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    A Cuban Boxer's Journey: Guillermo Rigondeaux, from Castro’s Traitor to American Champion
    A Cuban Boxer's Journey: Guillermo Rigondeaux, from Castro’s Traitor to American Champion
    A Cuban Boxer's Journey: Guillermo Rigondeaux, from Castro’s Traitor to American Champion
    Ebook174 pages2 hours

    A Cuban Boxer's Journey: Guillermo Rigondeaux, from Castro’s Traitor to American Champion

    By Brin-Jonathan Butler

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    THE STORY OF CUBAN BOXER AND POLITICAL PARIAH GUILLERMO RIGONDEAUX'S HARROWING DECISION TO DEFECT IN HOPES OF REAPING THE REWARDS OF THE AMERICAN DREAM

    "What is one million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans?"

    This was the question posed by legendary boxer Teofilo Stevenson in the 1970s, crowned by many as the Muhammad Ali of Cuba, in response to an offer of five million dollars to leave his island to fight Ali. But not all Cubans have come to the same conclusion, let alone with such apparent ease. Guillermo Rigondeaux, two-time Olympic champion and heir to Stevenson's throne, sacrificed everything he had in his home country—his wife, his son, his government-subsidized car and house, as well as universal reverence among his fellow citizens—to try to make it in the mecca of big-money boxing, the United States of America. But has the chance to make good in America been worth the loss of his national identity and the love of his countrymen? And to what extent has he been corrupted by the promise of untold riches?

    In A Cuban Boxer's Journey, author, filmmaker, and journalist Brin-Jonathan Butler chronicles the fascinating and tumultuous career of Rigondeaux—moody, driven, and almost mythically talented––as he attempts to capture the elusive and often punishing American dream. See how this athlete's most daunting challenge becomes how he can survive the complex forces outside of the ring.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJun 3, 2014
    ISBN9781250044709
    A Cuban Boxer's Journey: Guillermo Rigondeaux, from Castro’s Traitor to American Champion
    Author

    Brin-Jonathan Butler

    Brin-Jonathan Butler has written for Esquire, Bloomberg, ESPN Magazine, Al Jazeera, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Salon, and Vice. His first book, The Domino Diaries, was shortlisted for the PEN/ESPN Award for literary sports writing and a Boston Globe Best Book of 2015. His work has also been a notable selection in both Best American Sports and Best American Travel Writing multiple times.

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      Book preview

      A Cuban Boxer's Journey - Brin-Jonathan Butler

      1

      La Lucha

      Treason for money is one of the favorite weapons of the United States to destroy Cuba’s resistance.

      —Fidel Castro

      Ninety miles off the shores of Cuba, in the United States, boxing’s story was always pretty easy to follow. Maybe that was the point. What’s more basic in exposing a man or a people than what they’re willing to stand for or stand up to? After Jack Johnson became the first African American heavyweight champion, one great white hope after another attempted to dethrone him and everything he represented. James Braddock was the workingman’s champion during the Great Depression. When Joe Louis took on Max Schmeling in the 1930s, it wasn’t lost on anyone that he was championing a moral war against Hitler and fascism. Prior to their two fights, when had white America ever cared so deeply and gotten behind the struggle of an African American? In the thick of the 1960s Muhammad Ali challenged the establishment over Vietnam. By the end of the twentieth century, there were few more suitable emblems of unfettered capitalism than boxing promoter Don King waving the Stars and Stripes and shouting Only in America! at one of Mike Tyson’s billion-dollar stimulus packages to the Las Vegas economy. In one of the most recent examples of boxing’s power to reveal the nation’s true character, the justice system itself postponed the incarceration of Floyd Mayweather Jr. for domestic abuse on the basis of his economic value to down-and-out Vegas.

      Boxing illuminates just as much about the country only ninety miles south of the United States—Cuba. Cubans have always been haunted by the sea. The 228 miles dividing Havana and Miami might constitute one of the largest graveyards on earth. The area is a minefield of fatal dangers many Cubans have crossed blindfolded: the force of the Gulf Stream, volatile weather, shark-infested waters. Estimates vary, but as many as 40 percent of those who have attempted to cross the Florida Straits have perished. Since Fidel Castro rose to power in 1959, ending four hundred years of colonialism, more than a million Cubans have abandoned their lives in their homeland. The most corrosive legacy that Castro will leave behind for his people might be that of the broken family. The waves lapping against Cuba’s shore have long felt as much like the bars of a prison cell as a gateway to freedom. The torment and longing of exile has irrevocably damaged the soul of the Cuban people, and this anguish over an impossible choice unrelentingly shadows them regardless of their choice to stay or to leave.

      Enter into this fraught dilemma the Cuban athlete, perhaps the most lucrative human cargo left on earth. The first slaves were brought to Cuba around 1520, and political failures on both sides of the Florida Straits have encouraged a thriving modern slave trade. Today, at bargain-basement prices, extraordinarily talented human beings are bought and sold in the marketplace. Contracts are signed with these Cubans under duress and in languages they can’t comprehend. Once free of Cuba, many of these athletes never come close to earning enough money to repay the debt of their sale, trafficking, and survival in the United States to their benefactors. Many of the athletes have been unable to endure the guilt of abandoning their families, let alone the horrific voyage inside the smuggler’s boat.

      Indeed, despite demonstrating bottomless courage by having had more than four hundred fights inside a ring by the age of twenty-seven, it was the journey to America, in February 2009, that Guillermo Rigondeaux would later describe as the most traumatic experience of his life. And that was long before he got around to discussing the toll of potentially never seeing his country, home, or family again. Compounding this tragedy is the irony that Rigondeaux is the most capable human being I have ever witnessed defending himself inside a ring while also remaining one of the most vulnerable and defenseless outside a ring—at least since he arrived in the United States. It was his tragedy even more than his talent that compelled me to drop everything and take the considerable risks I did to explore what I could of the depths of his story, as well as the broader, troubling realities his experience exposed about Cuban and American cultures and their values.

      The mantra of all Cuban boxers is la lucha (the struggle). Boxers across the country train under Fidel’s words, painted on gym walls: Our athletes are and always have been an example for all. For ordinary Cuban citizens, the struggle in the ring reflects their day-to-day struggle of survival. By Castro and the system’s design, it is impossible to discuss sport in Cuba without exploring life in Cuba. Boxing has always been a Rosetta Stone into the character of Cuban society. Cubans enter the ring in defense of their families, their neighborhoods, their society, and then—and only then—their self-respect. As the conditions of life grew more desperate and more Cubans lived what many considered a broken dream, an increasing number of boxers risked death or imprisonment, abandoning everything they knew for the chance to shipwreck into the American Dream. While Castro branded any defector a selfish traitor to their people and their revolutionary cause, each ordinary Cuban citizen was forced to confront the harsh truth of whether, in fact, it was Castro’s Cuba that had betrayed them. If historically the Cuban boxer refusing millions to leave the island was an example of all that had succeeded with the revolution, surely those boxers that accepted the bait to abandon everything they knew was equally an example of a decaying revolution.

      In the 1970s, in the prime of his youth, Teófilo Stevenson, Cuba’s most famous champion, was offered $5 million to defect and fight Muhammad Ali. Stevenson responded by asking of the offer itself, What is one million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans? While all Cubans were intimately familiar with Stevenson’s words, only those who agreed were permitted to speak openly about how they felt. For the rest, even in the privacy of their own homes, they had to whisper.

      In the 1980s and 1990s, Teófilo Stevenson’s successor, Félix Savón, also a three-time heavyweight Olympic champion, rejected Don King’s offer of $25 million to leave Cuba in order to fight Mike Tyson. At the rate of pay the Cuban government extended to Savón at that time, he would have had to work roughly one million years to earn what America was offering him to fight inside one Las Vegas casino or another. I’m already a millionaire, Savón explained to me. If I need to, I can knock on any door in my country and find a million friends to offer me a peso or a piece of bread. I would never trade the love of my people for all the money in the world.

      After the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, where both Félix Savón and Guillermo Rigondeaux won gold, Savón retired and passed the baton of his captaincy of the Cuban national boxing team to Rigondeaux. At the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Rigondeaux scored another gold medal for Cuba and cemented the legitimate possibility that he be the first boxer in history to win four Olympic gold medals. Although Rigondeaux gave every indication of proudly carrying the torch passed on to him by one of the revolution’s greatest boxers, with his defection he was fighting for something more valuable than money and so used that torch to become a kind of Promethean figure, illuminating the possibilities and unseen dangers awaiting all Cubans in America.

      2

      Gimnasio de Boxeo Rafael Trejo, Havana, Cuba

      2007

      The president of Ecuador greets Fidel with the gift of a rare Galápagos tortoise, informing the dictator that they can live to nearly two hundred years. Fidel accepts the pet, then turns to his aide and says: That’s the problem with pets. You get attached to them and they die on you.

      —Miami joke

      My first trip to Havana was in February 2000, in the midst of the Elián González fiasco. This time, what was referred to as political kiddie porn entered into the civil war fought across ninety miles of ocean. In November 1999, at the age of five, Elián González and his mother, along with twelve other passengers, had left Cuba on a small aluminum boat. Tragically, the boat’s faulty engine had died after they encountered a storm while attempting to cross the Florida Straits. Only González and two other passengers managed to survive the journey. They were discovered floating at sea, and were saved by two fisherman. The fisherman handed the survivors over to the U.S. Coast Guard and all hell broke loose on both sides of Florida Straits. It turned out Elián’s mother had taken Elián from his father in Cuba without his father’s knowledge or permission. After some negotiation at the highest levels of government in the United States and Cuba, Elián was sent back to Cuba in June 2000. Elián’s return to Cuba, a high-profile loss for the United States, was yet another political feather in Fidel’s cap.

      On the flight over I was reading Pitching Around Fidel: A Journey Into the Heart of Cuban Sports by S. L. Price. Each elite athlete profiled in the book encountered the same hopelessly impossible decision as every other Cuban, only with a lot more money offered for their escape. Where Teófilo Stevenson had rejected $5 million in the 1970s, the rate offered to Félix Savón, Cuba’s latest heavyweight destroyer, to defect to America and fight Mike Tyson was in the neighborhood of $20 million. Even the act of writing a book exploring the ambiguity of that choice had caused Price to be banned from ever returning to Cuba. You have penetrated an impenetrable system, he was told by security agents. The bombshell of the book was Cuban boxer Héctor Vinent, a two-time Olympic champion, as Rigondeaux was soon to become, confessing to Price his desire to escape. No Cuban athlete, in Cuba, had ever before said this on the record. Yet Vinent never managed to escape. Maybe because he never tried in the first place was the only reason he wasn’t thrown in prison, either. Instead, Vinent began to train children to box at one of Cuba’s oldest boxing gyms. Two days after my arrival, I met Vinent at his gym, where he earned less than $20 a month. He offered to train me for $6 a day under the table, some portion of which was skimmed off the top by those who oversaw the gym.

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