“Are you happy with your life in Cuba?” I asked him, my voice shaking. “Are you happy with the life you’ve had?”
“Happy? I’m happy. I’m very happy.”
“No regrets?”
“No.”
“Why is that so hard for people to believe?”
“There are people who become immoral. I would never do that. I endure until the end.”
“I’ve just come from Ireland, where Guillermo Rigondeaux had his last fight. He told me you defended him after he tried to defect.”
“The Cuban system helped him. Where he grew up in Santiago de Cuba? They did not have the conditions that the revolution has created today. He should have respected that.”
“Félix Savón told me he felt Rigondeaux betrayed the Cuban people.”
“I rejected all that money. Because they wanted me to stay out there in the United States like Rigondeaux and the rest of them. Rigondeaux decided to leave. He wasn’t allowed to box anymore in Cuba. He betrayed the Cuban people. And … he left.”
“What does this decision feel like to stay or to leave?” I asked Stevenson. “Is it a decision from the mind or the heart?”
“There are decisions that emerge from your heart and your soul and those decisions can’t be betrayed. Now please stop the cameras for a moment. I don’t want the children to see the champ smoking, please. It’s a bad example.”
10
Miami, Florida
Summer 2011
Back in Ireland, I’d asked Rigondeaux for permission to drop by and interview him in Miami, and he’d agreed and given me his phone number. However, very soon after, he changed that number. And when he got a new one, he changed that number. Why? His Miami handlers said anyone living two years essentially under house arrest in Cuba never loses his paranoia. “How many Cuban athletes have thrown their athletic careers away after encountering a McDonald’s drive-in window?” one of his handlers joked. “How could anyone suffering away their lives in Cuba contend with stepping into an American supermarket with all that choice? Most Cuban boxers gain twenty pounds the day after they’ve arrived in Miami.” Maybe they were right.
When I tried to arrange another interview through Rigondeaux’s handlers in Miami, they said they had no idea where he lived and no way to contact him. He was “strange.” This runaround clarified itself when I was informed by these handlers that I was reporting on “someone as famous as Michael Jordan.” I knew what came next. They wanted to attach themselves to what I’d filmed or have me pay them a lot of money to continue. Otherwise, lawsuits were imminent. “This is Michael Jordan, my friend. What did you expect?”
From Ireland, Gary Hyde gave me the address listed during the last lawsuit Rigondeaux had brought against him and said he believed that he still lived at the same residence. So I rolled the dice on that and flew over from New York with what I’d shot of his family in Cuba.
After twelve years of visiting Havana, landing in Miami for the first time in my life was like conducting an autopsy of what Havana and Cuba as a whole had meant to the million Cubans who’d left. For all the money sunk into it, Miami still felt like a collection of shattered lives gathering dust in a pawnshop of broken dreams. In each city, generations’ worth of grievances had piled up in a toilet that wouldn’t flush, and the overflow had poisoned them both. What came next? S. L. Price, who had worked for the Miami Herald for ten years, once laughed as he told me that while the paper had Fidel Castro’s obituary at the ready for decades, in the end, Castro might well end up outliving the Herald before their battle was over.
On the drive over to Rigondeaux’s home, past the strip malls and gas stations, a Goodyear blimp floated over condos. I rolled past convenience stores, restaurant chains, billboards, bail bonds storefronts, and banks, gyms and beauty shops. Suddenly Havana was re-created all around me in Calle Ocho, the homes lathered with the same tropical palate as Havana maintained, many walled in. Watered lawns and dominos slapping against tables outside. Bodegas full of people arguing and laughing with cigar smoke in the air. They had the same wardrobe and soundtrack as Cuba. There was the occasional difference: a cheerful gift shop advertised toilet paper with Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez’s face on each sheet to wipe your ass with. However, it was pretty clear Thomas Wolfe had never met a Cuban. You can’t go home again? These people didn’t even have the luxury to confront that grim truth. However far away from Cuba these people ran, it was obvious no Cuban had any ability to escape home.
I wasn’t sure how Rigondeaux would respond to the footage I’d brought of his family back home. He refused to say much about the new life he’d created for himself in Miami. Gary Hyde claimed that since he’d first met Rigondeaux he’d invested more than $300,000 in subsidizing his life and also in the legal fees he accumulated fighting Rigondeaux and his Miami handlers, trying to maintain his hold. Rigondeaux’s Miami backers had further subsidized his life. After all, who was paying for his house? Who was paying for the new Mercedes Hyde had told me Rigondeaux drove around Miami? Apart from how much money Rigondeaux was able to earn in America, at this point the better question seemed to be how much did he owe? What happened if the pressure got to him enough to sabotage his boxing career. Then what?
Yoani Sánchez, Havana’s world-famous blogger, once described the Cuban people as birds in a cage: birds reduced to servility, living a life of limited liberties in exchange for the seed and water of the education and health-care systems. “Cubans wish to fly,” she said. “Yet the cage is well made and the bars are thick. And, by the way, neither the birdseed nor the water is all that great.”
The analogy certainly echoed Rigondeaux’s experience. Yet he’d chosen, despite Hyde’s contract offering a smuggler to bring his family with him to America, to leave his family behind in the “cage” of Cuba. His rationale for doing so was that, unlike in Cuba, if he failed in America the system would leave him to die. He was bankrupt if anyone got sick, thrown out of his home if he couldn’t pay rent, hopelessly unable to support his children to pursue an education to give them a better life. He was more afraid to subject his family to the risks of America’s system than to allow his family to live the rest of their lives without him, suffering the cost of his choice in Cuba.
However, I was in for a surprise. Just as I turned onto the narrow suburban street where Rigondeaux lived, the man himself hurtled past me going the opposite direction in his new white Mercedes. Once he was out of sight, I drove over to have a look at his house. A new Dodge Charger was in the driveway. As far as the house, paint job aside, it was nearly identical to the one he’d lived in back in Havana. The first thing that jumped out at me was the fact that both front doors were fenced in with the same unwelcoming, prisonlike bars. The feel that permeated the home, in contrast to all the other sleepy suburban homes in the neighborhood, was its heightened sense of vigilance against some unknown, perceived intruder, which, it became clear, on that day, was me.
I had a little time on my hands waiting for Rigondeaux to return home and so decided to try a different approach. I gave Cuban American author, radio host, and boxing historian Enrique Encinosa a call. Enrique was born in 1949 and lived in the United States after he left Cuba in 1961. I asked if he wanted to help me sit down with Rigondeaux, and he said to pick him up in fifteen minutes. Few people on earth know more about the history of Cuban boxers than Encinosa. I’d interviewed him a few times over the last couple of years to learn his perspective, along with every other authority across the political spectrum on Cuba I could find in America. I wanted as much variety of opinion as possible.
On the phone, one of the first things Enrique said to me after we began talking was: “The greatest pleasure I could ever experience in my life would be putting a gun to Fidel’s head and pulling the trigger.” While nuance on anything related to the revolution’s impact on Cuba wasn’t exactly Enrique’s forte (he frequently equated Fidel to Hitler, and Cuban athletes to Nazi youth) he was as articulate, illuminating, and informative as
anyone I interviewed on a wealth of other subjects. His background was also a little more frightening than most I talked with. Back in 1997, when seven bombs exploded in Havana hotels, killing one Italian tourist, Encinosa went on record defending the terrorist act and advocating further attempts. “I personally think it’s an acceptable method. It’s a way of damaging the tourist economy. The message that one is trying to get across is that Cuba is not a healthy place for tourists. So if Cuba is not a healthy place for tourists because there’s a few windows being blown out of hotels, that’s fine.”
I picked up Enrique, a bearded, smoking, husky ex-amateur boxer wearing an International Boxing Hall of Fame polo shirt, and we drove back to Rigondeaux’s place. After I told him about the footage of Rigondeaux’s family I was bringing over, he posed a question I hadn’t fully considered.
“What makes you think he’d want to see footage of his family at this point?”
“Wouldn’t you want to see it?” I asked.
“A new life in America might include pushing the old one back in Cuba as far as he possibly can. Including them. It’s sad to say, maybe especially them. Rey Ordóñez defected in 1993 when he signed for millions with the New York Mets and never sent a dime back to his wife and child. What makes you think Rigondeaux is any different?”
“His wife,” I answered.
“In Cuba she spoke well of him?”
“Very much so,” I insisted.
“Were their children present as you discussed her husband?”
“Yes, they were.”
“What makes you think she wasn’t covering for Rigondeaux? Saving face in front of their children?”
“After he left, wouldn’t she above everyone else on earth have the most reason to call him a bastard?” I asked Enrique.
“Not in front of her children,” he clarified. “I’m not suggesting I know if he’s sending money back or what. But from what you’ve said, he had the opportunity to bring them out and he didn’t. He gave you reasons which may or may not be true. Let’s see if he’s willing to talk with us.”
This time when we arrived at Rigondeaux’s home, a Mercedes was parked beside the Dodge Charger in the driveway.
“That’s his car,” I said, pointing at the Mercedes.
“Okay,” Enrique said, “but did you think who the other car belongs to?”
We parked on the side of the road and walked over to try the front gate. It was open. I had a DVD with me of the footage with Farah and the children. There was a window beside the front door with a curtain pulled slightly over to one side. Enrique, who had never met Rigondeaux in person before, knocked on the door, and I bent over to look through the window and saw the same poster of Rigondeaux on the wall next to some trophies that his son had held up in Havana.
Suddenly Guillermo’s voice called out from behind the door and Enrique calmly answered hello in Spanish and said who we were. The door opened carefully, revealing Rigondeaux, shirtless, wearing only a pair of boxing trunks. He noticed me and immediately stuck out his hand. “Campeón, where’s my cut from Ireland?”
Enrique explained that I’d brought something else for him, from Havana.
Rigondeaux, still holding the door only half open, asked what that was.
The moment I mentioned his family, Rigondeaux raised his hand to stop me. He pointed back inside the house. His fiancée was inside and we mustn’t say anything more about his family in Cuba while she could overhear it. He told us to come back in a couple of hours and we could talk. However, it was pretty obvious from his initial reaction that that wasn’t going to happen.
We returned two hours later anyway and discovered both cars had vanished from the driveway. We knocked on the door several times over the course of ten minutes with no answer, yet through the window we could see a little dog pacing inside near the kitchen.
“That dog is looking at somebody in there,” Enrique said.
“You think he’s hiding in the kitchen?” I asked.
“I can see from here the back door of the house is open. I think they’re both home. Oh, God. Wait. This is getting very weird. He just peeked out at me from the kitchen.”
“You just saw him?”
“He’s in there with the dog. What kind of situation this? All he had to do was give the fucking interview.”
“How do we proceed from here?” I asked.
“This guy lived under house arrest in Cuba for two fucking years. It wouldn’t bother him to sit for ten hours in that kitchen eating breakfast and juice, waiting for us to leave.”
“Great.”
Then the door opened a crack and a pale Latina in her mid-twenties answered with a Cuban accent. “Hola?”
On her left hand holding the door was an ample diamond resting over an engagement band on her finger.
Enrique explained that Rigondeaux had asked us to come back to the house.
“He’s not home,” she said.
“Do you know when he’ll be back?” Enrique asked her, trying to keep a straight face.
“Sorry,” the girl answered in agitation. “I don’t know.”
“Okay,” Enrique smiled politely. “Muchas gracias.”
She closed the door.
“Well,” Enrique began when we got back inside the car. “Did I tell you he had a new life or what?”
11
Radio City Music Hall, New York
April 13, 2013
On June 11, 2012, news spread from Havana that Cuba’s greatest boxing champion, Teófilo Stevenson, the most famous living Cuban after Fidel, had died suddenly in his home of a heart attack. He was sixty. His death sparked tributes from around the world, and thousands attended his funeral procession. He was buried with his gloves placed beside a wreath atop the grave that Fidel Castro had personally sent. In the end, whether or not Teófilo Stevenson could have beaten Muhammad Ali, his legacy in the minds of his people was built far more upon the fact he could have been Ali. Instead, he chose to be his enigmatic self on behalf of his country’s enigmatic struggle. Watching the news footage of thousands who loved him crying at his funeral, I couldn’t help imagining what Rigondeaux’s funeral would look like. How would it have looked different in Havana if he’d stayed, or in Miami since he’d left?
In his mansion, George Foreman told me that Stevenson’s passing deeply affected him. “He was the best amateur I’ve ever seen, probably the best professional also. He was the best heavyweight of his era. I know what success is and I know what failure is…. Stevenson had something more pleasant than all of us: He always stood for Cuba. If you said Cuba, you had to say his name. There was always something enchanting and flavorful about that, that I admired, and even Muhammad Ali and the world admired. Some of us had all kinds of riches, but that didn’t mean we found any kind of happiness. You pick your friends. But he chose Castro. I wish he could have had the best of both worlds.”
When I told Foreman about Stevenson not having enough money to pay for gas or put tires on his car, he shrugged.
“When I saw him in 1992 he looked content. So maybe there was something more than gas or tires that he was trying to get out of life.”
The Miami Herald ran a front-page feature on my interview with Stevenson from the year before. It turned out to be Stevenson’s last. “To Fight for Money or for the Revolution,” read the headline. The Herald was far more interested in the money Stevenson had asked from me for the interview than all the riches he’d turned down to leave. As far as I was concerned, both realities revealed something of an immensely complicated legacy. Choosing one to define Stevenson far less defined him than defined you. If anyone I’d ever met in my life contained “multitudes,” it was Teófilo Stevenson.
During the 2012 Summer Olympics, held in London, the latest crop of Cuban boxers competing all faced the same question: Who would be Cuba’s next Teófilo Stevenson? It was a hopelessly misguided question. Stevenson’s role in the revolution and Cuba was irreplaceable. Stevenson was a champion of his time, which, li
ke him, had passed. Besides, if they were speaking strictly about boxing ability, the best Cuban fighter in the world wasn’t at the Olympics, or in Cuba, for that matter. He had been fighting professionally since defecting in 2009. For the last twenty months Rigondeaux had been fighting in Las Vegas, steamrolling all three of his opponents and winning another world title on his way to the biggest prizefight a Cuban had ever fought since Fidel Castro rose to power.
The next time I saw Rigondeaux after Miami was at his press conference in New York, promoting his April 13, 2013 championship fight. Recently he’d signed a contract to fight ESPN’s 2012 Fighter of the Year, Nonito Donaire, at Radio City Music Hall, for $750,000 on HBO. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, and while Rigondeaux was a three-to-one underdog in the fight, win or lose, Rigondeaux would have career earnings surpassing $1 million since he’d left Cuba. In abandoning Cuba, Rigondeaux had also rendered moot the question of who would be Cuba’s next Teófilo Stevenson. Rigondeaux had always wanted to be better, but he also wanted to earn a pile of money proving it. “Just so you know,” he told HBO in a promotional video for the fight, “I’m an American now.” Whether Rigondeaux cared or not, making his statement as a professional, in only his twelfth professional fight, against one of the best fighters in the world, also confronted every dismissal of all of Cuba’s amateur champions who refused to turn pro. This was Rigondeaux at thirty-two years old. Rigondeaux might have been dominating the pros for the last ten years.
Since Mike Tyson had faded, boxing’s biggest fight in the last decade had been the one that hadn’t materialized: Manny Pacquiao versus Floyd Mayweather Jr. The biggest fight twenty-first-century boxing could conjure up in the hopes of capturing the public’s imagination was the one it wasn’t able to make happen. Even with $100 million on offer for Pacquiao and Mayweather taking the fight, the politics of the sport only marginalized boxing further from the country’s consciousness.
A Cuban Boxer's Journey Page 12
