B.J.B.: And what’s Rigondeaux doing during all this?
G.H.: He’s stalling. I’m still paying him. I have my contract but, like they say, contracts can’t fight.
B.J.B.: Where does Mexico enter this equation?
G.H.: Human smuggling is a fifteen to twenty-billion-dollar-a-year industry down there.
B.J.B.: Second to drug trafficking.
G.H.: Now it’s many of the same people.
B.J.B.: Diversified their portfolio.
G.H.: Drug traffickers charge smugglers a price per person for the right to cross over their territory.
B.J.B.: “Derecho de piso,” I read. Right of passage. Or they abduct the migrants and hold them for ransom.
G.H.: Messy business. This was all happening in Cancun. Eight people had been murdered over it just before I got there. Turf wars. Of course I didn’t know one person, not nobody in Cancun. I had nowhere to go. But I knew it was happening there in Cancun. Surely I’ll see a boat down there with a Cuban flag or whatever. I met someone down there, over the period of five days. A cabdriver. He knew where there were some Cubans living who were well-respected Cubans. I went down there, met those people. There was a gate. It was like a terrorist house with bars on the gate. I told him I wanted to get my friend out. He said, “I dunno what to say to you or who to tell you to go to.” I told him I was staying at the Cancun Palace. So he came over with his wife and his daughter and stayed with me for three days. He’d come over and unload my minibar in a suitcase and bring it home while being pissed drunk the whole time, too. After a few days he tells me he can deliver a boxer from Cuba. So I connected them to a boxer and they found him.
B.J.B.: Not Rigondeaux?
G.H.: He wasn’t ready yet. Still stalling. And at this stage I know everything about the waters between Cuba and Jamaica, Cuba and the Bahamas, Cuba and Miami, Cuba and the Cayman Island. I called after two days and they said my boxer could see Mexico from where he was in the boat. He couldn’t come ashore because they saw a navy boat from Mexico and they were waiting. Then I got a phone call and he made it. I talked with him. I got on a plane and picked him up in Cancun.
B.J.B.: This was the first boxer in history smuggled out of Cuba on a speedboat?
G.H.: Yes. I put the same people onto Rigondeaux. I got my work permit for him to get to Ireland, which would assure him a visa after he landed in Mexico. At the time I was doing this, several Olympic teammates of Rigo’s escaped by speedboat. None of them sent a dime back to Rigo. I had contacts in the Mexican underworld I was sending money through over to Rigo in Havana. I lined up a contact in Cuba to wine and dine Rigo to make a decision about leaving finally. This was all leading up to what happened at the Pan Am Games in Brazil in the summer of 2007, when he tried to leave with someone else and all that shit exploded. Rigo claimed he was drugged and drunk. He was found with hookers in Brazil. He denied signing or having any interest in leaving. He told that to Fidel and the press and he told that to me.
B.J.B.: You believe that?
G.H.: Doubt it. He went to the embassy over there in Brazil, where they had visas for him. As we’ve seen since, regardless of who actually got him out, I had my contract.
B.J.B.: Why didn’t he leave in Brazil?
G.H.: He wasn’t willing to make the jump. Rigo was hopelessly paranoid about security everywhere.
B.J.B.: So he’s the most politically radioactive person when he’s sent back in disgrace to Cuba. How the fuck do you get him out now?
G.H.: They took away his car. They would have taken away his house but for his family. He put on a lot of weight. He smoked. Wasn’t training. Everyone he knew was banned from talking to him. Everyone had to stay away and keep a wide berth. But he was still on my money drip. He was being looked after. But he was very isolated in Havana, though of course he was under constant surveillance, twenty-four-hour surveillance. He was very frustrated. He tried to get on as a coach for the Beijing Olympics. But Fidel said he was a traitor.
B.J.B.: Did Rigondeaux ever approach or push you about getting his wife and two kids out?
G.H.: I didn’t offer him this until 2008. I had to dangle a carrot to him. Of course I didn’t want the wife and the child out. I wanted him to get out and make his own money and then bring them out. I didn’t want to finance a wife and a child and then Rigondeaux. Let’s say they all get to Cancun and he has a passport and visa to come and work in Ireland but does he have the papers to prove she’s his wife? That is child is his child? What if that wife and child get stuck in Cancun? With Rigo and the work permit I had, I could get him his visa from any Irish embassy in the world within an hour. I learned enough in twelve months that you would learn in twenty years about the regime and getting out of Cuba. Everything. You had the “white cards,” marrying foreigners, the lottery in Cuba for an exit visa, and so forth along those lines.
B.J.B.: But he wasn’t leaving.
G.H.: Six weeks I had a man with Rigo every day trying to lure him out. I had a boat on twenty-four hours’ notice to leave. Still, every day, Rigo refuses to go. All through 2008, Rigo turned on at least twenty Cuban boxers to my contact to get them smuggled off the island using Miami money.
B.J.B.: What happens when these people get smuggled out?
G.H.: They get picked up quietly by a van or a trailer and taken to Pinar Del Rio. Big dangers. Boats break down. Pieces missing. They get shot at by police or the army. In Cancun they get locked up in windowless rooms until the money is paid over. It’s tense because COD doesn’t mean cash on delivery, it’s cash or death.
B.J.B.: How many people would Rigondeaux be traveling with on a smuggler’s boat?
G.H.: Normally thirty-four or thirty-six people. Normally.
B.J.B.: Men, women, and children?
G.H.: Men, women, and children. Yeah.
B.J.B.: He leaves Cuba through someone else and escapes to Cancun in February of 2009. When is your last contact with him?
G.H.: November 2008 was the last time I sent him money. A couple grand. I was starting to get itchy feelings Rigo was trying to sign with someone else. My contact said to me over there, “Jesus Christ won’t get Rigondeaux out. If Jesus Christ is here, he won’t get Rigo. Rigo is coming to you. You set us up with Rigondeaux and he’s coming to you.
B.J.B.: Somebody else got him out.
G.H.: Like everyone else, I saw the news he got out in February of 2009. He came out on my boat. I didn’t pay for it, though. He used my boat with someone else’s money.
B.J.B.: Had you negotiated a price to get Rigo out at that point?
G.H.: Fifty thousand dollars for Rigo, his wife, and one of the kids. That’s the price I negotiated for them.
B.J.B.: Who got him out?
G.H.: He’d signed a professional contract with Arena Box-Promotions. Presumably they got him out. I immediately filed suit, seeking an injunction prohibiting Rigondeaux from competing until the terms of my contract were upheld with him fighting for me.
B.J.B.: And you won in court.
G.H.: Indeed. And here we are at Tijuana, lads. Let’s park and start over on foot.
*
We parked the rental at the border, took a collective deep breath, and started across the border on foot as if walking the end of a plank toward Tijuana. The fenced-in path climbed toward a meat-grinder turnstile entrance beneath a sign announcing MEXICO. I could see nobody guarding the entrance. Once we were through the meat grinder, the path began a winding descent down a ramp toward a pair of armed Mexican marines standing near a seemingly barren “inspection area” with the most surreal traffic light I had ever seen: It had a button that we all took turns pushing, receiving an approving green glow in response. Everything about entering Tijuana seemed to nightmarishly suggest “What could you possibly smuggle into this place that we don’t already have?”
We walked down some stairs toward some chain-smoking taxi drivers slumped against their cars. Gary marched over and announced “Auditorio Municipal?” to the least sin
ister-looking of the group, and we got in the cab. After a couple of minutes we took a bridge over the Rio Tijuana and turned onto Avenida Revolución toward Rigondeaux’s weigh-in. Stopped at the first traffic light on Tijuana’s main strip, we saw soldiers straddling massive artillery they had pointed at the street, standing behind sandbags piled up to neck level. Waiting for the light to change, I looked up the street and saw Tijuana’s version of Cirque du Soleil, with two kids flipping cartwheels in between two lanes of traffic blowing by at forty miles per hour. Over and over again these lunatics spun and whirled, not a cigarette’s clearance between them and the cars blurring by on either side. A few blocks later we passed what seemed to be the same impromptu checkpoint set up with the artillery and sandbags.
“So far, so good?” Hyde elbowed me in the ribs and straightened his tie.
*
Outside the weigh-in being held at the Auditorio Municipal, we saw disgraced local boxer Antonio Margarito surrounded by Mexican reporters and photographers laughing off his banishment from boxing. Before a fight against former world champion Shane Mosley, a substance similar to plaster of Paris was discovered in Margarito’s hand wraps. He was suspended for a year from boxing, only to return to the biggest payday of his life with a shot against Manny Pacquiao at Cowboys Stadium in Dallas. If Rigondeaux won the following night, Hyde had mentioned Rigo would have his own title shot on that undercard. Ultimately the ugliness associated with Margarito’s cheating only increased his marketability.
Once we got inside the lobby of the arena, fighters were scattered around waiting their turn on the scales and a once-over from a doctor to clear them to fight. Among all the reporters and entourages, I couldn’t find Rigondeaux anywhere. The atmosphere inside the room was full of canned laughter, say-cheese smiles, and backslapping. Managers and promoters mugged for cameras with their fighters and recited sound bites to reporters whose faces lit up when they heard the one they’d run with on that evening’s telecast. Hardly any Americans anywhere, mostly Mexican and Latin American fighters looking to break into the American market with a big performance. I watched teenagers with their lives in front of them and a pipedream intact avoid the sad journeymen who also waited their turn on the scales. Eager young fighters on their way up, old fighters double-parked in their careers looking for one last payday to stave off their fate of being another footnote in punch-drunk history.
All the serious fights I’d seen up close until that point were in Havana, where some coaches from the Havana provincial team allowed me to sit ringside with their fighters at the Kid Chocolate arena. It was where I first saw Rigondeaux fight. Back in the 1920s, the eponymous Kid Chocolate (real name Eligio Sardiñas Montalvo) used to fight in the Havana streets as a boy for loose change. At twenty-one, he became Cuba’s first world champion. He ran around with so many women that he had to defend his championship numerous times while battling syphilis. The first time I walked into Chocolate I didn’t even know fights were taking place, and I entered midway through a provincial tournament. 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.
Cuban eyes often look close to tears. For me the most apparent trait of the national character is an unbearably proud, sore heart about what it it means to be Cuban. Tears are never far away because their pain is always raw, but so is their joy in equal measure. Kid Chocolate was my gateway drug into that joy. How many socialists does it take to change a lightbulb? We’re not going to change it. We think it works. My high school gym had more money sunk into it than the most famous arena residing in Cuba’s capital city named after a troubled hero. It was clear that nobody fighting was paid to fight any more than you or anyone else had paid to watch. Cigar and cigarette smoke curled into the rafters as bottles of rum were passed around in the audience and swigged. It 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, annoyed, nodding-off citizens in attendance at the Plaza de la Revolución. However, I didn’t find that here, even though the faces carried the same strain from all that was going wrong outside Chocolate. At first what I was looking at didn’t even register as Cuban, but rather an American conservative’s wet dream of sport: everything playing out under the emblem of sport being “pure,” as it was back in the golden era of grandpa’s time. Although nobody here could keep score with money in the same way you could back home, everything certainly still seemed to count.
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 parking lot or parking meters 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 the afternoon heat. No—just proud people everywhere. People fighting harder in the ring than anywhere else I’d ever seen for people in the stands who cheered louder than anywhere else I’d ever heard. Nothing separated them. They might have lived on the same block. Sport was no opium for these people; Cuban culture was the opium of sport. If van Gogh captured the world’s imagination in part for never being able to sell some of the most treasured works of genius, it’s important to remember he was still trying to. Castro’s culture went further and they knew it: The magic of everything Cuba represented was in their heroes not being for sale. Then they started leaving, just like Rigondeaux.
*
Rigondeaux’s name was called over a P.A. and Hyde pointed him out to me, grabbing my arm. Rigo was sitting quietly in the corner of the room on a folding chair when he noticed us approaching. He had on the same Armani T-shirt that he wore when I first met him in Havana. When he saw Hyde he offered his hand to shake but made a point of staring away from his face. I stood off to the side and watched them hug awkwardly while Rigo leaned over and whispered something in Hyde’s ear. When they pulled away from each other Hyde nodded and smiled politely, saying to his boxer, “After. After the weigh-in. After.”
Rigondeaux got undressed and handed his clothes to Gary Hyde as he stepped on the scale. A few members of the Mexican media took his photo, but most weren’t that interested in him. Rigondeaux’s sixth professional opponent, Jose Angel Beranza, a sorrowful-looking, diminutive Mexican with thirty-two wins and eighteen losses on his record, watched the proceedings in his underwear before his turn arrived.
Hyde came over and grumbled to me, “Rigo wants more money. Same story every time I see him.”
After Rigondeaux had his clothes back on, I approached him and wished him luck in his fight the following evening. He sullenly shook my hand, avoided eye contact, and thanked me.
I asked him about an interview and the expression on his face turned severe as he tilted his head to one side.
“Claro.” He flashed the gold in his mouth—a sudden grin. “How much money did you bring, campeón?”
I looked over at Hyde and back to Rigondeaux. I shrugged, and Rigo smiled again and told me we could talk back at his hotel. He signaled to Hyde that he was ready to leave and began to walk toward the door while a few photographers called out to him. Rigondeaux offered a fist in their direction as we followed behind him, caught a taxi outside, and left for the nearby hotel where the fighters were staying. Nobody said anything in the taxi while Rigondeaux fiddled with his new iPhone. Bobby Cassidy, a kind and generous reporter I’d contacted in New York who interviewed boxers in Cuba, had sent me footage he’d captured of Rigondeaux wearing an I LOVE NEW YORK sweatshirt and using the same iPhone to film Times Square the night before a fight on Broadway. Beneath the stock ticker, double-decker buses, and billboards, he looked less like your typical tourist than like a man floating off into the capitalist abyss.
Rigondeaux had the saddest face I’d ever seen in Cuba, yet looking at it in that cab, I saw i
t had clearly hardened into bitterness since he’d arrived in America. It seemed as if Rigondeaux’s Greek tragedy in Cuba had simply found a new stage in America. Homer, the first boxing writer in history, wrote of Achilles sacrificing marriage and a happy but unremarkable (and forgotten to history) life for the tragic immortality that awaited him in Troy. The etymology of Achilles’s name comes from the Greek words akhos for grief, and laos, meaning a people, a tribe, a nation. Achilles chose to live a cursed existence. Rigondeaux looked as if he knew something about that state of being as he resembled more and more a gargoyle pried off Fidel’s monument of Cuban sport.
I wasn’t sure leading up to our interview whether Rigondeaux’s Troy amounted to the world championship title or simply the riches that came with it. Maybe he wanted to bring his family over with that money, and maybe he didn’t. A lot of hugely successful Cuban athletes escaped with the help of their families back home only to turn their back on them the minute they arrived in the United States. (S. L. Price explored that angle in Pitching Around Fidel with Rey Ordóñez’s escape and subsequent success as a shortstop with the Mets in Major League Baseball). Others moved mountains to reunite with their loved ones, as El Duque had. Of course, maybe Rigondeaux wouldn’t even get that far.
After we got to the hotel, Rigondeaux ordered a Coke from the bar and joined me at a table with Gary Hyde. His security handler from Miami agreed to translate for our interview. A waiter brought Rigondeaux a well-done steak from the kitchen and two other staff members politely asked if they could have their photos taken with him. He posed with his fist raised for both photos and sat down across from me, leaning over with his elbows over his knees.
A Cuban Boxer's Journey Page 6
