The Domino Diaries Part 13

"When I met these people I thought: This is human. It's not neat. It's not reduced to some box where they're bad and we're good. And you know, there were heroes in Miami who had left behind families, children, their wives-penniless-and wouldn't send them money. Tefilo Stevenson gave every sign to me of being a full-blown alcoholic. In some ways, even though he was mouthing pieties about the revolution, he seemed to have his soul damaged by being a flag bearer for the revolution. It wasn't clean.

"In Lawrence of Arabia, Jackson Bentley asks Lawrence, 'What is it about the desert that so appeals to you?' And Lawrence says: 'It's clean.' The thing about Cuba is that it's dirty. It's not clean. And the relations between the families in Miami and the families in Havana aren't clean. It's dirty. And I don't mean dirty like filthy or corrupt-although all that is there. I mean it's gray. You will go there and all your preconceptions will be upset. And if you're any kind of human being, you will allow them to be upset.

"At the Olympics, when we competed against the Russians, they were enemies. But there was something about the Cubans that American kids that I knew thought was very, very cool. And Tefilo Stevenson was that way. I didn't understand the politics of it. At that point I was a real kid. But there was something about that pride that was unmistakable. When we watched the Russians as kids, against the U.S., they were the enemy and they looked like the enemy. They were steroid-ridden, unhappy, blunt. The Cubans weren't like that. They were stylish. They were proud. They carried themselves with a feeling of love-love is sort of a strange word to use-but you knew they were tough and they were proud but you could tell that they loved what they were doing and who they were. They were proud to have the Cuban flag on their chest. And that was disconcerting because they were supposed to be the enemy, to be communist and therefore deep down hateful of their country.

"There are plenty of people in Cuba who want their system to change. I need to be as clear as possible on this. Everybody I met thought, 'We built this thing. Castro's gotta go. This has got to change and I need a better life for my child.' There's that, too. This system is bankrupt. And then there's also this embargo, which has got to stop. 'You're hurting us, you're not hurting the guy on top,' they say. So, it's all very mixed. And then at the same time, there are people who say, 'Before Castro, my father had no education, had no health care, and couldn't read. And now he can do that. There's something good about that.' I've been trained to a.s.sume that there's nothing good about the Cuban revolution. So I'm getting these mixed messages, and that's thrilling. Because it confronts me with all my preconceptions and makes me throw them out the window and start again."

For the next four and a half hours, I didn't move off my wastebasket until we both noticed out his window the sun had come up.

22.

MISADVENTURES.

I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations-one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it-you will regret both.

-Sren Kierkegaard "MALA SUERTE" WERE THE FIRST WORDS uttered by the formidable stepfather of a Cuban girl I'd fallen for, after casually placing his bishop to pin my queen right in front of my king. He removed the unlit Winston Churchill Romeo y Julieta cigar from his lips that he'd been chewing on since we'd begun playing an hour ago. He gulped the last of his mojito and refilled the gla.s.s with a bottle of mud-colored Havana Club. "Another zugzw.a.n.g. What a feo position, but with such a sensual name it's hard not to savor it."

It was the third game in a row he'd taken off me and he'd been playing for both of us every move along the way. It was an ugly feeling to be that easily toyed with, but I was a little more concerned with the interrogation about my relations.h.i.+p to his daughter Sofa that inevitably loomed.

After three years of clandestinely meeting her in hotel rooms around Toronto, on my way to or from Cuba to film the queasy doc.u.mentary on Rigondeaux I'd begun, it was the first time Sofa had invited me to her home. Thirty minutes earlier she had left us alone to talk while she grabbed some groceries for a meal she wanted to cook that evening. "See you soon, papi!" she hollered innocently from behind the front door. But after her stepfather and I instantly glared at the door to acknowledge her good-bye-and then even faster at each other-I a.s.sumed he was going to flip the table and start swinging at me. We both knew he was papi by rank while I knew, and he seemed to suspect, I was papi by s.e.xual confession.

After winning a lump sum of cash a couple weeks before in Ireland by betting on a Rigondeaux victory at twenty to one odds, I convinced Sofa to join me on my next trip to Cuba. Sofa and I were leaving the next day to visit what was left of the Havana their family had left behind ten years earlier, when she was fourteen. She'd left Cuba only a couple years younger than my mother had left communist Hungary. My mother and she had a little more in common, too. They'd both spoken up as kids in school when the Youth Communist League recruited new members to announce their belief that communism was, in fact, bulls.h.i.+t. In other words, they were both preternaturally stubborn and gutsy.

Her stepfather and I were sitting fourteen hundred miles away from Havana, huddled over a chessboard in the dining room of a small apartment in a quiet Toronto suburb. While I was struggling with another zugzw.a.n.g on the board, I knew from his daughter that he was still reeling from the life back in Cuba he'd chosen to abandon. We were in the same apartment where, his stepdaughter had told me, he had sent his wife, son, and her to live a year ahead of his arrival, a decade before.

After securing a tarjeta blanca (white card) from the government to leave the island, he'd sold on the black market their beautiful Havana family home, just down the street from the Habana Libre hotel in Vedado. He'd sold the house to finance his family's departure and look after their needs in Canada the best he could until they could gain a foothold. The plan was to give his family a head start in their new life, free of all of Cuba's crus.h.i.+ng restrictions, until he could join them. He had to wait a year after he'd sold the home to not raise any suspicions with the government and endanger any of their extended family. But when he arrived in Toronto the following year to reunite with his family, they weren't the same people he'd said good-bye to at the airport twelve months before. He couldn't recognize them from how much they'd changed adjusting to life outside Cuba. His marriage never recovered and his wife eventually left him for a man she'd met online who lived in Miami. Now his teenage son had suffered a nervous breakdown and lived with him down the street while Sofa took over the family's old apartment after graduating university, working two jobs, and living with a roommate.

"Do you mind if I smoke this?" He held up the cigar between his fingers. "It reminds me of nice things. Proust had his madeleines, we exiles have our cigars to retrieve the past."

"I don't mind." I smiled, tipping over my king.

"Gracias," the stepfather said, placing the cigar between his teeth while reaching into his pocket for an old Zippo. He made kissy-faces in my direction sucking in the flame while his eyebrows arched teasingly. "You give up so easily."

"It's pretty obvious I've brought a knife to a gunfight."

"I'm not bored." He grinned, chewing on an ice cube. "But I've been meaning to ask you since my daughter first mentioned you to me. Wife or mistress?"

"Come again?" I asked.

"Is your preference for a wife or a mistress?"

"You went easier on me with chess."

"And you left the field of the battle." He laughed. "So I'm giving chase. Sofa told me you have a wife in New York."

I nodded.

He nodded back to me, absentmindedly replenis.h.i.+ng the chessboard's rank and file.

"I must admit..." He laughed, flicking some ash off his cigar and resting his fist against his cheek with the smoke curling toward the ceiling. "I find your dynamic quite strange. Three years ago you met a Cuban boxer who told you he melted his Olympic gold medals into his mouth. Even if you made that up, if he didn't say it, he should have said it. But you've been chasing this tortured boxer around the world and to finance this pursuit, Sofa told me you've maxed out four credit cards and a line of credit to do this."

"Maybe the wife or mistress thing is a better question for her to answer," I suggested.

"Last week our family-what's left of it-watched Rigondeaux fight in Ireland on the Internet. Sofa told me you bet your last thousand dollars on him winning in the first round at twenty to one after some thugs robbed you of your camera and your footage filming him."

"Just before the fight I gave Rigondeaux my phone in the dressing room, with Sofa on the other end of the line. I wanted him to hear a friendly Cuban voice before he went out to fight."

"We were in this dining room when she spoke to him. Do you know what she told him?"

"No," I admitted. "But whatever it was, I've very rarely seen Rigondeaux smile the way he did."

"She asked him to win so she could see you. And now the proceeds from Rigondeaux's victory have given you and my daughter a trial marriage in Havana for two weeks."

I shrugged.

"I see," he said. "So, wife or mistress?"

"You first."

"An old communist joke has Marx, Engels, and Lenin asked their preference. Marx immediately said, 'Wife.' Engels countered, 'Mistress.' Lenin answered, 'Both.' Like you have chosen."

"Why did he choose both?" I asked.

"Because he wanted them to know about each other. That way he'd be free to spend more time learning."

"One more game before Sofa gets back?"

"Of course." He reached over and held his p.a.w.n suspended over the board. "You're following one of Fidel's p.a.w.ns with Rigondeaux, aren't you? This boxer trying to escape Cuba in a smuggler's boat and make it in professional boxing has more in common with a p.a.w.n than at first glance, doesn't he? p.a.w.ns are the only pieces on the board that can't go backwards."

"That's true," I agreed.

"But they're also the only pieces on the board that, if they can make it all the way to the final row of the enemy's side, can transform into something more powerful. All the boxers and athletes of tomorrow must be tuned into radio bemba to see how he does. I'm sure Castro's traitor is Cuba's martyr for most people."

"He's already won a world t.i.tle and made some serious money. He might earn a million dollars within the next year or so. As his life and career keep unfolding, I'm trying to explore if leaving his whole life behind was worth it."

"Stories are like s.e.xuality." He grinned mischievously. "All that matters is the flammability. Whatever the tale is-moral or immoral, tragic or farce, ambiguous or black-and-white-the potency is all in how hot it burns. How hot does this Cuban stranger's story burn for you?"

"Well," I said. "I'm bringing all the footage I've shot with Rigondeaux to his family so they can see him for the first time since he left. If they'll speak to me and I'm not arrested interviewing them, I'll take that footage back to Rigondeaux in Miami."

"So answer my question," he persisted.

"Maybe I reject the premise of the question."

"All the precious things we have in life are fragile. We'll lose them all one way or another soon enough. Sometimes we'll lose them for the right reasons, often for the wrong reasons, and occasionally for no reason. Whatever you intentions are, I think you appreciate how precious my daughter is."

"Yes."

"I tried to save my family from the suffering we endured in Cuba by bringing them here." He swept a hand across the room. "In the process I unwittingly destroyed everything I had. I lost everything I cared about. This boxer you follow confronted his own Faustian bargain abandoning his family. But like a lot of writers you remind me of a bullfrog. Do you know what a bullfrog does?"

"I don't know what a bullfrog is," I confessed.

"During mating season a bullfrog finds a pond in the swamp to sing his song to lure any females who can hear his voice. And many female bullfrogs turn into groupies the moment they hear it. But n.o.body falls for his song more deeply than himself. So much so, in fact, that he forgets the reason why he began singing in the first place."

"Sofa's a bigger romantic than I am."

"And romantics pretend they love the hopeless chase when really they're addicted to suffering. The only woman who really saw me for who I am told me that I was someone who would fall in love ten thousand times. She accepted that before she gave in to being one of those ten thousand, rather than trying to force me into being someone else by stopping with her. She didn't waste any time trying to prevent me from being who I was. I think you have the same curse and it's much uglier to see my daughter falling for this than it ever was looking in the mirror."

"Maybe if you find the right girl you don't have to fall in love with ten thousand other ones. You can just fall in love with that girl ten thousand times and you sort of fulfill the quota of the curse, no?"

"Okay." He slapped his forehead. He reached down and picked up his p.a.w.n and set it gently back down. "Bueno. Let's be civil before she gets home and return to some chess. Your move."

23.

SLIDING DOORS.

Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn't necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that's that.

-J. D. Salinger, "A Girl I Knew"

PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING I'd lined up in Havana to complete my doc.u.mentary fell apart almost immediately after we arrived. Split Decision was meant to explore all the reasons behind why Cubans remained on the island or fled, examined through the consequences endured by Cuba's heroic boxers who turned down fortunes or, like Rigondeaux, escaped. Increasingly it became clear the only story I could tell was how I couldn't tell that story. I wanted to interview as many notable Cubans and experts as I could find-artists, journalists, athletes, coaches-knowing meanwhile that all the interviews would have to be conducted illegally. There was no way to officially line anything up unless you knew the right officials to bribe. And everyone I spoke with a.s.sured me I'd have to bribe everyone who went on camera to get them to talk about how money had no value.

I wanted to shoot my footage as fast as possible and remain below the radar for as long as I could. I had an ambitious list of people to interview on camera. Banned authors like Yoani Snchez, the controversial blogger whom Time magazine had named one of the world's most influential people in 2008 and who'd interviewed Obama not long before. Yoani's blog was translated into more languages than The New York Times and she was quickly beginning to symbolize a controversial role as something akin to Cuba's Anne Frank.

I wanted Tefilo Stevenson to talk about his role in the revolution and Rigondeaux's "betrayal," which he'd ultimately spoken out in defense of. If Stevenson and Felix Savn represented Cuba's past, and if Rigondeaux's story was emblematic of its present, a young teenage boxer named Cristian Martnez caught my eye as someone representing the future. He'd starred in a doc.u.mentary about elite young boxers on the island called Sons of Cuba, and many people viewed him as the next great boxer emerging to a.s.sume Rigondeaux's abdicated role as Cuba's dominant champion. Sons of Cuba was the first film for which foreign filmmakers were allowed into La Finca, the elite boxing academy where all of Cuba's great champions had trained.

Last, if at all possible, I wanted to interview Rigondeaux's wife and children: the collateral damage. Even knocking on their front door represented crossing a Rubicon. Or worse. An American, Alan Gross, had just been imprisoned for illegally working as a covert U.S. operative supplying satellite equipment to people on the island.

After we drove to meet Sofa's grandparents near Playa del Este and unloaded all the supplies we'd brought, I went over to the Habana Libre to check on the status of the people I wanted to meet and discovered nearly all of them were spooked about the risks and asked that I make no effort to contact them again. At the other hotels around Havana where I'd arranged to discuss the possibility of other interviews, I was stood up by every contact I'd had lined up through journalists in New York. Cars began to drive past with strangers smirking and pointing up at the cameras hanging over the streets, heightening my paranoia. My desperation still had a step on my fear, but it was pretty evident that things were falling apart.

"Beeeg brother eez watching, gringo," I was warned by the people renting me the apartment in Centro Habana, where Sofa and I were staying. "Welcome to Hotel California! Leezon to Mr. Henley's words. 'Check owwd aanee time bhat joo can never leave...."

Any country takes on a sinister hue once Don Henley's lyrics begin to carry any significance.

I made more calls around Havana to sort out something-anything-and salvage the two months I had already committed to being there. I'd borrowed a lot of money and maxed out every credit card and line of credit I had, and the only way out of bankruptcy was getting a story.

My att.i.tude at that point was that my debts were an a.s.set, because anybody else chasing after this story with a budget would steer clear. Bad cards or not, I was all in. Pretty soon the warnings I received from the people who were renting me the apartment escalated to begging on the lives of their children that I cease anything that could get their families in trouble. Everyone was petrified to talk about anything related to Rigondeaux or other defected fighters. "You're on your own," I was told repeatedly.

I heard the same things over and over: Security knows everything. Taps the phone. Checks your e-mails. Talks to your neighbor. When your boxer tried to defect, Castro wrote about Rigondeaux himself. This is not a man to ask questions about. Officially he is a traitor. Surveillance had escalated since Castro had stepped down from power. Cameras were on most of the street corners now across the entire city. More uniformed police. More secret police. The CDR on every block had stepped up their vigilance. More informants. The government was clamping down on everything, especially an issue as touchy as defecting athletes. Leave this situation alone. You can leave. We cannot. We live with the consequences of your actions. If you are not careful you will not leave or ever be able to come back.

After I went back to Playa del Este to pick Sofa up, the time with her grandparents had left her sealed off. They were two sweet people who lived in a small apartment after they'd traded in their house in Havana for two apartments in this suburb. Relatives lived in their other place. Sofa's grandfather had been a wealthy man who managed three sugar refineries that were all seized by the rebels. A couple of strokes had left his speech very limited, but he was open to talking about the circ.u.mstances of the complete overhaul that his life and country underwent during that time. He acknowledged the many struggles and missteps of the government's maneuvers.

When he touched on the impact of the U.S. blockade he was nuanced and explored it from several sides. The Cuban American vote in Florida had largely been responsible for the results of both of George W. Bush's elections, while Castro had a scapegoat for his own blunders, he said. He had no bitterness about losing his own station in life prerevolution in exchange for the improvements he saw for so many others from how life had been pre-Castro. "Do you really imagine the Cuban people would hand over the wheel of our country and abandon our whole socioeconomic system to a pack of bearded kids if all the greed, corruption, and unspeakable cruelty hadn't made life in this country a living h.e.l.l for millions of our citizens? Castro was created by those conditions. The new generation never saw what was before. Those who did are dying off."

After we left and headed back to Havana, Sofa was very quiet in the car. She stared out the window at the sea and finally shook her head. "After they're gone I'll never come back here. I hate returning to Havana more each time. It only reminds me I don't belong here any more than I do where I live now. All of my beautiful memories just rot away while I'm in Toronto, but here the stench makes me sick. I'll never ever come back after they die."

This was the backdrop of our trial-run honeymoon from h.e.l.l.

While the rest of the world's attention had turned to the struggle against dictators in Syria, Egypt, and Libya, Sofa and I landed in Havana just as the celebrations on behalf of the fiftieth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs failed invasion were picking up steam. As a tidal wave of antigovernment protests swept the Middle East, Havana was caught in some kind of bizarro Fourth of July, collectively celebrating their greatest victory against imperialism and their maximum leader outliving ten U.S. presidents and counting.

I brought a camera along and we marched with the ma.s.ses. It was a weird and convoluted mix of the deadweight of so many other things Cubans had endured along with that half-century's opposition to the United States. But along with all the mandated hypocritical bulls.h.i.+t summed up on billboards proclaiming it was all VAMOS BIEN!, thousands more people were lost in their pride like kites blown out of their souls scratching the sky. It was like being on the field for the Super Bowl with a hundred thousand players from one team. In between the little flags, blown whistles, and chants, I saw faces bracing all around me, struggling against an unknown future and turbulent past to create a spectrum of emotions that spanned from panic to exhaustion. The surreal spectacle was held in the Plaza de la Revolucin with Russian MiG fighter jets straight out of Top Gun soaring through the clouds and scaring the h.e.l.l out of a flock of vultures circling over our heads. Hundreds of thousands of habaneros took buses, hitchhiked, biked, or simply walked out their front doors and struck out across the city on foot to join the crowd in the square.

Once we got near the Plaza, thousands of immaculate, olive-uniformed and white-gloved soldiers marched in formation, row after row, with rocket-propelled grenade launchers slung over their shoulders. Behind them dozens of military trucks with forty red-tipped rocket payloads drove next to other bulky vehicles rumbling by, with .50 caliber cannons and gleaming tanks bringing up the rear. The huge building-high stencils of Che and the newly built Camilo Cienfuegos stared down over another procession of soldiers following the last pack, with automatic Russian guns held against their chests. Framing the festivities were hundreds of silhouetted citizens on the roofs of the various ministry buildings enclosing the square, waving diaphanous Cuban flags against the sky. Then the navy marched into view with their rounded hats and bayonet-tipped rifles pointed up at the sky. Far off, we could see Ral Castro waving a beach hat in front of the Jose Mart monument surrounded by other government heads. Fidel's name was chanted and posters featuring his face at various ages were held aloft. Some Cuban troops fired a cannon while the fighter jets made another pa.s.s over the throngs.

As we got closer to the crowds, Sofa and I were jammed in against everybody like a packed s...o...b..ll. We saw a procession of schoolchildren in their colorful uniforms wave their scarves over their heads as a replica of the Granma, the leaky boat that brought eighty-two revolutionaries to the island, was pulled on a float behind them. The kids, as usual, caught my attention because innocence in Cuba does not resemble the Disneyfied kind that I was accustomed to back home. Cuban childhood has its own intricate character and coding. Fidel was welcomed by the children as a kind of cute grandfather figure compared with the hyperpaternalistic view their parents always seemed to have of him, whether they loved or hated him.

As we slowly churned toward the bottleneck of the main procession, with hundreds of home-painted placards held high-VICTORIA O MUERTE! and SOCIALISMO! and VIVA FIDEL! and VAMOS BIEN!-next to Camilo's smiling face, Sofa leaned over to me in the crush of the parade. She had been seething through all of this.

"Why did we come here, Brinicito? This is f.u.c.king excruciating. They're just doing this to pretend that if Cuba can stand up to the United States it can deal with how much worse life is about to get after Ral lays off a million government workers. Everybody's only here because 80 percent of them work for the government! They have to come here. It's the same old bulls.h.i.+t, scapegoating the U.S. for all our problems. It makes me sick to my stomach. Over fifty f.u.c.king years to turn one page from this same comic book they offer us. Let's get out of here. I've had enough of all of this to last a lifetime. Please, I can't be here anymore."

After Ral waved his hat over us from a platform surrounded by his entourage of stooped yet supremely powerful political old men, Sofa yanked me out of the parade and dragged me down a nearby side street where someone just turned a pickup truck's engine. Another person waved us over to the bed of the truck and we climbed in and sat alongside a dozen Cubans eager to get back home after perfunctorily paying their dues at the great celebration.

After being rebuked for trying to console her, I sat holding Sofa's hand while everyone in the back of the truck took turns bemoaning their flawed country with as many jokes as earnest complaints. Despite looking furious for the same reasons as everyone else in the truck, I noticed that Sofa didn't bother to chime in or partic.i.p.ate in the grousing. Nursing her own grudge brought on an agitation in her that was so overwhelming none of the people around us even tried to cheer her up with a joke. As much as was possible crammed into the bed of the truck, the others stayed clear. Instead they looked at me apologetically while Sofa closed her eyes and breathed heavily as the wind played with her hair. Without her having to say a word, they knew she'd endured what they had, but they also mysteriously determined she wasn't staying long.

We drove back into town down a long, hilly street with the sidewalks mostly empty. I was trying to think of a place we could go to cheer Sofa up. Havana was all but abandoned, even more of a city of ruins than usual for the next few hours. We'd have the Hotel Nacional to ourselves for a drink or the Museo del Chocolate without the forty-five-minute wait to get in next to an open sewer or Coppelia for an ice cream. Maybe hitchhike out to Playa del Este on a deserted section of beach, with the tropical water and sand so bright it was almost neon. But one look at Sofa's sullen face and it was obvious that I was to leave her alone for the rest of the drive in.

Like most of the Cubans on the flight over, Sofa had brought a huge amount of supplies to deliver to her grandparents and extended family: medicine, a walker for her grandfather who'd just suffered a stroke, vitamins, toothpaste, foot cream, tampons, an mp3 player, soap, and a slew of other basic necessities well beyond the reach of average citizens. Sofa had been ha.s.sled by customs officials, being forced to explain and then defend each item, as with many other Cubans returning home to help their families. It was clear that she'd been through the routine so many times already that the only emotion she had left was disgust. She told me after we got in the cab outside Jose Mart Airport that once her family had raised enough money to survive in Canada, all their resources went toward sending Sofa back to the island to deliver what they could provide back home to family members buried by increasing needs as things continued to deteriorate in Cuban daily life.

From the beginning, unlike most Cubans I'd met who had defected or found other means of leaving, for Sofa nostalgia for anything relating to home repulsed her. Her sentimentality was reserved only for the decidedly unsentimental stories she'd left behind. Mainly stuff she trotted out to demonstrate how elusive she was from my grasp and best to keep at a distance.

The first time I met her in a Toronto hotel lobby on King Street, she'd laughed in my face before confirming to herself the suspicion that she'd had since we'd begun writing each other: that she was completely out of my league. She announced this finding at such volume that most of the hotel staff took my measure and nodded agreement. Naturally, any hopes I had collapsed on the spot and I a.s.sumed at any second she would turn around and disappear forever, all with the indifference one might bring to throwing away trash. "Listen, Gypsy, maybe we can just grab a drink first since you came all this way, but don't get any ideas...."

Some snow was falling outside and clung to her hair and jacket collar, and the rest of her looked like some tropical princess. Before she'd left Cuba, all her life she'd wanted to see the snow, and on the day she finally arrived to Canada, Toronto was under siege, battling a blizzard. She'd traded one excruciating extreme for another, and that was before she had enough English to contrast Cuban men with their Canadian equivalents. Leaving home as a teenager, Cuba was like a bear trap where the only means of escape required amputating vital portions of her soul. Food and music were the only safe areas to remain connected. Everything else seemed to bring into focus how the two worlds she straddled had left her life completely off-balance. And because our meetings after this one had all been restricted to fleeting marathon f.u.c.kfests around Toronto-behind the backs of our respective partners-there was always a kind of wartime urgency compounded by a tacit prohibition of talking about the past or the future. Last Tango in Paris was for both of us a favorite movie, and so we re-created our own version in my home country each time I departed for her hometown.

But the good-byes were rigged with all kinds of explosives. The moment I'd raise the prospect of seeing her again she'd pull up her drawbridge and dig a moat around herself, informing me we'd never see each other again. "We'd only make ourselves miserable anyway," she'd sneer. So I stopped asking permission and continued to lay over in Toronto for a few days every time I went to Havana with the express purpose of ambus.h.i.+ng her. The more secure a setup she had with a man, the easier it was to entice betrayal.

Back in Havana Sofa finally smiled. "I know where I want you to take me," Sofa said. "Let's get off the truck and grab another car."

"Where do you wanna go?"

"Quinta Avenida. Let's go to Miramar and you can f.u.c.k this sadness out of me at Parque de los Ahogados. I'm tired of feeling grumpy. It's my favorite park and where I lost my virginity. While you f.u.c.k me I'll think about him." She smiled.

"Hold on, I'm still stuck on ahogados. Park of the hanged?"