Don’t try to understand me too quickly.
—André Gide
A MONTH GOES BY and the best I can do to explain anything to myself is to admit how many things don’t work here, but they don’t seem to work the other way, either. In Old Havana, the names of the streets before the revolution provided a glimpse into the city’s state of mind. You might have known someone who lived on the corner of Soul and Bitterness, Solitude and Hope, or Light and Avocado. After the revolution, they changed the names and put up new signs, but if you asked directions from a local today you’d get the old names. They all meant something personal to the people who lived on those streets. That avocado grew in the garden of a convent. That hope was for a door in the city wall before it was torn down. That soul refers to the loneliness of the street’s position in the city. Sometimes these streets lead you to dead ends and other times you stumble onto cathedrals, structures built with the intention of creating music from stone. The sore heart Havana offers never makes you choose between the kind of beauty that gives rather than the kind that takes something from you: it does both simultaneously.
While guidebooks might tell you that time collapsed here, another theory says that in Latin America, all of history coexists at once. Just before the triumph of the revolution, progress took shape in ambitious proposals made by American architects to erect grand skyscrapers all along the Malecón seawall offering a fine view and convenient access to a newly constructed multicasino island built in the bay. To accommodate the gamblers, vast areas of Old Havana were to be demolished and leveled for parking access. In 1958, Graham Greene wrote, “To live in Havana was to live in a factory that turned out human beauty on a conveyor belt.” Yet this beauty the people of Cuba unquestionably possess walks hand in hand with their pain. Whoever you might encounter in this place lacking the ability to walk or even to stand for whatever reason will inevitably remain convinced they can dance. When Castro was put on trial in 1953 by Batista’s government and asked who was intellectually responsible for his first attempt at insurrection, he dropped the name of the poet José Martí. From the little I’d learned of it, the revolution’s hold on Cubans resembled not so much poetry as the chess term zugzwang: you’re forced to move, but the only moves you can make will put you in a worse position. Cuba had become an entire population of eleven million people with every iron in the fire doubling as a finger in a dike.
I hitched a ride in a gypsy cab most of the way to the boxing gym with a black Cuban who gave me the dime tour of the greatest potholes in Havana. He was literally serenading the potholes before we could even see them. Out my window there were lineups and police icily keeping their eyes peeled. “¿Último?” someone shouted as they joined the line, followed by another “¡Último!” confirming who was the last person in the line. This was how people found their place in queues all over the city. The driver told me what was clearly an old joke: stop anywhere in Havana for five seconds and you’ll start your own lineup.
I looked up at clotheslines strung between columns, women in curlers leaning against the railings of their balconies. I saw tourists snapping photos of the architecture of a building where Lesvanne took me to visit a friend. We had coffee while his family complained incessantly about the broken stairwell and leaky roof. Finally the harbor came into view with the waters that in the early twentieth century were banned to fishermen because of all the bodies being thrown from the Morro Castle by government thugs. Trumpet players on the Malecón blew at sea puddles on the pavement. A policeman checked a man’s identification while staring at a cruise ship coming in on the horizon. We drove a little farther and the whole colonial theme park faded in the distance.
The driver lit a cigarette and reached back to press play on a little broken-down ghetto blaster in the backseat, and Nat King Cole’s voice came overenunciating in Spanish through the speakers. The driver imitated it and grinned wide: “Pen-sannn-doh. I luuuv it. He recorded it in Havana. My father saw him in a nightclub perform before the revolution.
“My friend, did you know they needed three tries to find Havana before they got it right?” he asked me.
I looked at his face and asked him for one of his cigarettes.
“Did you know that originally Cuba was named ‘Juana’ after Juana La Loca, the insane daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella? They were Columbus’s patrons. All of that little girl’s relatives have been screwing with our lives ever since. We can stop for a beer and I could tell you more.”
“I’m training at the gym very soon.”
“But you’re smoking.”
“I’m a very complicated man.”
We shared an uneasy silence for a moment or two.
“I could pick you up after your training. My friend, I know some great girls I could introduce you to. Any color you like. I have a business card.”
He conducted a frantic search of the vehicle before he produced the business card, but he was clearly quite proud of it once he straightened out the wrinkles with the side of his hand against the dash.
“Thank you.”
“My friend, I like to drink Hatuey beer. I once drank a beer with Ernest Hemingway in San Francisco de Paula when I was a boy. Do you like our beer?”
“I don’t drink.”
“My father was an alcoholic, too.” He winked. “But you get over it eventually. Let me tell you a story about my favorite beer. When the Spanish first came here an Indian chief named Hatuey sailed from Hispaniola to warn the people. The resistance was brave but it wasn’t much. Hatuey was burned at the stake. Just before they burned him they offered him a last-minute conversion so he could enter heaven. Hatuey asked whether there were any Christians in heaven. After they assured him that there certainly were, he told them he’d rather go to hell than anywhere where there were people as cruel as the Spaniards. In Gringolandia Pocahontas was a little friendlier when John Smith arrived. Maybe all there is in this world is underdogs and whores.”
“They named your beer after this person?”
“Can you imagine a greater honor to bestow?”
The silence went by a little smoother this time.
“My friend, I can introduce you to some very nice, clean girls.”
“My schedule is a little booked. I have a backlog of about 4,500 ‘very nice, clean girls’ I already have to meet.”
“You haven’t seen my girls. You have my business card.”
* * *
My boxing gym, Rafael Trejo, was located in what was once the cheapest red light district in the city, only a few minutes’ walk from José Martí’s childhood home, now converted into a museum. One of the largest funeral processions in Cuban history was for the notorious pimp Yarini Ponce de León, who was shot in a duel in the area.
These days most of the prostitution in the city is run, curiously, by cab drivers. Right after the revolution they reformed most of the prostitutes into cab drivers. Job reorientation. Now cab drivers are mostly composed of lawyers and doctors looking to scrounge enough tourist dollars to cover the basic needs of their family that their wages as professionals can’t accomplish.
About the only thing you can trust in this neighborhood is that nothing is trustworthy to an outsider. I had my boxing gloves hanging off my bag and some of the small kids joyously raised their fists at me while their older siblings eyed my belongings. The neighborhood was a maze of narrow streets closely monitored by thieves. I figured if I was going to be passing through on a daily basis for appointments at the gym, I might as well just accept being robbed soon enough and probably with the use of a blade of some kind. All I brought with me was the money I owed Héctor and my gloves and skipping rope, as I didn’t want to enter this place with suspicion or even caution. I elected to give into whatever toll the neighborhood expected from me and just said hello to anyone who looked me in the eyes no matter who they were. While, as anyone, I’ve never enjoyed being played for a sucker, I also can’t remember experiencing anything worthwhile without trust regardless of how little trust was warranted. Trusting the world is a risk, while not trusting it is a guarantee you’ll be left with nothing.
Trejo is one of the oldest boxing gyms in Cuba; it’s outdoor, and every great champion the country has produced has passed through and was forged in the open air. Different sets of the same mildly sinister women who look like the Macbeth witches guard the entrance from tourists and procure a toll for entry, snapshots, or stories. The witches rest their chairs against a wall of photographs under portraits of great world or Olympic champions who spent time staining Trejo’s lone ring with their blood and sweat.
Cuba’s answer to Muhammad Ali, Teófilo Stevenson, was featured among the portraits, along with Félix Savón, who turned down even more millions than Stevenson to leave Cuba, but this time to fight Mike Tyson. Also José “Mantequilla” Nápoles, Kid Chocolate, and some other names I didn’t recognize, and finally there was Héctor, attached by scotch tape in his Olympic heyday with his arm raised in victory. I paid the witches to tell me the stories behind the faces and in their words, always, more than any achievements in the ring, these boxers’ greatest legacy was the money they refused to betray the revolution. It was strange to see the gleam of pride in their eyes as they envisioned the kinds of lives these men had forgone in favor of embracing their role as symbols of a cause greater than any individual. These men stood for the highest literacy rate in the world, universal health care, free education, better lives for their children and all Cubans. I listened and absorbed the reports of their virtues, but I knew full well that most Cuban champions were so desperate for money that many had sold off all their Olympic medals and even uniforms to the highest tourist bidder. That part of the Cuban sports legacy was omitted from their tales. So were the defections of boxers starting in 1967, five years after Fidel Castro banned all professional sports from the island. All those who had tried to leave, successful or not, had essentially committed social suicide: they ceased to exist in their native land.
* * *
Cuban eyes often look close to tears. Tears never seem far away because both their pain and their joy are always so close to the surface. There’s an open wound that defines the national character and the tide of emotions is always raw and overwhelming. Kid Chocolate was my gateway drug into those emotions. They didn’t have enough money for a bell to clang to announce the fights or declare the beginnings or ends of rounds, so they used an emptied fire extinguisher and a rusty wrench instead. My high school gym had more money sunk into it than the most famous arena residing in Cuba’s capital city. Did that detract from the atmosphere or impact? Donald Trump named everything after himself while nothing in Havana, not even a plaque, had Fidel’s name attached. Who would history remember? Nobody fighting there was paid to fight any more than anyone watching had paid to attend. Cigar and cigarette smoke curled into the rafters as bottles of rum were passed around and swigged in the audience. The place was packed and at first I assumed everyone was forced to attend these matches the same way seven-hour Fidel speeches invariably had hundreds of thousands of bored, nodding-off citizens in attendance at the Plaza de la Revolución. But it wasn’t the case. All the faces still carried the same strain from what was going wrong outside Kid Chocolate, but they also knew they were watching sports in a way that the rest of the world could only dream about. That’s why what I was looking at, at first, didn’t even register as Cuban; it was an American wet dream of sport. At least while the fights lasted, it was pure.
No interviews. No cameras. No advertising. No commercial breaks. No merchandise. No concession stand. No thanking of sponsors. No luxury boxes. No Tecate or Corona ring girls. No autographs. No VIP seating. No scalpers outside. No venue named after a corporation or corporately owned anything, anywhere. No air conditioning or even fans to mitigate how fucking hot it was in there. No amenities of any kind, but instead you had a full auditorium of intensely proud people who didn’t require cues to cheer or applaud. Without the incentive of money, I watched people fight harder in the ring than anywhere else I’d ever seen. And they fought this way before an audience who cheered louder than anywhere I’d ever heard. And nothing separated them. The best of the boxers might have lived on the same block as anyone in the stands. Sport wasn’t an opium for these people; their culture was an opium for sport. Who walked into a museum anymore without asking how much the masterpieces had sold at auction for? If van Gogh captured the world’s imagination in part for never being able to sell some of the most treasured works of human expression ever put to canvas, he was certainly trying to sell them. This society’s experiment went further and they knew it: heroes weren’t for sale. But how long could that last? How long could anyone resist not cashing in? And if no price was acceptable to sell out, what was the cost of that stance?
During the last fight of the evening, a hometown Havana kid was beating another boy from Sancti Spíritus terribly. So badly, in fact, that someone in the crowd raced down from the rafters and threw his bunched-up towel into the ring since the Sancti Spíritus coaches had refused to throw in their towel.
He’d cupped his hands to scream at the referee, “Alright then you son of a bitch, I’ll spend the night in jail for your crime, you motherfucker!”
The crowd ignited as they watched that towel leave the man’s hand in a sweaty clump and sail unfurling under the lights toward the ring, with the referee conspicuously unaware of the attempt on his life.
Héctor had arranged for me to sit ringside next to one of the trainers named Alberto Brea, along with the rest of the Havana team, and all of us betrayed our team’s fighter in the ring to cheer on the heckler. When the towel found its target and compressed like an accordion against the referee’s ear and we heard every last sweaty drop behind the wet slap of its impact, Brea nudged me: “This man is a noble martyr for Sancti Spíritus. If I was his father I would be proud.”
Another coach turned to Brea: “What makes you think you aren’t his father?”
Brea was delighted by this possibility—along with every other child on the team who heard it and doubled over laughing—but conceded, “He didn’t get an arm like that from me. Béisbol was never my game.”
As the protester stood on the stairs glaring at the referee and screaming obscenities, with both hands high over his head gesticulating wildly, the referee calmly halted the fight to pick up the towel and contemplate it in his hands for a moment before attempting to locate the heckler. Even the judges at ringside were having trouble keeping a straight face.
The rest of us in Kid Chocolate watched as the uniformed policía stormed down the steps to arrest the protester. He didn’t flinch when the four cops grabbed his arms, shirt, and pants and began hauling him toward the exit. He kept his eyes on the referee in the ring and kept talking to him as though he were microphoned.
The referee patiently held on to his new towel while the commotion was dealt with.
But then something magical happened, after which nobody in the arena had a harder time holding their composure together than the referee.
Another towel entered the ring and lightly—almost obediently—touched down on the canvas near the referee’s feet. Sancti Spíritus had finally had a chance to inspect the damage on their fighter and quit on his behalf.
There was agonized panic to get this point across to our arrested towel thrower before it was too late. The protester was in the doorway of the exit when he broke loose of the police grip long enough to look back over his shoulder and grasp the full meaning of the moment. Everyone collectively forgot to breathe as we all waited to see what he’d do next. Suddenly his hands shot up as he wailed with vindication, and even the police laughed as everybody got to their feet to whistle and cheer his achievement.
The referee gazed toward the arrested man, shook his head, and smiled as he waved the fight off.
* * *
When the revolution triumphed, one of the strange and beautiful sights across Havana was the destruction, by the thousands, of any and all parking meters. The mafia had collected all the money from those parking meters and much of it had been pilfered, along with hundreds of millions from the Cuban national treasury, by Batista and taken with him into exile in Spain.
I went outside into the parking meter–less night and walked over to the corner of the block and bought a peso ice cream from a pretty light-skinned Cuban girl reading a weathered and wrinkled-up celebrity magazine from the 1980s. She held the cone under the spout and pulled the arm of the machine, all the while hypnotized by a photograph of Madonna. She handed me the cone and reached up and took her hair in a fist trying out the hairstyle. I watched her for a bit trying other styles until the security guard from the little dollar grocery store next door began flirting with her. When she gave him a smile he turned with satisfaction in my direction.
The grocery store he was supposed to be guarding had dozens of people lined up outside the entrance, peeking through the windows into the glass display cases of chocolate, makeup, gum, toothpaste, soap, suntan lotion, American cigarettes, and other “luxury” items.
It was worse a few blocks down the street at the Adidas store on Calle Neptuno. You’d see kids buying sneakers at American prices—the equivalent of eight months’ salary for a Cuban neurosurgeon—acting casual about the transaction. Phony designer T-shirts were available on the mercado negro. You could spot the occasional busted-up, discarded tourist cell phone carried like a talisman in the hand of a teenager. Every now and again you’d see useless, tossed-away cell phones carried around in the hands of Cubans as a status symbol, their best attempt at conspicuous consumption.
The designated tourist Lada taxis were waiting across the street in front of the steps at the Capitolio and the drivers were all leaning over the hoods of their cars chatting and smoking with a few of the drivers of horse-drawn carriages. The cabbies were some of the best-connected men in Havana: girls, drugs, whatever you need for your stay. “You don’t like the food? Don’t you know the best meals are all cooked at secret locations? Would you like to visit the private home that cooked for Steven Spielberg? Come, my friend, let me show you.… Have you tried our cocaine yet? Have you seen how we smoke joints through our nostrils? You need a girl who will treat you right, not like the stuck-up ones you have back home. I have an uncle who has several boxes of Trinidad Cigars stolen from Castro’s personal collection for diplomats. Don’t worry, my friend.”
Nothing alerts me to the fact that I’m out of my depth like preemptive assurances of my safety. All the hustlers worked this area of town day and night looking for tourists to ride. Which was fair, because a hefty cross-section of tourists pretty much only frequented the areas of Havana where they could give young Cuban girls a ride.
Police were everywhere but lots of product—cigars, merchandise, even drugs—was being moved in secret stashes all over town. Everybody had a friend or a relative who could get it for you. Another herd of tourists arrived fresh off a cruise ship or from a bus visiting from Varadero, where locals were no longer able to vacation with their families. The government had forbidden them. I watched them march through Parque Central headed for Calle Obispo and some Hemingway daiquiris at El Floridita, where the first daiquiri was invented and poured.
* * *
Past the entrance to Rafael Trejo, the sun blazed down and there were rows and rows of bleachers surrounding a ring, barely covered by a roof. For warm-ups, students raced up and down the bleachers and their footfalls were as loud as a New York express subway train until the coaches whistled them on to the next task. Car tires were set against an iron railing for boys to practice their combinations, snapping their punches. In place of bags, sacks were hung next to the tires. A tractor tire lay in the shade under the far-side bleachers, where an instructor swung a sledgehammer over one shoulder and then the other, plunging the hammer down and showing a kid the proper technique of incorporating the entire body with each swing and the mechanics of the weight transfer involved. The ring was the centerpiece of the gym, its canvas blood- and sweat-stained, with a little neighborhood mud smeared here and there. There was a lucky child who lived next door, on the second floor of his building, who spied with his friends on the action below from his window.
Héctor walks into Rafael Trejo in jeans and an undersized Cuban national volleyball team shirt that accentuates a growing paunch. I’m shadowboxing in the ring with half a dozen other students, all several years younger than me. Héctor has a book and a folded newspaper in one hand and one of the other coaches quickly hands him a bundled-up shoelace necklace with a whistle hanging off. Héctor lays the book and newspaper over the equipment table and drapes the necklace over his bowed head. It’s a daily ritual with a ghostly nod to the elephant in our roasting, open-air gym. I can’t help but try to imagine how he copes with the two Olympic gold medals that were placed around his neck in Barcelona and Atlanta, this future barely earning enough in a month to afford the cost of a movie ticket as his reward.
Héctor puts his hands on his waist and watches me expressionlessly.
“¡Oye, Brinicito! Three more rounds of shadowboxing, then we’ll work.”
I nod and look back at the ground and throw more combinations in the air, spilling more sweat over my shadow. The old ring creaks and moans under the collective feet finding their rhythm and transferring weight to give force to our blows at imaginary opponents.
I’ve taken Héctor to dinner a few times after our lessons but he’s not interested in the conversation veering toward defection stories or even boxing, really. He’s more interested in the fact that both of us are the only people at Trejo who bring in novels to read. He loves Hemingway and Don Quixote. He’s desperate for more books the government won’t permit locals to read. He enjoys the work of Gabriel García Márquez so deeply he asks if I could bring him Márquez in English when I come back to the island. He thinks it would be the best way to learn the language. Mostly Héctor just seems grateful to enjoy a full meal without having to worry about the looming fight that in the past he’d have had to make weight for.
Héctor yells for another kid to imagine squishing a cigarette under his back toe when he throws his right hand. He’s not turning it properly. Where’s your ass in that punch? How do you expect the weight between your shoulders to snap without the full extension of your punch? Where’s your balance? Héctor gestures to steal the cigarette from an onlooker’s mouth and flick it into the ring to help the education along.
Three more rounds of the art of shadowboxing for me, a lifetime of battling against their shadow selves over in America for Héctor and any other Cuban boxer that remained on the island.
“Our athletes are and always will be an example for all” are words painted over a sign hanging in the entrance to Rafael Trejo. The same sign hangs over most boxing gyms across the country, I was told by the Macbeth witches for a tourist dollar. “Men’s sacred values are beyond gold and money,” Fidel once explained. “It’s impossible to understand this, when you live in a world where everything is bought and sold and gotten through gold.” Professional boxing had been banned for thirty-eight years at that time, since 1962, and, in part to vindicate Fidel’s explanation, only a fraction of fighters from then until now had left. This was rarely if ever a story outside reporters gave much credence to, let alone bothered to explore. Tough to find a peg on which to hang that story.
But as I peeked up from my shadow at Héctor, unfurling his newspaper to read a few paragraphs of the state news, I wondered what was the example Héctor was meant to convey to the next generation of Cuban children by his choices? Or perhaps the better question was, what could be made of the powerful revolutionary figures taking Héctor’s choice away before he ever had a chance to betray their ideals? In Cuba you could be convicted of crimes you were only suspected of committing, all under the Orwellian umbrella term of “dangerousness.” Fidel hogged the credit for any athlete that stayed as proof of the revolution’s triumph, but by the same logic, when boxers defected how much of a referendum was it about why all Cubans might be torn about remaining?
Héctor hadn’t spoken freely to me much since I’d first met him, but I’d done some homework on him. Héctor Vinent Charón was born in Santiago de Cuba, an eastern province where the bulk of the best boxers are found. Many in that region, like Héctor, come from large families who suffered the worst before the revolution and were some of the biggest beneficiaries of the revolution’s reforms. Massive literacy drives, eradicating obscene rates of death by curable diseases, lowering infant mortality rates below nearly all first-world countries, agrarian land reform, access to education, an emphasis on social justice that made a tangible impact across the country, an end to racial discrimination—a massive overhaul of a whole society conspiring to help the weakest and end widespread corruption and exploitation. The upper crust in Cuba got the shaft and most fled. While the ideals of the revolution resonated deeply with almost every Cuban I encountered, the results in so many areas, especially over the last ten years, had driven home just how untenable this regime in power truly was. But the United States and the embargo had rarely missed an opportunity to antagonize matters and essentially let the government off the hook in the eyes of many. Fidel’s bogeyman was just as stubborn as he was.
Then again, Héctor was almost thirty and already the father of five children he was clearly struggling to support. He was only eight when the Mariel boatlift took place in 1980, during which ten thousand Cubans attempted to gain asylum at a Peruvian embassy. An exodus of 125,000 Cubans fled the country. “Fidel has just flushed his toilet on us,” Maurice Ferré, the Miami mayor at that time, famously remarked. Héctor had won his first Olympic medal in 1992, just as Cuba entered its Special Period, after the collapse of the Soviet Union ended the Soviets’ massive subsidies to the island. “We’re in a Special Period,” Fidel spoke before a crowd at that time. “Why? Because we’re alone confronting an empire.… Only a weak, cowardly people surrenders and goes back to slavery.”
Héctor won his second medal in Atlanta, as the Special Period’s hardships reached their peak with widespread blackouts, fuel shortages, and starvation. The choice to remain for any Cuban, let alone an elite athlete, had never been more difficult. And Héctor was part of a continuum of Fidel’s champions, meant to reject any offer to leave and be a proxy for Fidel and the revolution’s values, displaying they were still strong enough to dominate those of Americans stepping into the ring and challenge America itself.
Héctor was a chubby young boy when he began training as a boxer, stepping into a broken-down gym called Los Songos to throw his first punches. It didn’t take him long to get noticed and selected for entry into La Finca, the special elite school in Havana for boxers. The Cuban sports machine might have been the most effective apparatus on earth for uncovering and developing athletic talent and Héctor was exactly the kind of world-class athlete they were looking for. Héctor’s talent was never inconspicuous. Barely into his teens, he left his family behind in Santiago and took the train across the country, and before long he became a national champion. He won the nationals six times in all. He won a junior world championship in Lima at age eighteen. By twenty, when the Barcelona Olympics rolled around, he cruised to a gold medal with a combined score of 85 points to his opponent’s 11. The Cubans trounced the Americans at the Olympics that year, winning seven gold medals to the United States’ one. Héctor had also proven, pound-for-pound, he was one of the greatest living fighters in the world. What made him even more enticing to foreign promoters was his professional style: he was a tenacious, brutal puncher who savored finishing off opponents and electrifying crowds.
I’d heard one of his eyes was damaged from a detached retina after the accumulation of punishment he endured over his hundreds of amateur fights and sparring. He’d given some interviews to foreign journalists using the injury as the reason his boxing career was finished. But in truth, after the 1996 Olympics, when his teammates Ramón Garbey and his best friend Joel Casamayor defected—Casamayor being the first Olympic champion ever to do so—Héctor took the brunt of the consequences back home for their actions. Héctor’s fate was sealed when he was only twenty-four years old.
“¡Oye!” Héctor hollered and blew his whistle. “Come outside the ring. Today we spar a little.”
“With whom?” I asked, climbing out of the ring.
“Me.” Héctor grinned and offered two thumbs he happily tugged back at himself. He put his arm over my shoulder and let loose a deep, growly laugh. “The Olympic Games are in Sydney soon. Maybe they’ll let me make a comeback. I need some sparring just in case.”
“Who is the best boxer Cuba is sending to Sydney?” I asked.
“Guillermo Rigondeaux,” Héctor answered immediately. “El mejor.”
“No question?”
“Por favor. Nobody close. He’s magnificent. But what a sad face he has! We both came from Santiago de Cuba. He came from a coffee plantation. He is only 118 pounds, but we’ve never seen anything like him. Most people like the big guys, but they are very limited in terms of skill. To be small you must have everything. Rigondeaux might be the most beautiful boxer I’ve ever seen. He is a little Stradivarius of a boxer. I’m friends with Félix Savón, the captain of the national team. A very simple but good man.” (A running joke in the gym and across the island was Savón’s Yogi Berra–like quote, “Technique is technique because without technique there’s no technique.”) “Savón has told me he will hand over his captaincy to Guillermo after these games. Only one gold medalist has defected, never someone that high profile. Who knows, Rigondeaux will turn twenty the day he wins his gold medal. He could easily be the first man in history to win four. Certain things in my country make his choices different than when I was twenty and won my first medal.”
“The offers followed you everywhere you fought?”
“Everywhere.” He laughed. “Suitcases of money popped open from ringside. Crumpled-up paper thrown into the ring with dollar figures just to talk. Just to talk more money than I would see in ten years living here.”
“You like Dickens?” I asked Héctor.
“Yes, I like him.”
“Aren’t you Rigondeaux’s ghost of Christmas Past?”
“A Christmas Carol was not so popular here.” Héctor smiled. “Christmas was banned in Cuba for many years until the Pope visited our island and Fidel reinstated it. He did not reinstate El Duque, and so he escaped to the Yankees.”
“But not you.”
“Not me.” Héctor shook his head, and when he looked away I wasn’t sure if he was looking into his past or Rigondeaux’s future.