The Domino Diaries Part 2

-Vladimir Nabokov MY HOMETOWN HAD BREEZES it treated like hurricanes; Havana had hurricanes it treated like breezes.

In 1492, Columbus first described looking upon Cuba as "the most beautiful land that eyes ever beheld." On the way over, Columbus was the first man from the Old World to record an encounter with a hurricane. The very word "hurricane" was invented by the native Taino population of Cuba as the name of a deity they feared and sought to soothe, Hurakan. Soon enough Columbus and the Spanish were convinced the worsening hurricanes they endured in Cuba were their Christian G.o.d's curse for their overwhelming cruelty against the island's inhabitants.

After all those Tyson biographies, The Old Man and the Sea was the first novel I ever read. It introduced me to Cuba. I was fifteen and the first keyholes I peeked through toward the island were Ernest Hemingway's novelization of his twenty years there, the enigma of Cuban boxers who casually rejected offers of vast fortunes from American promoters, and Cuba's courage to stand up to the most powerful nation on earth (Fidel was actually carrying Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls looking for pointers on guerrilla warfare while he was up in the Sierra Maestra mountains during the revolution). These entry points to Cuba were like the Pyramids, but what loomed like the sphinx was the character of the people themselves.

Why had Hemingway-one of America's most beloved writers-spent the last third of his life on the island and declared himself a Cuban? Why, in 1976, when America offered Cuba's greatest boxer, Tefilo Stevenson, five million dollars to leave Cuba and fight Muhammad Ali, had Stevenson turned the tables and instead asked of the offer itself, "What is one million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans?" And why would anyone want to resist America, let alone wish to a.s.sume the role of David against a Goliath only ninety miles away?

Before I ever set foot on Cuban sh.o.r.es, I wondered what Shakespeare might have done with Fidel Castro and his cursed treasure chest of an island Columbus had tried to plunder, along with all the other intruders ever since. And then an hour later after my first visit in 2000, when I was only twenty, it became clear that the better question was what Fidel Castro and Cuba would have done with Shakespeare. Everywhere I looked, I was confronted with the same question: Who would believe this society ever existed in the first place, let alone for this long?

During my first week in Havana, I took a gypsy cab over to Cojimar and tracked down Gregorio Fuentes, the still living 103-year-old model for Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. I asked him, "If Hemingway wrote about every other war he'd chased after around the world, why not the revolution going on in his backyard?" Gregorio shrugged and took a puff from his cigar. "He liked boxing. Maybe Hemingway's knowledge of boxing taught him enough to know to punch your weight." He smiled. As for a hero like Tefilo Stevenson turning down all that money to leave, on my final trip to Cuba, eleven years after my first visit, Stevenson reluctantly granted me the last filmed interview of his life before his sudden death a year later, in 2012. When the Miami Herald ran a front-page feature about that interview, in which Stevenson asking me for a hundred dollars in return for our session somehow overshadowed all the millions he'd turned down during his career, it cost me my ability to ever return to an island I love and greatly admire. I'd handed ammunition to a lot of enemies of the Cuban government by exposing one of its idols. And over half a century after Fidel Castro seemed to be taking a joyride on the t.i.tanic, dedicating his life to opposing America, with the latest banking collapse, suddenly our unsinkable s.h.i.+p of capitalism was taking on water with a limited supply of lifeboats to go around. Maybe with The Old Man and the Sea, a lovingly told story embracing the haunting beauty found in certain failed journeys, Hemingway spoke with equal truth to both sides of the ninety miles separating his adoptive home and his native country.

The first thing that happens when you arrive in Havana is you feel your heart's watch resisting your mind's clock about what time it is. The Cuban poet Dulce Mara Loynaz once described the shape of her island as "like the drawn bow an invisible archer raises in the shadows, aimed at our hearts." I was warned like all visitors that books were banned in Cuba. This had the unintended consequence, at least for me, of redoubling my desire to go to a place where books were still that powerful. No matter what was written in a book in most places in the modern world, who would think to waste their time banning it? It was hard enough getting people unplugged for long enough to read, let alone care enough to rally against one. When the revolution triumphed, four out of five soldiers who marched into Havana with Fidel were illiterate. Forty years later, when I arrived in 2000, the city boasted one of the highest literacy rates in the world.

Havana is a city of bright lights and dark corners I explored as much as I could, on and off, for twelve years. It's very difficult to see anything clearly for long. It never seems to finish what it has to say, and part of its essential mystery and beauty is how you always come away missing something.

6.

HUNGARIAN JOKES.

The formula "two and two make five" is not without its attractions.

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky MY INTRODUCTION TO CUBA came in the form of the punch line of a Hungarian joke my grandfather left behind for me after his death. We'd never talked much, but in the last decade before his death we hadn't spoken at all. I lost someone I never really had. Then, after my mother gave me some photographs from his youth and an old cigarette tin from his mandatory service in the Hungarian army, my feelings for him started to change. My mother saved the biggest surprise for the breakfast table not long after he died. She wanted to use what little money he had left her to send me to Cuba.

As far as I can tell, most Hungarian jokes have two central objectives: making you laugh to avoid crying or crying your way into laughter. Alcoholism and suicide rates among Hungarians are some of the highest in the world (and my own family did their part to chip in on both fronts), so perhaps this is to be expected. My deepest connection to my grandfather is through the Hungarian minor chord in music. The composers Bela Bartk and Erik Satie favored the Hungarian minor chord in some of their compositions, whereas most composers avoided it, because too many listeners found the unresolved nature of the melody simply too haunting. Any untrained ear can decipher whether most melodies are happy or sad, but the Hungarian minor chord conjures an ambiguity that leaves you off-balance and unsettled, much like a Hungarian joke.

My grandfather escaped Hungary in 1956 as a refugee while Russian tanks were rolling down the streets outside his family's apartment. One of my mother's first childhood memories was seeing the tanks outside her window. While in Canada, he sent back whatever money he could to support his family and saved in order to bring his family over with him. It was always his intention to reunite with his wife and two children. It didn't work out that way. The distance was too much and finally both my grandparents moved on with their lives and divorced six years after his escape. My grandmother met the love of her life while my grandfather never truly recovered.

My uncle was caught trying to escape Hungary and was sent back, but my mother succeeded ten years after my grandfather's escape and followed him to Canada. At sixteen she reunited with my grandfather but he was a changed man, a drinker, hardened and abusive. She tried to take off three times before she finally got away. That same year she became pregnant with my brother, and married the father. Almost as soon as she gave birth, she was pregnant again. Seven months after giving birth to her second child, he died from crib death. Things kind of spiraled out of control for her after that, until she found G.o.d. My grandfather never reached out with any help during that time. She had another child from an affair two years later that ended her first marriage. From then on my mother and brothers lived in the projects while she supported her family on welfare and odd jobs she could get cleaning houses or working with the elderly.

My grandfather, at least while I knew him, was a grumbling, unhappy, standoffish man fastened to the portable whipping post of regret. He shared my mother's enormous pale blue eyes but lacked the kindness and generosity that kept hers lit up. My favorite story my mother told about him centered on a wedding he attended after he divorced my grandmother. He'd fallen in love with a woman already engaged to someone else. After failing to persuade her against the marriage, he showed up at the wedding and hanged himself in revenge during the ceremony. In the banquet hall, my grandfather swayed for two minutes from the noose before anyone was able to cut him down. He spent the next fifty-six days in a coma.

In his old age, my grandfather expected his family to reach out to him, but I could never find much about him to justify bothering. After about the age of ten, we stopped communicating altogether and the last time I ever saw him was when I visited him in the hospital a few days before his death, not long after his eightieth and my twentieth birthday. He'd had a stroke and could no longer communicate verbally. I couldn't get past the doorway to his room as he lay there staring at me.

During the last year of his life, the only times I heard his voice were when he would sing Hungarian and Gypsy folk songs on my mother's answering machine. It was such an uncharacteristically sweet, warm act that I wasn't even sure how to approach asking my mother why he'd begun regularly doing it. My mother visited him at the hospital as often as she could in the last days of his life. There were silly, petty issues with his will where the obvious desire he'd had to look after his two children was complicated by fears of being exploited. He didn't have much money in the first place, yet his wish to offer something to my mother was botched at the end, and she never complained despite always having financial constraints herself. She laughed about how typical it was of him.

She invited me for a palacsinta (Hungarian crepes) breakfast a few months after he died.

"Darrrrling," she began in her Count Chocula accent, as I braced myself.

Our breakfast table had always been a dangerous place for me. When I was eight, after having watched her light a candle on the anniversary of my dead brother's birthday, I asked over palacsinta how anyone could possibly get over the death of a child.

"Well, darrrrling," she smiled, "your mother lost the will to live."

I stopped sc.r.a.ping jam over the pancake.

"I couldn't feel anyt'ing. The only place I could feel anything was tw'oo s.e.x. Not making love. Just s.e.x. s.e.x was the only t'ing that made me feel like a human being."

"s.e.x?"

"s.e.x was the only t'ing, Bwinny."

The week before we'd clarified that s.e.x, making love, and f.u.c.king were three entirely different things. But it would be another year before I'd seek clarification on which of the distinctly different, obviously designated holes one was supposed to use when seeking to lose one's virginity. Was it insulting to ask for the "f.u.c.k hole" or "s.e.x hole" with a girl? Did all women expect their first time to be through the "making love hole"? If you lost your virginity to someone who'd already lost theirs, was it insulting to ask for the "making love hole"?

"s.e.x?" I repeated.

"You asked me so I'm telling you."

"You were still with the husband before daddy?"

"No." She smiled. "T'ank G.o.d I was free of dat."

"So you were with daddy?"

"No. Dis is before I met your fadder."

"Okay."

"Let me have some of your jam if you're not using it."

Little was functioning inside me as I contemplated what she was telling me.

"s.e.x was the only thing that helped you to feel alive?"

"Yes," she said, fiendishly jamming her knife into the jar of strawberry jam. "s.e.x was the only t'ing. So every weekend I went to discos and I watched very carefully for the best dancer and I went over to dance. Then after, I would go home with them and we would have s.e.x. On Sat.u.r.day and Sunday, every week, for an entire year this is what your mother had to do to find any reason to live."

Multiplication was part of the curriculum that year and, while not having memorized the times tables, I felt confident I had easily gleaned enough to comfortably handle this one. Fifty-two weeks, times two of the best dancers in these clubs every week, equals ...

"You slept with two thousand men in one year?"

"Around a hundred, I would say. But then I got much better just before I met your fadder."

Four years later, at the same table, pancakes steaming on the plate, she brought up the s.e.xual education pamphlet I'd brought home from school the day before.

"Bwinny, I read what you brought home. We have always been open with each other, right?"

"Yep."

"Have you ever woken up with the sheets moist? I don't mean pee."

"I don't think so."

"You have never had an or-gasm? You know what dat is, right?"

"I don't think I have."

"It might happen soon. All I vant to say, it's very, very normal."

"How old were you when you had your first one?" I asked her.

"I was eleven. In Budapest they have a beautiful park called Margaret Island. Very beautiful place in the summer. I was dere one summer afternoon and saw an old man feeding birds on zee park bench. All the birds were so happy and some flew into his hand to eat the birdseed. So I sat down across from him and asked for some birdseed."

"Mom," I interrupted. "What the h.e.l.l does this have to do with your first o.r.g.a.s.m?"

"I tell you. Zee old man was very kind and asked me to cup my hands and reach over so he could give me some seed. I did and he gave me some and then I started to feed zee birds. But zen zee old man did an interesting t'ing. First he put down the birdseed. Then he came over close to me on zee bench. Then as I kept feeding the happy little birds he reached down and put his hand slowly up my dress and he was touching me."

"Mom."

"Let me finish the story. You asked, so I am telling you this story."

"I don't want to hear this story."

"He was touching me there right on the bench and I had never felt deez sensation in my life. I wasn't scared or hurt, I was confused. But I didn't say anything or do anything. I just felt this new sensation building and building until, finally, an amazing thing happened. And at that exact moment, this very old man took his hand away, grabbed his birdseed, and walked off."

"Your first o.r.g.a.s.m was from being molested by an old man on a park bench?"

"It's true."

"Something like this would scar a woman for life, wouldn't it?"

"Why? He gave me pleasure and I was never hurt. I t'ink it's interesting. Someone else can have it mean somet'ing else. I won't argue with them, they shouldn't waste time arguing with me."

When I mentioned this story to my father, he ventured that my mother had been denied the kind of love she needed in her childhood. And maybe that desperation was why she was willing to take such risks in finding it, even from this stranger's touch. My father always nursed a grudge against my mother's dad that I adopted very early on. It ended one day after I was back at the breakfast table after my grandfather's death.

"My father and you never had much closeness. I'm sorry for dat. For both of you. He was better than I think you realize."

"I don't know." I shrugged.

"I have a silly question." My mother smiled. "If you could go anywhere in the world. Where do you think you would go?"

I'd just finished reading The Old Man and the Sea and a teacher at school had told me that Hemingway's captain and friend from the story was still alive and kicking at 103 years old in Cojimar, the same town as in the story.

"Cuba," I told her.

"Why Cuba?"

"To find a boxing trainer and to meet the guy from The Old Man and the Sea."

"Okay, then today your grandfather is sending you to Cuba. He didn't leave much, but there's enough to buy you a ticket. I think he would enjoy giving you this present. So you will have to look up many of my friends in Havana."

"You have friends in Cuba?"

"Don't be ridiculous. Of course I do."

"I've never heard you mention knowing anybody in Cuba."

"That's because I haven't met them yet. But they're there. You'll see, darling."

7.

VALET PARKING.

It is well known that curious men go prying into all sorts of places (where they have no business) and come out of them with all sorts of spoil. This story [Heart of Darkness], and one other ... are all the spoil I brought out from Africa, where, really, I had no sort of business.

-Joseph Conrad A WOMAN SITTING next to me on my first plane ride to Havana was underlining an entire pa.s.sage from a story she was reading, La causa que refresca (A Cause for All Seasons) by Jose Miguel Snchez. The story was about a Cuban male prost.i.tute waiting at the airport for a tourist he would spend the next six weeks with. After reading just the first few sentences over this woman's shoulder, I asked if I could copy it into my notebook: I'm only a guide, but I'm like a priest in a way.... I absolve you, but I leave you with just enough guilt so that you will come back soon to this Cuba, which lies behind the picture postcards, to this game of masks that we play, and you play, too.... I absolve you and rekindle in your heart your faith in the cause, a cause for six weeks of the year of Latin love and forbidden fruits, of s.e.x and idealism. A safe and cozy cause. Easy to carry around. A cause for all seasons.

The philosopher Slavoj iek once said that fantasy is for those who can't cope with reality, while reality is for those who can't cope with their fantasies. I've gone back and forth my entire life about which, between the two, really triggers the more lasting damage. Some people are homesick the moment they leave their front door, others are homesick from birth for a place they can never find. Some girls enjoy the walk to a new boy's house more than they will ever enjoy the boy himself.

My first trip to Havana was in February of 2000, right in the middle of the Elin Gonzlez fiasco. As with everything about Cuba, n.o.body could agree on anything. And now, what the press referred to as "political kiddie p.o.r.n" had entered into a Cuban civil war fought across ninety miles of ocean. What was portrayed as a custody case by some (and a kidnapping by others) became an existential crisis for millions of Cubans on both sides of the issue. With Elin's story, millions of Cubans saw their own family's breakup writ large.

At the age of five, Elin Gonzlez and his mother, along with twelve other pa.s.sengers, had fled Cuba on a small aluminum boat. The boat's faulty engine gave out after they encountered a storm while attempting to cross the Straits of Florida. Only Elin and two other pa.s.sengers managed to survive the journey. Elin's mother died-heroically, some in America said-trying to save her son from the horrors of a life in Cuba. To allow any child to live under Castro's rule in Cuba was tantamount to child abuse, is what seemed to be implied. The survivors were discovered floating at sea by two fishermen. The fishermen handed the survivors over to the U.S. Coast Guard and all h.e.l.l broke loose in Miami and Cuba. It turned out Elin's mother had taken Elin from the boy's father in Cuba, without his knowledge, let alone permission. After some negotiation at the highest levels of government in the United States and Cuba, Elin would be sent back. The young boy became yet another feather in the cap for Fidel against the United States.

For my own research, I was reading Pitching Around Fidel: A Journey into the Heart of Cuban Sports by S. L. Price. Price's book was the most current, in-depth breakdown of Cuba's enigmatic powerhouse sports machine. I wanted to learn how to locate boxers and how to properly approach them to see if any would be willing to teach me. I had no idea how to handle negotiation in Cuba or what the risks involved were. But I'd read that the black market economy in Cuba eclipsed its official economy. In the book, Price details how each elite athlete he profiled encountered the same hopelessly impossible decision to stay or leave as every other Cuban on the island, only with a lot more money at stake if they managed to escape. Whereas Tefilo Stevenson had rejected five million dollars in the 1970s to fight Muhammad Ali, the going rate offered to Felix Savn, Cuba's latest heavyweight destroyer, was in the neighborhood of twenty million, to defect to America and fight Mike Tyson. Even the act of writing a book exploring the ambiguity of the choice involved had caused Price to be banned from ever returning to Cuba. "You have penetrated an impenetrable system," he was told by security agents. The bombsh.e.l.l of the book was a Cuban boxer, Hector Vinent, a two-time Olympic champion, confessing to Price his desire to escape. No Cuban athlete, in Cuba, had ever confessed such a thing on the record before. Yet Vinent never managed to escape. He was punished before he'd ever had a chance to try. Vinent only wished to leave Cuba after the government had banned him from boxing for the rest of his life. Price's book didn't say what became of Vinent, whether he remained in Havana or had returned to be with his family in Santiago de Cuba in the east of the island. If Vinent was living in Havana as I flew over, he was twenty-eight, and my guess was he could probably use some extra money training me at a local gym. It was as good a place as any to learn about his island, too.

My mother's prediction about friends I hadn't met yet came true before the plane ride was over. Across the aisle from me a middle-aged Latino, wearing reading gla.s.ses that kept falling off his nose, was devouring pages from For Whom the Bell Tolls nearly as fast as the rum and c.o.kes he was ordering. I noticed his hands were getting steadier with each sip of alcohol. There was a casual sense of doom about him that intrigued me. He was ordering rounds for the three people sitting next to him as if they were his friends, and then drinking them all himself. I've always spooked pretty easily around heavy drinkers. They tend to hold up a mirror that I have difficulty turning away from. And this guy was getting steadier the more he drank, not sloppier. In his novel Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry describes this sensation as "the shakes of too little and the abyss of too much." As I looked across the aisle and tried not to think about the stranger who epitomized this, he smiled at me.

"You don't even seem drunk," I said.

"Drunk?" He held up his empty gla.s.s. "Why would I be drunk? This isn't drinking. I'm in training." He reached up and pushed the b.u.t.ton for the flight attendant again. When she arrived he ordered another round. "My name is Alfonso."

"I'm Brin. You're Cuban?"

"No Brinicito, I'm Guatemalan, but I've divided my time evenly between Havana and Toronto for many years now. I need to get off this f.u.c.king plane and get something to drink."

Alfonso wasn't kidding. His cirrhosis, I'd find out later, was pretty far along already and his drinking on the plane was small potatoes compared to after we'd landed. After the flight attendant cut him off he asked me to start ordering drinks and pa.s.s them over to him.

"What are you looking for in Havana?" he asked me. "A girl?"

"I'd like to meet some of their best boxers and see if I can get some training and maybe meet the guy from The Old Man and the Sea. I heard he's still alive over there."

"Gregorio Fuentes! I'm reading Hemingway now. I love that America's favorite writer is even more popular in his adoptive 'state sponsor of terror' home in Cuba. I mean the moment he had to go back to America he blew his brains out! But Gregorio is still there. Gregorio is a national treasure. You'll love him. And you have the best boxers in the world to see over there and get to know. Cuba is a wet dream as much as it's a nightmare. That's why America has always been so obsessed with it."

"Can you hire any of these Olympic boxers to train you? Is that done?"

"That's easy. With a little money and perseverance anything is available to you in Havana if you know the right people. Heroes are for sale everywhere, but in Havana heroes make twenty dollars a month. You know anyone for that?"

"I don't know a soul over there."