After another fifteen minutes Savón’s watch sounded its alarm and our time was up. He shrugged sheepishly and indicated for me to shut off the camera. Once the camera was off he reached over to collect the agreed-upon price for the interview. I paid and Savón smiled and spoke the only two words I’d ever heard him speak in English: “Thank you.”
When I got home to my temporary apartment with the footage, I called back to my old place to see if anything out of the ordinary had taken place. They said the police had just left after taking the new tenants they’d rented the apartment to that night in for questioning. “Be very careful.”
I packed up and got the next flight out of Havana.
8
Dublin, Ireland
March 19, 2011
Two months later, on the night of Rigondeaux’s next fight in Dublin, Rigondeaux’s team was inside the dressing room while our getaway van was poised outside the emergency exit with the engine running. Fifty feet away from us were three thousand intoxicated Irish and Gypsy fans who wanted Cuban blood, wailing menacing, deafening soccer chants louder than anything I’d heard in my life. Riot police had been called over to the arena. “Whatever happens in there,” the driver had warned us, “you get the fuck out, lads. These people are fucking animals. It’s not worth getting stabbed or having a bottle cracked over your heads from those fuckin’ pikey bastards. I’ll be here. You get out fast before they can have a go at the fuckin’ van.” Riot police had been called out to supplant the local police force at the Citywest Hotel arena after Irish papers reported the entire “traveler” population of Limerick had emptied out and flooded into Dublin to support Rigondeaux’s opponent—one of their own—Willie “Big Bang” Casey, for his World Boxing Association interim title shot.
The previous morning, Rigondeaux’s team van had already been robbed outside our hotel in an attempt to steal his WBA championship belt. Fortunately for Rigondeaux, in their haste, the criminals had stolen the wrong bag. Unfortunately for me, this meant that they’d instead successfully robbed the man I’d hired to help me shoot my documentary. They stole his camera, laptop, hard drives, and all the footage we’d shot in Ireland with our main camera.
In revenge I’d doubled down against fate and gambled the last thousand dollars I had in the world on Rigondeaux scoring a knockout in the first round against Willie Casey at twenty-to-one odds. Before I laid the bet, every last person in Rigondeaux’s camp tried to talk me out of it, with the only dissenting opinion coming from Rigondeaux himself. “Are you crazy?” Rigondeaux sneered. “Bet your life savings.”
So I did. All in. The first and last time I’d ever gamble.
We were only in Ireland because Bob Arum had told Gary Hyde he’d been humiliated by Rigondeaux’s performance in Dallas. It’s never an encouraging sign when the only fight a world champion can get requires him to fly thousands of miles into a challenger’s backyard. The press had piled on even more criticism. While nobody questioned Rigondeaux’s talent, most compared it to jazz, in which the better you are in a technical sense, the less people seem to enjoy your work. Arum had assured Hyde there wouldn’t be any more undercards on major fights or cable or pay-per-view audiences for Rigondeaux. Arum’s contract with Rigondeaux would be honored for the next few fights, but he’d written him off as a bust in the United States. This all meant that Rigondeaux was struggling for personal and professional redemption in Dublin.
Willie “Big Bang” Casey was an eleven-to-zero, undefeated father of four from Limerick with an astounding twenty-two siblings. He had won Sky TV’s Prizefighter series. Brad Pitt had modeled his character of an Irish-Gypsy boxer in Snatch entirely on boxers with Casey’s background. When I’d seen Casey and his massive entourage speak at press conferences, for all I knew, Pitt had based his character on Casey himself. The Irish press accused the local TV stations of racism against Casey when they were reluctant to air his fight against Rigondeaux.
Rigondeaux’s training camp literally took place in Hyde’s backyard in Cork. To accommodate the fight, Hyde had hired a construction crew to build Rigondeaux a state-of-the-art boxing gym right behind his house on his sprawling property. Hyde flew in sparring partners from around Europe.
For the first few days I kept some distance from Rigondeaux as far as asking him any questions, but I went out with him during all his runs around a lake early in the morning and watched his sparring sessions. During training was the only time he appeared to be comfortable in the world. He ate his meals alone or with his translator in the hotel dining area. He spent his afternoons alone in his hotel room or feeding birds at a nearby pond. During the nights, Hyde had Rigondeaux make visits to shopping malls around Cork and make guest appearances at local amateur boxing shows involving Irish youth. Rigondeaux took his picture with anybody who asked along the way, but one thing that became obvious was the way he had with children. For a fighter who achieved one of the most sophisticated defenses in boxing history, he allowed nearly every child he came into contact with to pierce his guard. His attention and charm delighted children. Of course, I wondered about his sons back home. I had never witnessed this side of his nature before. All of the kids wanted to play with him, and he was always kind and playful in return. Hyde’s four-year-old daughter adored interacting with him, and no matter what went on around him, from the stresses of promoting to the excruciating training regimens, he teased her until she smiled every time she was around. All his interactions in Ireland were limited by language, because even after two years away from Cuba, he hadn’t learned a word of English. This was another barrier between him and selling his fights to an American audience he either disregarded or couldn’t cope with.
Ernest Hemingway had always warned of getting too close to a fighter. It’s not something that promises to end well. Boxing is a terribly lonely life. On St. Patrick’s Day, as the training camp came to a close with only a couple days before his fight against Casey, I drove with Rigondeaux and the team into Dublin for his first title defense. As we got into the backseat of our van, Rigondeaux offered me a pair of his cutoff hand wraps as a souvenir. He’d allowed me to observe and film him training that whole week, but he’d never engaged me until that moment.
“Campeón, if you would like, these are for you,” Rigondeaux said in his thick Santiago de Cuba accent. “My translator told me you were just in Cuba and spoke with Félix Savón. I could never talk to him and keep a straight face with how he speaks.”
I nodded. “We talked about you.”
“Everyone is entitled to their opinion. I don’t think for them, they shouldn’t think for me. Savón, Stevenson, Héctor Vinent—those guys are history. Their time is long gone. You saw how they lived there.”
“Savón’s home was very simple,” I agreed.
“Those guys had a chance and they didn’t take it and they got screwed. If you get a chance to leave, take it. Those opportunities don’t repeat themselves. They laid that opportunity on the table and I took advantage of it and now I’m here. If not, I would still be back in Cuba just like they are, struggling. I would be living in Cuba off photos and memories. Telling people what you did is all you’re left with.”
“How much pressure is on you to earn enough money in the ring to bring your wife and children to Miami?”
“For what?” Rigondeaux asked, collapsing back against our seat, folding his arms across his chest.
It took me a second to accept he meant this rhetorically.
“My family isn’t going to come here,” he went on. “Everything they need I send them from here.”
“You still look after them?”
“Absolutely. Absolutely I take care of them.”
After that Rigondeaux leaned forward and put his head against the seat in front of him and slept the rest of the drive into Dublin before we checked into our hotel.
The next morning began with everyone from the team loading up the van for the trip to that afternoon’s weigh-in before the following day’s fight. I got into t
he backseat with Rigondeaux, while my cameraman, the last to load his gear into the back, struggled to close the door to the rear of the van. He came around to ask assistance from the driver Hyde had hired for us.
That’s when our friends in a pickup truck moved in from where they’d been hiding and drove over. Nobody saw them coming. Only our driver saw them leaving.
“Fuckin’ hell!” our driver screamed. “Didja see those thievin’ bastards?
Apparently I looked in every direction except where the fucking thieves had run off to, saw nothing, and had no idea what the driver was talking about.
“Where?” I asked.
“The bastards are pulling out of the parking lot now!”
Rigondeaux’s trainer, Ronnie Shields, turned around from the front seat. “I think that pickup truck swiped something from the back of the van. I saw some kid on the back almost fly off onto the street while he tried to grab one of our bags.”
A smoker standing out front of our hotel ran over and pointed to the main freeway past the parking lot where they’d escaped.
“How much shit did they steal?” Ronnie Shields asked.
My camera guy went back to inspect and slammed his hand against the bumper. “They fuckin’ stole everything we had!”
“Everything?” I confirmed.
“Everything.”
I got out and looked at the freeway where the thieves had fled and in the corner of my eye noticed one of the Paddy Power chain of betting shops next door. Ireland was in the midst of crippling unemployment, so naturally betting and pawnshops sprang up across the country like McDonald’s or Starbucks to lend a helping hand in troubled times.
“Does anyone know the fucking odds on Rigondeaux knocking out Casey in the first fucking round?” I asked.
“Twenty to one,” all the inhabitants of our team van sang in chorus.
“Wrong move,” Gary Hyde warned. “Wrong.”
*
Three minutes and five seconds. From getting to the dressing room to inside the ring, having an announcer introduce both fighters, and the bell finally sounding for the fight to begin. Three minutes and five fucking seconds—I timed it. Six seconds longer, according to my wager, than Rigondeaux had to knock out Casey in the first round while three thousand feverishly angry Irishmen (and their women and children) were on their feet, spitting venom in Rigondeaux’s direction, assuring him that he had made an enemy of the whole country. Before the bell, Rigondeaux paced over in front of Casey’s enormous family and smiled at them. Even with the riot police everywhere, they’d spat and thrown garbage at us as we walked out to the ring.
This is how that night happened: Half of the first round went by and the crowd screamed even louder. With one minute and fourteen seconds left in the round, just as I was beginning to worry less about winning the bet and more about getting out of Ireland alive, Rigondeaux clipped Casey with a left uppercut that dropped his glove to the canvas to keep him from falling over. Rigondeaux casually raised the glove he’d knocked Casey out with to the audience as the referee issued a standing eight count, allowing Casey time to recover before resuming action. I looked over at the scorekeeper’s clock. One minute five seconds remained in the round. Casey was hurt and shaken up, but game to keep going. Typically this was where Rigondeaux would disengage his attack and lie in wait for his opponent to become desperate and make egregious mistakes. Not this time. Rigondeaux stalked and threw viciously until he landed a straight left fist that wound up leaving Casey crumpled over in the corner. Forty-one seconds remained as the referee issued another standing eight count. Down to twenty-eight seconds. The moment after the referee agreed to let the fight continue, a pouncing Rigondeaux finished everything off in four seconds. It was over.
As Rigondeaux went back to his corner after being declared the winner, he was already laughing about being en route to Miami and getting home. Then he spotted me on the ring canvas and excitedly held out one of his wrapped hands.
“So where’s my cut?” he smiled.
With the winnings from Rigondeaux’s victory I bought a ticket that same night to fly back to Havana in the hopes of tracking down his family. They hadn’t seen each other in more than two years. I wanted to bring footage of Rigondeaux to them and return with footage of them to show to Rigondeaux in Miami.
9
Havana, Cuba
Spring 2011
The plane began its descent over the last stretch of water that divides Cuba from the United States. Out my window the sunset glazed over the surface of the ocean and glinted off the slits of wave creases like fresh wounds. Up and down the aisles I heard the slap of shades yanked down over passengers’ windows while the rest of us eagerly took in the view. It’s this homestretch that fleshes out the tourists from the locals on flights to the island.
As the plane touched down at José Martí International Airport, I still wasn’t sure I would be allowed to enter Cuba. Would there be fallout from my interview with Félix Savón during my last trip? I had no idea. Movies released in Cuba never know until it’s too late whether they have violated the rules of the state censors. The rules are deliberately spelled out only in the vaguest terms.
Since Rigondeaux had escaped on a smuggler’s boat two years prior and become a permanent exile, his family had been living under twenty-four-hour surveillance and quasi–house arrest. Cuban state security wasn’t known to fuck around.
When it came to Rigondeaux’s abandonment of Cuba, there was an eerily similar precedent. The first African slaves were brought to the island as far back as 1520 by the Spanish, who found themselves in need of replenishing the native Indian population (three hundred thousand at the time Columbus first encountered them), which they had wiped out through a combination of genocide, disease, and brutal labor. Many Indians were so desperate to escape the calamity of their lives under Spanish rule that they attempted suicide by trying to choke on dirt. These attempts ceased after the Spanish threatened severe punishment of the family members of suicides.
One of the most famously courageous Indian chiefs, Hatuey, having been captured and tied to a stake to be set ablaze, was offered salvation by the Spanish if he accepted Jesus. Hatuey asked the man holding the flame if indeed any Christians were in heaven. He was assured there were. Hatuey replied that he would rather burn and be sent to hell than ever again encounter people as cruel as the Spanish.
“Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope!/Where is thy market now?”
—J. M. W. Turner, from “The Slave Ship”
Almost three hundred years later, on November 29, 1782, the events depicted in J. M. W. Turner’s famous painting, The Slave Ship, unfolded. First known as the Zong Affair, and decades later as The Zong Massacre, the story goes something like this: With a business disaster looming—slaves were dying at more than the usual rate during these voyages transporting slaves—English captain Luke Collingwood ordered some of the Zong’s human cargo (122 shackled African men, women, and children) to be thrown overboard into the shark-infested waters of the Caribbean. Another ten slaves threw themselves overboard in a display of defiance against the inhumanity.
These 132 deaths left the captain with high hopes of filing his insurance claim: lost-at-sea slaves would be insured, dead-on-arrival slaves would not.
At the trial for insurance fraud, England’s solicitor general stated:
“What is this claim that human people have been thrown overboard? This is a case of chattels or goods. Blacks are goods and property; it is madness to accuse these well-serving honorable men of murder…. The case is the same as if wood had been thrown overboard.”
In 2009, 228 years after the Zong disposed of its cargo in the Caribbean, another boat carrying human beings—who’d also been bought and sold on the marketplace—sped under cover of night across the same Caribbean waters. This time the boat was headed for Mexico, where a ransom masquerading as a fee was to be paid for the lives of the men, women, and children being transported. Three of the occupants on the smuggler’s bo
at were elite Cuban boxers. One of those boxers was Guillermo Rigondeaux. Despite his more than four hundred fights inside a ring against the greatest boxers in the world, Rigondeaux would describe this journey, with immense reluctance, as the most traumatic event of his life.
*
On May 2, 2011, while I was in Havana, the most dangerous man in the world was found and killed in Pakistan. Nothing about this event, however, was reported in Havana or across Cuba by the Cuban state. No interruption to the news and nothing in either of the two state newspapers. No celebration or protest in the streets. While it was true that few Cubans had access to the Internet, there seemed not to be even an acknowledgment of the event if anybody had found out. Not even Radio Bemba (Cuban slang for the rumor mill) had picked up the signal. Bin Laden’s death caused no ripples one way or the other.
Since the first day I arrived in Havana as a kid trying to track down the real-life 103-year-old hero from The Old Man and the Sea still living in Cojimar, or seeing if I could bribe an Olympic champion boxer Héctor Vinent to help me with my amateur boxing career, I’ve walked down the Prado promenade every chance I could get. Prado was the first name I recognized here, since I used to live a few blocks from the Prado museum in Madrid when I was twenty. I was living there when the Atocha train station was bombed down the street by terrorists some years later.
Havana’s Prado runs all the way to the sea, right up to the Malecón seawall, which the people of Havana consider both their collective sofa and enchanted windowsill on the world. Hundreds of years ago the most beautiful women in Havana could be glimpsed stepping in or out of carriages on this street. The first foreign writers who saw this phenomenon repeatedly pointed out just how incredibly beautiful their feet were.
A Cuban Boxer's Journey Page 10
