The Domino Diaries Part 5

We shared an uneasy silence for a moment or two.

"I could pick you up after your training. My friend, I know some great girls I could introduce you to. Any color you like. I have a business card."

He conducted a frantic search of the vehicle before he produced the business card, but he was clearly quite proud of it once he straightened out the wrinkles with the side of his hand against the dash.

"Thank you."

"My friend, I like to drink Hatuey beer. I once drank a beer with Ernest Hemingway in San Francisco de Paula when I was a boy. Do you like our beer?"

"I don't drink."

"My father was an alcoholic, too." He winked. "But you get over it eventually. Let me tell you a story about my favorite beer. When the Spanish first came here an Indian chief named Hatuey sailed from Hispaniola to warn the people. The resistance was brave but it wasn't much. Hatuey was burned at the stake. Just before they burned him they offered him a last-minute conversion so he could enter heaven. Hatuey asked whether there were any Christians in heaven. After they a.s.sured him that there certainly were, he told them he'd rather go to h.e.l.l than anywhere where there were people as cruel as the Spaniards. In Gringolandia Pocahontas was a little friendlier when John Smith arrived. Maybe all there is in this world is underdogs and wh.o.r.es."

"They named your beer after this person?"

"Can you imagine a greater honor to bestow?"

The silence went by a little smoother this time.

"My friend, I can introduce you to some very nice, clean girls."

"My schedule is a little booked. I have a backlog of about 4,500 'very nice, clean girls' I already have to meet."

"You haven't seen my girls. You have my business card."

My boxing gym, Rafael Trejo, was located in what was once the cheapest red light district in the city, only a few minutes' walk from Jose Mart's childhood home, now converted into a museum. One of the largest funeral processions in Cuban history was for the notorious pimp Yarini Ponce de Len, who was shot in a duel in the area.

These days most of the prost.i.tution in the city is run, curiously, by cab drivers. Right after the revolution they reformed most of the prost.i.tutes into cab drivers. Job reorientation. Now cab drivers are mostly composed of lawyers and doctors looking to scrounge enough tourist dollars to cover the basic needs of their family that their wages as professionals can't accomplish.

About the only thing you can trust in this neighborhood is that nothing is trustworthy to an outsider. I had my boxing gloves hanging off my bag and some of the small kids joyously raised their fists at me while their older siblings eyed my belongings. The neighborhood was a maze of narrow streets closely monitored by thieves. I figured if I was going to be pa.s.sing through on a daily basis for appointments at the gym, I might as well just accept being robbed soon enough and probably with the use of a blade of some kind. All I brought with me was the money I owed Hector and my gloves and skipping rope, as I didn't want to enter this place with suspicion or even caution. I elected to give into whatever toll the neighborhood expected from me and just said h.e.l.lo to anyone who looked me in the eyes no matter who they were. While, as anyone, I've never enjoyed being played for a sucker, I also can't remember experiencing anything worthwhile without trust regardless of how little trust was warranted. Trusting the world is a risk, while not trusting it is a guarantee you'll be left with nothing.

Trejo is one of the oldest boxing gyms in Cuba; it's outdoor, and every great champion the country has produced has pa.s.sed through and was forged in the open air. Different sets of the same mildly sinister women who look like the Macbeth witches guard the entrance from tourists and procure a toll for entry, snapshots, or stories. The witches rest their chairs against a wall of photographs under portraits of great world or Olympic champions who spent time staining Trejo's lone ring with their blood and sweat.

Cuba's answer to Muhammad Ali, Tefilo Stevenson, was featured among the portraits, along with Felix Savn, who turned down even more millions than Stevenson to leave Cuba, but this time to fight Mike Tyson. Also Jose "Mantequilla" Npoles, Kid Chocolate, and some other names I didn't recognize, and finally there was Hector, attached by scotch tape in his Olympic heyday with his arm raised in victory. I paid the witches to tell me the stories behind the faces and in their words, always, more than any achievements in the ring, these boxers' greatest legacy was the money they refused to betray the revolution. It was strange to see the gleam of pride in their eyes as they envisioned the kinds of lives these men had forgone in favor of embracing their role as symbols of a cause greater than any individual. These men stood for the highest literacy rate in the world, universal health care, free education, better lives for their children and all Cubans. I listened and absorbed the reports of their virtues, but I knew full well that most Cuban champions were so desperate for money that many had sold off all their Olympic medals and even uniforms to the highest tourist bidder. That part of the Cuban sports legacy was omitted from their tales. So were the defections of boxers starting in 1967, five years after Fidel Castro banned all professional sports from the island. All those who had tried to leave, successful or not, had essentially committed social suicide: they ceased to exist in their native land.

Cuban eyes often look close to tears. Tears never seem far away because both their pain and their joy are always so close to the surface. There's an open wound that defines the national character and the tide of emotions is always raw and overwhelming. Kid Chocolate was my gateway drug into those emotions. They didn't have enough money for a bell to clang to announce the fights or declare the beginnings or ends of rounds, so they used an emptied fire extinguisher and a rusty wrench instead. My high school gym had more money sunk into it than the most famous arena residing in Cuba's capital city. Did that detract from the atmosphere or impact? Donald Trump named everything after himself while nothing in Havana, not even a plaque, had Fidel's name attached. Who would history remember? n.o.body fighting there was paid to fight any more than anyone watching had paid to attend. Cigar and cigarette smoke curled into the rafters as bottles of rum were pa.s.sed around and swigged in the audience. The place was packed and at first I a.s.sumed everyone was forced to attend these matches the same way seven-hour Fidel speeches invariably had hundreds of thousands of bored, nodding-off citizens in attendance at the Plaza de la Revolucin. But it wasn't the case. All the faces still carried the same strain from what was going wrong outside Kid Chocolate, but they also knew they were watching sports in a way that the rest of the world could only dream about. That's why what I was looking at, at first, didn't even register as Cuban; it was an American wet dream of sport. At least while the fights lasted, it was pure.

No interviews. No cameras. No advertising. No commercial breaks. No merchandise. No concession stand. No thanking of sponsors. No luxury boxes. No Tecate or Corona ring girls. No autographs. No VIP seating. No scalpers outside. No venue named after a corporation or corporately owned anything, anywhere. No air conditioning or even fans to mitigate how f.u.c.king hot it was in there. No amenities of any kind, but instead you had a full auditorium of intensely proud people who didn't require cues to cheer or applaud. Without the incentive of money, I watched people fight harder in the ring than anywhere else I'd ever seen. And they fought this way before an audience who cheered louder than anywhere I'd ever heard. And nothing separated them. The best of the boxers might have lived on the same block as anyone in the stands. Sport wasn't an opium for these people; their culture was an opium for sport. Who walked into a museum anymore without asking how much the masterpieces had sold at auction for? If van Gogh captured the world's imagination in part for never being able to sell some of the most treasured works of human expression ever put to canvas, he was certainly trying to sell them. This society's experiment went further and they knew it: heroes weren't for sale. But how long could that last? How long could anyone resist not cas.h.i.+ng in? And if no price was acceptable to sell out, what was the cost of that stance?

During the last fight of the evening, a hometown Havana kid was beating another boy from Sancti Spritus terribly. So badly, in fact, that someone in the crowd raced down from the rafters and threw his bunched-up towel into the ring since the Sancti Spritus coaches had refused to throw in their towel.

He'd cupped his hands to scream at the referee, "Alright then you son of a b.i.t.c.h, I'll spend the night in jail for your crime, you motherf.u.c.ker!"

The crowd ignited as they watched that towel leave the man's hand in a sweaty clump and sail unfurling under the lights toward the ring, with the referee conspicuously unaware of the attempt on his life.

Hector had arranged for me to sit ringside next to one of the trainers named Alberto Brea, along with the rest of the Havana team, and all of us betrayed our team's fighter in the ring to cheer on the heckler. When the towel found its target and compressed like an accordion against the referee's ear and we heard every last sweaty drop behind the wet slap of its impact, Brea nudged me: "This man is a n.o.ble martyr for Sancti Spritus. If I was his father I would be proud."

Another coach turned to Brea: "What makes you think you aren't his father?"

Brea was delighted by this possibility-along with every other child on the team who heard it and doubled over laughing-but conceded, "He didn't get an arm like that from me. Beisbol was never my game."

As the protester stood on the stairs glaring at the referee and screaming obscenities, with both hands high over his head gesticulating wildly, the referee calmly halted the fight to pick up the towel and contemplate it in his hands for a moment before attempting to locate the heckler. Even the judges at ringside were having trouble keeping a straight face.

The rest of us in Kid Chocolate watched as the uniformed polica stormed down the steps to arrest the protester. He didn't flinch when the four cops grabbed his arms, s.h.i.+rt, and pants and began hauling him toward the exit. He kept his eyes on the referee in the ring and kept talking to him as though he were microphoned.

The referee patiently held on to his new towel while the commotion was dealt with.

But then something magical happened, after which n.o.body in the arena had a harder time holding their composure together than the referee.

Another towel entered the ring and lightly-almost obediently-touched down on the canvas near the referee's feet. Sancti Spritus had finally had a chance to inspect the damage on their fighter and quit on his behalf.

There was agonized panic to get this point across to our arrested towel thrower before it was too late. The protester was in the doorway of the exit when he broke loose of the police grip long enough to look back over his shoulder and grasp the full meaning of the moment. Everyone collectively forgot to breathe as we all waited to see what he'd do next. Suddenly his hands shot up as he wailed with vindication, and even the police laughed as everybody got to their feet to whistle and cheer his achievement.

The referee gazed toward the arrested man, shook his head, and smiled as he waved the fight off.

When the revolution triumphed, one of the strange and beautiful sights across Havana was the destruction, by the thousands, of any and all parking meters. The mafia had collected all the money from those parking meters and much of it had been pilfered, along with hundreds of millions from the Cuban national treasury, by Batista and taken with him into exile in Spain.

I went outside into the parking meterless night and walked over to the corner of the block and bought a peso ice cream from a pretty light-skinned Cuban girl reading a weathered and wrinkled-up celebrity magazine from the 1980s. She held the cone under the spout and pulled the arm of the machine, all the while hypnotized by a photograph of Madonna. She handed me the cone and reached up and took her hair in a fist trying out the hairstyle. I watched her for a bit trying other styles until the security guard from the little dollar grocery store next door began flirting with her. When she gave him a smile he turned with satisfaction in my direction.

The grocery store he was supposed to be guarding had dozens of people lined up outside the entrance, peeking through the windows into the gla.s.s display cases of chocolate, makeup, gum, toothpaste, soap, suntan lotion, American cigarettes, and other "luxury" items.

It was worse a few blocks down the street at the Adidas store on Calle Neptuno. You'd see kids buying sneakers at American prices-the equivalent of eight months' salary for a Cuban neurosurgeon-acting casual about the transaction. Phony designer T-s.h.i.+rts were available on the mercado negro. You could spot the occasional busted-up, discarded tourist cell phone carried like a talisman in the hand of a teenager. Every now and again you'd see useless, tossed-away cell phones carried around in the hands of Cubans as a status symbol, their best attempt at conspicuous consumption.

The designated tourist Lada taxis were waiting across the street in front of the steps at the Capitolio and the drivers were all leaning over the hoods of their cars chatting and smoking with a few of the drivers of horse-drawn carriages. The cabbies were some of the best-connected men in Havana: girls, drugs, whatever you need for your stay. "You don't like the food? Don't you know the best meals are all cooked at secret locations? Would you like to visit the private home that cooked for Steven Spielberg? Come, my friend, let me show you.... Have you tried our cocaine yet? Have you seen how we smoke joints through our nostrils? You need a girl who will treat you right, not like the stuck-up ones you have back home. I have an uncle who has several boxes of Trinidad Cigars stolen from Castro's personal collection for diplomats. Don't worry, my friend."

Nothing alerts me to the fact that I'm out of my depth like preemptive a.s.surances of my safety. All the hustlers worked this area of town day and night looking for tourists to ride. Which was fair, because a hefty cross-section of tourists pretty much only frequented the areas of Havana where they could give young Cuban girls a ride.

Police were everywhere but lots of product-cigars, merchandise, even drugs-was being moved in secret stashes all over town. Everybody had a friend or a relative who could get it for you. Another herd of tourists arrived fresh off a cruise s.h.i.+p or from a bus visiting from Varadero, where locals were no longer able to vacation with their families. The government had forbidden them. I watched them march through Parque Central headed for Calle Obispo and some Hemingway daiquiris at El Floridita, where the first daiquiri was invented and poured.

Past the entrance to Rafael Trejo, the sun blazed down and there were rows and rows of bleachers surrounding a ring, barely covered by a roof. For warm-ups, students raced up and down the bleachers and their footfalls were as loud as a New York express subway train until the coaches whistled them on to the next task. Car tires were set against an iron railing for boys to practice their combinations, snapping their punches. In place of bags, sacks were hung next to the tires. A tractor tire lay in the shade under the far-side bleachers, where an instructor swung a sledgehammer over one shoulder and then the other, plunging the hammer down and showing a kid the proper technique of incorporating the entire body with each swing and the mechanics of the weight transfer involved. The ring was the centerpiece of the gym, its canvas blood- and sweat-stained, with a little neighborhood mud smeared here and there. There was a lucky child who lived next door, on the second floor of his building, who spied with his friends on the action below from his window.

Hector walks into Rafael Trejo in jeans and an undersized Cuban national volleyball team s.h.i.+rt that accentuates a growing paunch. I'm shadowboxing in the ring with half a dozen other students, all several years younger than me. Hector has a book and a folded newspaper in one hand and one of the other coaches quickly hands him a bundled-up shoelace necklace with a whistle hanging off. Hector lays the book and newspaper over the equipment table and drapes the necklace over his bowed head. It's a daily ritual with a ghostly nod to the elephant in our roasting, open-air gym. I can't help but try to imagine how he copes with the two Olympic gold medals that were placed around his neck in Barcelona and Atlanta, this future barely earning enough in a month to afford the cost of a movie ticket as his reward.

Hector puts his hands on his waist and watches me expressionlessly.

"Oye, Brinicito! Three more rounds of shadowboxing, then we'll work."

I nod and look back at the ground and throw more combinations in the air, spilling more sweat over my shadow. The old ring creaks and moans under the collective feet finding their rhythm and transferring weight to give force to our blows at imaginary opponents.

I've taken Hector to dinner a few times after our lessons but he's not interested in the conversation veering toward defection stories or even boxing, really. He's more interested in the fact that both of us are the only people at Trejo who bring in novels to read. He loves Hemingway and Don Quixote. He's desperate for more books the government won't permit locals to read. He enjoys the work of Gabriel Garca Mrquez so deeply he asks if I could bring him Mrquez in English when I come back to the island. He thinks it would be the best way to learn the language. Mostly Hector just seems grateful to enjoy a full meal without having to worry about the looming fight that in the past he'd have had to make weight for.

Hector yells for another kid to imagine squis.h.i.+ng a cigarette under his back toe when he throws his right hand. He's not turning it properly. Where's your a.s.s in that punch? How do you expect the weight between your shoulders to snap without the full extension of your punch? Where's your balance? Hector gestures to steal the cigarette from an onlooker's mouth and flick it into the ring to help the education along.

Three more rounds of the art of shadowboxing for me, a lifetime of battling against their shadow selves over in America for Hector and any other Cuban boxer that remained on the island.

"Our athletes are and always will be an example for all" are words painted over a sign hanging in the entrance to Rafael Trejo. The same sign hangs over most boxing gyms across the country, I was told by the Macbeth witches for a tourist dollar. "Men's sacred values are beyond gold and money," Fidel once explained. "It's impossible to understand this, when you live in a world where everything is bought and sold and gotten through gold." Professional boxing had been banned for thirty-eight years at that time, since 1962, and, in part to vindicate Fidel's explanation, only a fraction of fighters from then until now had left. This was rarely if ever a story outside reporters gave much credence to, let alone bothered to explore. Tough to find a peg on which to hang that story.

But as I peeked up from my shadow at Hector, unfurling his newspaper to read a few paragraphs of the state news, I wondered what was the example Hector was meant to convey to the next generation of Cuban children by his choices? Or perhaps the better question was, what could be made of the powerful revolutionary figures taking Hector's choice away before he ever had a chance to betray their ideals? In Cuba you could be convicted of crimes you were only suspected of committing, all under the Orwellian umbrella term of "dangerousness." Fidel hogged the credit for any athlete that stayed as proof of the revolution's triumph, but by the same logic, when boxers defected how much of a referendum was it about why all Cubans might be torn about remaining?

Hector hadn't spoken freely to me much since I'd first met him, but I'd done some homework on him. Hector Vinent Charn was born in Santiago de Cuba, an eastern province where the bulk of the best boxers are found. Many in that region, like Hector, come from large families who suffered the worst before the revolution and were some of the biggest beneficiaries of the revolution's reforms. Ma.s.sive literacy drives, eradicating obscene rates of death by curable diseases, lowering infant mortality rates below nearly all first-world countries, agrarian land reform, access to education, an emphasis on social justice that made a tangible impact across the country, an end to racial discrimination-a ma.s.sive overhaul of a whole society conspiring to help the weakest and end widespread corruption and exploitation. The upper crust in Cuba got the shaft and most fled. While the ideals of the revolution resonated deeply with almost every Cuban I encountered, the results in so many areas, especially over the last ten years, had driven home just how untenable this regime in power truly was. But the United States and the embargo had rarely missed an opportunity to antagonize matters and essentially let the government off the hook in the eyes of many. Fidel's bogeyman was just as stubborn as he was.

Then again, Hector was almost thirty and already the father of five children he was clearly struggling to support. He was only eight when the Mariel boatlift took place in 1980, during which ten thousand Cubans attempted to gain asylum at a Peruvian emba.s.sy. An exodus of 125,000 Cubans fled the country. "Fidel has just flushed his toilet on us," Maurice Ferre, the Miami mayor at that time, famously remarked. Hector had won his first Olympic medal in 1992, just as Cuba entered its Special Period, after the collapse of the Soviet Union ended the Soviets' ma.s.sive subsidies to the island. "We're in a Special Period," Fidel spoke before a crowd at that time. "Why? Because we're alone confronting an empire.... Only a weak, cowardly people surrenders and goes back to slavery."

Hector won his second medal in Atlanta, as the Special Period's hards.h.i.+ps reached their peak with widespread blackouts, fuel shortages, and starvation. The choice to remain for any Cuban, let alone an elite athlete, had never been more difficult. And Hector was part of a continuum of Fidel's champions, meant to reject any offer to leave and be a proxy for Fidel and the revolution's values, displaying they were still strong enough to dominate those of Americans stepping into the ring and challenge America itself.

Hector was a chubby young boy when he began training as a boxer, stepping into a broken-down gym called Los Songos to throw his first punches. It didn't take him long to get noticed and selected for entry into La Finca, the special elite school in Havana for boxers. The Cuban sports machine might have been the most effective apparatus on earth for uncovering and developing athletic talent and Hector was exactly the kind of world-cla.s.s athlete they were looking for. Hector's talent was never inconspicuous. Barely into his teens, he left his family behind in Santiago and took the train across the country, and before long he became a national champion. He won the nationals six times in all. He won a junior world champions.h.i.+p in Lima at age eighteen. By twenty, when the Barcelona Olympics rolled around, he cruised to a gold medal with a combined score of 85 points to his opponent's 11. The Cubans trounced the Americans at the Olympics that year, winning seven gold medals to the United States' one. Hector had also proven, pound-for-pound, he was one of the greatest living fighters in the world. What made him even more enticing to foreign promoters was his professional style: he was a tenacious, brutal puncher who savored finis.h.i.+ng off opponents and electrifying crowds.

I'd heard one of his eyes was damaged from a detached retina after the acc.u.mulation of punishment he endured over his hundreds of amateur fights and sparring. He'd given some interviews to foreign journalists using the injury as the reason his boxing career was finished. But in truth, after the 1996 Olympics, when his teammates Ramn Garbey and his best friend Joel Casamayor defected-Casamayor being the first Olympic champion ever to do so-Hector took the brunt of the consequences back home for their actions. Hector's fate was sealed when he was only twenty-four years old.

"Oye!" Hector hollered and blew his whistle. "Come outside the ring. Today we spar a little."

"With whom?" I asked, climbing out of the ring.

"Me." Hector grinned and offered two thumbs he happily tugged back at himself. He put his arm over my shoulder and let loose a deep, growly laugh. "The Olympic Games are in Sydney soon. Maybe they'll let me make a comeback. I need some sparring just in case."

"Who is the best boxer Cuba is sending to Sydney?" I asked.

"Guillermo Rigondeaux," Hector answered immediately. "El mejor."

"No question?"

"Por favor. n.o.body close. He's magnificent. But what a sad face he has! We both came from Santiago de Cuba. He came from a coffee plantation. He is only 118 pounds, but we've never seen anything like him. Most people like the big guys, but they are very limited in terms of skill. To be small you must have everything. Rigondeaux might be the most beautiful boxer I've ever seen. He is a little Stradivarius of a boxer. I'm friends with Felix Savn, the captain of the national team. A very simple but good man." (A running joke in the gym and across the island was Savn's Yogi Berralike quote, "Technique is technique because without technique there's no technique.") "Savn has told me he will hand over his captaincy to Guillermo after these games. Only one gold medalist has defected, never someone that high profile. Who knows, Rigondeaux will turn twenty the day he wins his gold medal. He could easily be the first man in history to win four. Certain things in my country make his choices different than when I was twenty and won my first medal."

"The offers followed you everywhere you fought?"

"Everywhere." He laughed. "Suitcases of money popped open from ringside. Crumpled-up paper thrown into the ring with dollar figures just to talk. Just to talk more money than I would see in ten years living here."

"You like d.i.c.kens?" I asked Hector.

"Yes, I like him."

"Aren't you Rigondeaux's ghost of Christmas Past?"

"A Christmas Carol was not so popular here." Hector smiled. "Christmas was banned in Cuba for many years until the Pope visited our island and Fidel reinstated it. He did not reinstate El Duque, and so he escaped to the Yankees."

"But not you."

"Not me." Hector shook his head, and when he looked away I wasn't sure if he was looking into his past or Rigondeaux's future.

10.

THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA.

Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called [by] the Masai "Ngje Ngi," the House of G.o.d. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carca.s.s of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that alt.i.tude.

-Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro IT'S HARD TO WALK in any direction here without b.u.mping into politics. What King Midas was to gold, Fidel might be even more to politics. Sports took you there. Hemingway did, too. Like his metaphorical leopard, I'd wondered for a long time what America's most famous writer was seeking from Cuba for the last twenty years of his life. How could someone like him support Fidel? I'd heard the captain of his beloved Pilar had even gained his permission to carry explosives for the revolutionaries. How could America give Hemingway such a pa.s.s for this?

Hemingway and Castro only met once, in 1960. Very few photographs of the meeting exist and the one movie camera filming their union lasts about as long as the Zapruder film. They met right after Fidel entered-and won-Hemingway's annual fis.h.i.+ng tournament. Fidel was asked why he was so eager to meet Hemingway and casually explained that he'd always envied his adventures. Hemingway had lived in Cuba for twenty years leading up to and during the revolution. While Tolstoy had, in Hemingway's terminology, "gotten in the ring" with Napoleon, Hemingway-after taking on World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II, with the Cuban revolution taking place in his own backyard-never went near Castro or what he was up against in print. To me, that was a far more compelling mystery than whatever that leopard was sniffing around for.

After training one day, I took the long way home along the sea, turning off the Prado promenade, with the Morro fortress and the lighthouse behind me. While I was training with Hector, one of his students tapped me on the shoulder and warned me about not missing him fighting on HBO when I got home. "You'll see." His eyes sparkled. "Don't be surprised when you see me." Of course this was a kid who had zero access to HBO or any other American television that wasn't pirated and sold on the street. If he had been growing up in the 1990s he could have been thrown in jail for having so much as an American dollar on him.

It gnawed at me as a fisherman along the Malecn waved h.e.l.lo. An old fisherman with a mustache cast a hunk of bread just over the crest of the last wave that broke against the wall. A fish bit quickly and he reeled it in and removed his shoe in order to clunk the fish on the head and drop it wriggling into the pail nestled between his ankles. He rigged another hook and relit his peso "torpedo" cigar. Beyond the fisherman's line were some cruise s.h.i.+ps headed for the harbor. Beyond them were wars.h.i.+ps. The fisherman wasn't paying attention to either. He stared at his line while the death rattle of the fish in the bucket petered out.

The day before, the staff had let me inside the Finca Viga, Hemingway's house on a hill in the nearby town of San Francisco de Paula, about seven miles away from Havana. Five minutes outside of Havana by car and you're in a different world all over again. Modern technology a.s.sumes an even lower profile. I'd gone alone. A gypsy cab agreed to drive me there and back for five tourist dollars. Letting me inside the home was against the rules-too much to steal and no security cameras-but the staff made an exception after grilling me on some trivia. I was a terrible student who flunked nearly every subject in school, but I'd skipped a lot of cla.s.ses and spent hundreds of hours in the library reading everything I could get my hands on about Hemingway's work and life.

After the revolution they'd converted Hemingway's home into the Hemingway Museum. Bullfighting posters, animal heads, horns, and antlers were everywhere, but far and away the most dominant feature was the personal library of 8,000 books along with his typewriter. The contents of the bookshelves represented one of the most profound displays of curiosity I'd ever encountered. I saw piles of first editions: Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Mailer, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Wolfe-even The Catcher in the Rye. I wanted very badly to steal that book. During World War II, not long after the liberation, J. D. Salinger had met Hemingway in Paris. It was a meeting that changed Salinger's life. Salinger had continued to write to Hemingway after the war. Hemingway knew who Holden Caulfield was long before the world did. However interested the world was in Hemingway, his library demonstrated he was even more interested in the world. The great seducers are always suckers. And what I loved about his home was feeling that Hemingway was the biggest sucker who ever lived; the world had never seduced someone so completely. And that mutual seduction put such smiles on the visitors I saw that day.

Everything in the house was left untouched since he'd died. There was alcohol still inside a handful of bottles in the living room lying beside a vast pile of magazines and newspapers he subscribed to. You were surrounded by his pa.s.sion for bullfighting and the hunt in paintings and trophies hung all around the house. The bathroom had his chicken-scratch handwriting on the wall showing his battle with his weight and high blood pressure over the years. Beside the pool visiting Hollywood starlets like Ava Gardner swam naked in, there was an understated cemetery for his beloved cats and dogs.

Every step I took on his property felt as if he could come back through the door at any moment. It was a little eerie combing so much of a man's life left pristinely as he'd chosen to live it in his adoptive home. Havana's marina had been named after him. Why not? He'd donated the n.o.bel Prize and the Pulitzer to the Cuban people. His Pulitzer had been stolen from the shrine where it was kept near Santiago de Cuba. The staff guarding the house told me that it was eventually returned. Back in Havana, the room where he started writing For Whom the Bell Tolls at the Ambos Mundos was roped off. There were old women guarding it who had met him as teenagers. Apparently he wasn't stingy with compliments for pretty girls and they still blushed remembering them.

I'd admired Hemingway's work for a long time, but his effect on so many of the Cubans I spoke with in his adoptive country added a great deal to my appreciation of the man. Cubans by and large are a tremendously respectful people, but they aren't easy to impress. Hector had shrugged once after mentioning he'd fought around the world for crowds but never felt (not heard) anyone respond like his own people. "Everybody deserves to have Havana as a hometown," I heard again and again.

Alfonso lined up for me a meeting with Gregorio Fuentes, Hemingway's former captain of his beloved fis.h.i.+ng boat, the Pilar, which he kept in Cuba. Nearly half a century after the last novel Hemingway ever saw published in his lifetime found its way into readers' hands in 1952, the inspiration for The Old Man and the Sea, Fuentes, with his 103-year-old birthday around the corner, still lived in Cojimar, the tiny fis.h.i.+ng village from the story. While Castro was up in the Sierra Maestra, Fuentes supported the revolution by smuggling explosives inside his boat. He still worked for the revolution by speaking with foreigners about his life and friends.h.i.+p with Hemingway. He asked for fifteen dollars from visitors to his home, which he donated to the Cuban government. Fuente's tale of going up against a marlin was Hemingway's comeback after the disastrous reception of his World War II novel, Across the River and into the Trees. Critics had savaged the book and relished their ad hominem attacks against Hemingway. The common wisdom was that he was shot as an artist and had become nothing more than a third-rate caricature of a bloated legend.

Hemingway responded by sitting down at his typewriter. After a handful of weeks writing inside his San Francisco de Paula home, he sheepishly approached his wife, Mary, with the pages of his ma.n.u.script. She read the book in one sitting and returned to him with tears in her eyes and told him she forgave him for everything. For different reasons, others seemed to be able to relate: readers weren't far behind Mary's reaction, s.n.a.t.c.hing up over five million copies of Life within two days of the novel being featured in the magazine. Forty-five years later I carried a beaten-up copy across Europe, and in every country men and women would stop me, tap an index finger on the cover, and shake their heads smiling. The critics awarded it the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the following year it was specifically mentioned when Hemingway took home the n.o.bel Prize in Literature. "All the works of Hemingway," Fidel Castro once said, "are a defense of human rights."

Montalvo picked me up outside Trejo, with Alfonso and Lesvanne in the car. Alfonso, who was riding shotgun, winked at me as he took a sip from a twelve-year-old bottle of Havana Club from his left hand while waving with his right, a copy of Romeo y Julieta wedged between his fingers. His eyes were bloodshot and his face had a sickly pallor.

"You okay?" I asked.

"Don't look at me like that." Alfonso laughed. "Get in. Today we have a good day. A very, very good day. So what if I'm already celebrating how you're going to remember this day. I live for days like these."

As I got into the backseat with Lesvanne, Montalvo rubbed Alfonso's shoulder and we began to drive.

"My friend, celebrating all these days you live for is going to put you in the ground," Montalvo said.

"I won't live for long anyway. That isn't the point. I leave to go home to a place where everyone reaches old age, and how many really enjoy the life they have? A midlife crisis is the best-case scenario. Of all the species on this planet, you know how many expect to live to old age? Only those that reside in captivity. All the rest are eaten when they no longer have enough life to fight."

"So why don't you move here?" I asked him.

"My favorite thing is to miss my flight from Havana." Alfonso laughed, reaching back and slapping my knee in the backseat. "I hate leaving this place. Brinicito, do you have any idea how many flights I've missed attempting to leave Havana?"