw the sleeve of a red jersey filled out with a broad shoulder and a flash of a shaved head. After another person was finished at the register, I watched this man reach into his back pocket and produce several plastic bags for the checkout girl to place the items he’d purchased. His face was sullen yet his body language was confident. He pointed eagerly through the glass counter at chewing gum and a small bar of chocolate. The checkout girl teased him, reaching over to tap his tummy. Millimeters before contact he snatched her hand—savored her startled shudder for a split second—only to squeeze it gently with affection. She nodded and they kissed each other on the cheek good-bye.
“You see?” Lesvanne reached into his own back pocket and held a fistful of his own plastic bags. “A two-time Olympic boxing champion like Héctor is just like any other Cuban who wants to go grocery shopping. He could have left and made millions anywhere else on earth, but here he has to wait in line and bring his own bags. We all carry those bags because none of our stores have them.”
“That’s Héctor Vinent?”
“Claro qué sí. Maybe a little heavier than his fighting days, but that’s Héctor Vinent Charón. Watch—¡HÉCTOR! ¡CAMPEÓN! ¡OYE!”
Héctor looked out the window at us without smiling and reflexively held up a fist and winked.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I gasped. “It is him.”
“He doesn’t live any better than someone selling peanuts in the street.”
As I looked on I couldn’t help trying to imagine stumbling upon Joe DiMaggio at a supermarket or Jack Nicholson waiting in line to catch the bus. Maybe it was more like unearthing a Cézanne while rummaging through piles of used Ikea prints at a garage sale. This was a human being who represented a deliberately uncashed winning sweepstakes ticket. Like any of the elite Cuban athletes, Héctor Vinent, in the bloom of his career, encompassed the most expensive human cargo left on earth. There were over twenty thousand boxers officially employed by Cuba. If a fraction of them along with the cream of the béisbol crop washed onto American shores tomorrow, they would be worth billions on the marketplace.
When I first saw him, Héctor was twenty-eight, maybe thirty pounds over his fighting weight, and he was banned from competing for his country for the last four years by the most powerful political forces in Cuba. It happened after two of his teammates defected at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, leaving him to live out the rest of his life as a kind of living double-exposed photograph of the future he gave up in America versus the one awaiting the rest of his life in Cuba. Maybe his headline was a completely different cautionary tale depending on which side of the Florida Straits you told the story on, but staring at him, the fine print was completely illegible to me.
Héctor shook the hand of the security guard who held the door open and glared at me with a mixture of curiosity and wariness.
“Héctor?”
“Campeón,” he grunted, offering his hand. “¿Boxeador?”
I nodded.
Héctor turned to Lesvanne, who turned to me. “I’ll ask him if he’ll train you. How much are you willing to pay?”
“Whatever he thinks is fair.”
Héctor proposed to train me at Rafael Trejo the following week for six dollars a day, nearly half his monthly wage for training children there. We could train as often as I liked, but there was also a daily surcharge of two dollars for the women who looked after the gym for the state. Palms had to be greased. Lesvanne shrugged and said it all sounded reasonable to him.
“What’s the going rate for private lessons from two-time Olympic champions where you come from?” asked Lesvanne.
“¿Está bien?” Héctor asked me.
“Sí,” I answered. “Lesvanne, I don’t know the word but please tell him it’s an honor to meet him and I’m grateful for this.”
Before Lesvanne could translate, a beautiful girl in a red dress passed behind Héctor, and he caught me following her movements. He laughed and quickly turned to look at her before crying out, “¡Oye! ¡Mi amor! Mi amiga. ¡Yaima!” The girl stopped, recognized Héctor, and they embraced. Héctor introduced Lesvanne and me to Yaima, who delicately leaned in to be kissed on the cheek by each of us. After I kissed her she leaned back and assessed me with a slowly curling smile. Héctor took a step toward Lesvanne and his gruff voice whispered gently into Lesvanne’s ear.
“He says you look a little lonely and if you’d like to have Yaima visit your apartment tonight or be your girlfriend while you stay in Havana, none of that would be a problem.”