There are plenty of tragic and inspiring choices, but the most obvious legacy Castro will leave behind is the broken family.

As the plane touched down at Jose Marti Airport I still wasn’t sure I would be allowed to enter Cuba in the first place. I had spent my last trip a few months earlier conducting illegal interviews with the country’s most famous boxing champions, men who had turned down millions and were only willing to discuss it if I paid them under the table. Of course there was no official way to have these interviews given the sensitivity of the topic. The state security had started following me after the first interview. All the Cubans I was working with couldn’t understand why we weren’t being arrested. But we kept going until we landed every interview on my wish list. Then it was just a matter of getting that material out.

While I probably should have quit while I was ahead, my purpose this time around was to knock on the door of one of the most politically radioactive residences in the country—the wife of Guillermo Rigondeux, a 30-year-old two-time Olympic boxing champion, branded by Fidel Castro as a Judas and traitor to the Cuban people. I was there to track down the family of one of the most notorious defectors in Cuban history.

Since Rigondeaux had escaped on a smuggler’s boat (venture humanitarianism between Cuba and Cancun has thrived enormously the last few years) and become a permanent exile, his family had been living under 24-hour surveillance and nearly house arrest. Cuban state security doesn’t fuck around. As attractive an analogy it might be for any foreigner to view Rigondeaux as a kind of Orpheus, a highly charged defector forever abandoning his life, nobody is in any hurry to have a camera and a microphone placed in the face of Eurydice to discuss the matter. The official state version of events is quite sufficient, muchas gracias. Bienvenido a Cuba!

Everyone on the island knows that at Castro’s first trial, when he was asked to confess who was intellectually responsible for his attack against Batista, he proclaimed it was none other than “a poet.” But whether Cuba’s Comandante likes it or not, his country is poetry of a different order, something like 1984 penned by Charles Dickens.

The first African slaves were brought to the island as far back as 1520, a measure taken after the Spanish were in need of replenishing the native Indian population (300,000 at the time Columbus first encountered them) they had wiped out through a combination of genocide, disease and brutal labor. Many Indians were so desperate to escape the calamity of their lives under Spanish rule that they attempted suicide by trying to choke on dirt. This concern ceased after the Spanish warned of severe punitive measures on the family members of suicides.

One of the most famously brave Indian chiefs, Hatuey, captured, tied to a stake and about to be set ablaze, was offered conversion by the Spanish if he accepted Jesus. Hatuey asked the religious man holding the flame if indeed any Christians were in heaven. He was assured there were. Hatuey replied that he would rather burn and be sent to hell than ever again encounter people as cruel as the Spanish.

When Columbus first saw Cuba in 1492 he described it as “the most beautiful land human eyes have ever seen.” He asked the first local he could find if he had arrived on an island, and was assured that he had, but that it was infinite.

I’ve never been able to get the wrapping paper off trying to imagine the expression on the face of the man who told Columbus that.

“Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope!/Where is thy market now?” -J.M.W. Turner

Almost 300 years later, on November 29, 1782, the events depicted in Joseph M. W. Turner’s famous painting, The Slave Ship, unfolded. First known as the Zong Affair, and decades later as The Zong Massacre, the story goes something like this: With a business disaster looming—slaves were dying at more than the usual rate—Captain Collingwood ordered some of the Zong’s human cargo—122 shackled African men, women and children—thrown overboard into the shark infested waters of the Caribbean. Another 10 slaves threw themselves overboard in a display of defiance at the inhumanity.

These 132 deaths left the captain with high hopes of filing his insurance claim: lost-at-sea slaves would be insured, dead-on-arrival slaves would not.

At the trial for insurance fraud, England’s Solicitor General stated:

“What is this claim that human people have been thrown overboard? This is a case of chattels or goods. Blacks are goods and property; it is madness to accuse these well-serving honorable men of murder… The case is the same as if wood had been thrown overboard.”

In 2009, 228 years after the Zong disposed of its cargo in the Caribbean, another boat carrying human beings—who’d also been bought and sold on the market place—sped under cover of night across the same Caribbean waters. This time the boat was headed for Mexico, where a ransom masquerading as a fee was to be paid for the lives of the men, women and children being transported. Three of the occupants on the smuggler’s boat were elite Cuban boxers. One of those boxers was Guillermo Rigondeaux. Despite over 400 fights inside a ring against the greatest boxers in the world, Rigondeaux would describe this journey, with immense reluctance, as the most traumatic event of his life.

“There may be no entrapped pool of human talent left on earth with the dollar value of Cuban athletes.”

-Michael Lewis

***

On May 2^nd, 2011, the most dangerous man in the world was found and killed in Pakistan. Nothing about this event, however, was reported in Havana or across Cuba by the Cuban state. No interruption on the news. Nothing in either of the two state newspapers. No celebration or protest in the streets. And while it was true that few Cubans had access to the Internet, there seemed to be not even an acknowledgment of the event if anybody had found out. Not even Radio Bemba (Cuban slang for the rumor mill) had picked up the signal.

It was just any other day in the land where Christmas had been illegal until 1997 (the same day El Duque, the most famous baseball player in the country, had defected) and they received and rejected cashing their annual $4000 check issued by the US Treasury for leasing the Guantanamo base (an unlimited lease, by the way, that no Cuban had ever negotiated), which they had done since Castro rose to power. Terrorists against Cuba who had once shot down passenger jets later found safe haven in Miami. Yet, here in Cuba—a country still listed as a “state sponsor of terror” by the US—Bin Laden’s death caused no ripples one way or the other.

I only discovered the news by overhearing a sunburned tourist mention it near Havana’s Central Park, in La Esquina Caliente (the hot corner), where the men, many with official documentation as “professional fans,” gather to argue about baseball. The tourist’s wife was filming him arm-in-arm with a fourth-rate Che Guevara lookalike who regularly posed for pictures in front of the hotels. The tourist was wearing the unofficial uniform of all tourists in Cuba—Che Guevara t-shirt and single-starred beret—and the lookalike had successfully capitalized on the heartbreakingly predictable coincidence.

The tourist was celebrating Bin Ladin’s death by smoking and handing out Cohiba cigars. An individual Cohiba would cost you about the same amount that a Cuban brain surgeon or lawyer makes in a month and a half of work. But the tourist knew somebody who’d died in the towers. There was real joy on his face doling out the cigars and giving some to his wife to pass out from the box. He said he’d already seen the crowds cheering outside the White House on CNN. He announced he was off to get across the park to the Floridita to get drunk with Hemingway’s statue. Some eyes in the park watched him while the police monitored the situation from several street corners. This last trip it had felt as if there were more cameras around Havana than Times Square.

The last of the cigars was handed out and the Che lookalike was paid and went back in search of other tourists. It took me a long time to let this scene go.

When you first come here and find things to enjoy much faster than you’ve earned, they’ll inform you that everybody deserves to have Havana as their hometown. What you’ll have to discover for yourself is that if Havana really were your mother, there would never be a way of truly making anywhere else a wife. Cubans are cursed whether they find a means of escape or remain. There isn’t anyone you’ll meet here who doesn’t know a handful of people close to them who were forced to choose in what order to abandon their lives. Needless to say, it leaves quite an impression.

I’d arrived from New York City. Like that tourist handing out cigars, I, too, had a family member in one of the towers that had been struck by a plane. Both my wife’s parents were within a few blocks and had to be evacuated. I’d gleaned a fair bit of the collateral damage from that event. Yet I had serious trouble understanding how to cheer on the news of Bin Laden or anyone else dying. There was a handy distraction in the Che t-shirt the tourist was wearing while celebrating the death.

The year that Che Guevara left Cuba and his family to fight and die in Bolivia in an effort to help liberate the peasants there, the United States government had listed Che, as they would Bin Laden, the most dangerous man in the world. As with Bin Laden, the US gave the order to execute him.

Where exactly could I look to find the symmetry between these two men beyond the obvious: that they were both, in their time, the greatest source of anxiety for America? Was there any point in looking? Many years down the road, would that tourist’s grandson be wearing an Osama t-shirt celebrating the death of another terrorist? What symbol couldn’t America recycle into kitsch? Was Che anything more than a cheap karaoke of what he stood for?

“If the nuclear missiles had remained (in Cuba) we would have fired them against the heart of America including New York. We must never establish peaceful coexistence.”

-Ernesto “Che” Guevara

But the last words Che left for his family in a letter were these:

“Above all be sensitive, in the deepest areas of yourselves, to any injustice committed against whoever it may be anywhere in the world.”

I guess what really troubled me about all this was wondering to what extent, taken far enough, these words were consistent or an aberration from the substance that made him so threatening?

Since the first day I arrived in Havana as a kid trying to track down the real-life 103-year-old hero from The Old Man and the Sea still living in Cojimar, or seeing if I could bribe an Olympic champion boxer to help me with my amateur boxing career, I’ve walked down the Prado promenade every chance I could get. Prado was the first name I recognized here since I used to live a few blocks from the Prado museum in Madrid when I was 20. I was living there when the Atocha train station was bombed down the street some years later. Both Prados have enough magic that, after you visit them, the whole world feels like their gift shop for a few hours. For Havana’s Prado, the sooner after dawn you arrive the more birds there are in the trees. On the weekends the birds and stray cats keep the artists company as they set up their displays. Later schools empty out children, who race over to play games under the shade. At night jineteras stalk the promenade in search of tourists while a trumpet from a bench serenades the proceedings on. The Prado runs all the way to the sea, right up to the Malecon, which the people of Havana consider both their collective sofa and enchanted windowsill on the world.

Hundreds of years ago the most beautiful women of Havana were only glimpsed stepping in or out of carriages on this street. The first foreign writers who arrived and saw this could never get past just how incredibly beautiful their feet were.

When I first asked my boxing coach, two-time Olympic champion Hector Vinent, what made the Cuban style of fighting distinct from the rest of the world, he smiled and told me to sit on a bench in Prado and watch the Cuban women walk. “It’s all right there, Brinicito. That’s our secret. We try to box the way our women move. Have you ever seen women who can do more with one step than ours?”

Point taken.

A mood that haunts Prado and the rest of Havana for nearly every step is something like catching the gaze of a beautiful teenage girl with every fuse on her body lit by sexuality smiling at you with rotten teeth. Both for Havana’s beauty and decay, it’s very hard to restrain yourself from staring everywhere you look. I was told before my first trip that no city in the world offered the dreams you could have sleeping in Havana. But nobody warned me that Havana also always feels like an exhausting nightmare that never quite fulfills the promise of what it’s threatening you with. It’s an open-wound city that’s been raped for centuries by foreigners looking for loot. And while gambling is forbidden and all the casinos long since shut down by Fidel, every inch of this society, for better or worse, is the result of one of the biggest gambles any society could make in the 20th century: openly taking on America while residing just 90 miles off its shore. David and Goliath gets tossed around a fair bit as an analogy, but with the conditions Cuba has faced, the fight looks a lot more like Tiny Tim wielding a crutch than David with a slingshot. Yet, 52 years on, somehow, things remain.

Along the Prado they used to sell slaves on the auction block, too. Before Fidel, when segregation was in full swing, the Cuban apartheid meant many clubs and parks still refused black Cubans entry. Famously even Batista, the president of the country before Fidel, was forbidden membership to a country club because he wasn’t white enough.

Maybe this was one of the reasons Guillermo Rigondeaux’s own father, living on a coffee plantation in the east, disowned his son after the first failed attempt at defection in 2007, blaming him for betraying a society that helped so many like their own family climb out of the vicious conditions that existed before the revolution. Or maybe Rigondeaux’s father was another brainwashed Fidelista oblivious to all the failed promises.

And while I know Cuba’s meaning is perpetually up for grabs, whose isn’t?

Walking along the Prado, every time, for better or worse, I pass different versions of myself and of Havana. First the superficial things jump out at me. Cellphones are everywhere now. With jewelry, iPods, gold-capped teeth, piercings, fake designer label clothing and accessories, Adidas sneakers, Redbull, the Cuban equivalent of conspicuous consumption is on full display with the youth. Private businesses are legal finally. Real estate is around the corner. Less restricted travel is on the way. Outside Havana they’ve even started construction on a few golf courses with condos overlooking.

And off the promenade I can look down a bumpy street where I dragged a girl’s luggage to her grandmother’s house before saying goodbye. We didn’t look at each other walking down street after street but we held hands. Her head was high, my chin was down the whole way. We stopped outside her grandmother’s apartment and I let go of her hand and told her I couldn’t wait with her for the taxi to take her to the airport. She smiled at me when she saw that my eyes were wet.

“Oh pleeease. Joo acting like joo might never see me again.”

But I hadn’t thought that far ahead.

“I think it’s a little worse, Janita.”

“Why is that, Brinicito?”

“I’m crying because I won’t see you tonight.”

Stay anywhere long enough and every direction eventually leads you toward a pawnshop of your life. But if you run away it might be worse.

Maybe this is why Rigondeaux’s journey had fascinated me so deeply. From the specific, find the universal. In chess, it’s called zugzwang: you’re forced to move, but the only moves you can make will put you in a worse position. Welcome to the daily struggle of every face you meet in Cuba. A whole population of 11 million with every iron in the fire doubling as a finger in a dyke.

***

Finding the address for Rigondeaux’s wife and children was easier than I thought it would be—even if going there might ensure that I’d be banished for it. Someone on the street drew me a map with directions—but only after telling me that to visit Havana was paradise, to live there was hell. He was trying to sell his house to go back to Spain.

“Would you leave tomorrow if you could sell it?” I asked him.

“Please,” he laughed, handing me the map after he was finished sketching. “I would leave tonight.”

I asked how he knew the directions were accurate and he smiled and asked me to stop any taxi on the street, secure a ride, and then ask them to take me to the address he’d written down. I tried this twice and both drivers gave me an incredulous look before driving off.

This was real danger in a land where, if there was a suggestion you were sympathetic to one of the most famous living traitors, your whole life was at hazard. Maybe not just your life, either. Anyone close to you. Scores are settled here, and in a hurry. There aren’t any tag-backs either. While you aren’t likely to meet a people more generous, nobody can hold a grudge like Cubans.

I finally got to the little green house Rigondeaux had been given by the government for his achievement as an Olympic champion, and knocked on the door. There was his wife, Farah Colina Rigondeaux , along with their two children, Guillermo Jr. (eight-years-old) and Cesar (17-years-old).

I explained who I was, unsure of how she’d react. I’d spent a lot of time with her husband after his escape and respected a great deal about him in the process. After a pause she invited me in with a warm smile, as if I were a neighbor. Fourteen years this woman had spent with Rigondeaux before he escaped. The living room looked exactly the same as when the international news crews had covered one of the most famous defections in Cuban history. Small TV in the corner, a couch, a few pictures on the wall of the family together, some medals and trophies from Rigondeaux’s career, blinds drawn.

She broke the ice by telling me she’d met him at one of his fights. He noticed her in the crowd while he was sitting on his stool between rounds. She laughed until she was about to cry.

Suddenly Farah’s expression changed as she assured me the police were tracking me and asked that I be very careful for the rest of my time in Havana. “Your phone, email, movements, everything. Beeg Brother knows everything.”

My camerawoman had visited a central police station and told me that for every two cameras in Havana (which in many areas was nearly every block) there was one policeman assigned. As a precautionary measure, after the visit I left my apartment and stayed somewhere else and, sure enough, the police came to my previous apartment and took people in for questioning.

I began by telling Farah that, while she knew absolutely nothing about me, I’d spent the last three years learning everything I could about her family’s situation. I also told her that the only reason I was able to come to Cuba to work on my film about her husband was because I’d had a camera and half my footage stolen in Ireland during Rigondeaux’s last fight over the Saint Patrick’s Day weekend. There was some organized heist meant to steal Rigondeaux’s championship belt and by mistake they’d stolen the wrong bag and got my equipment and material. I didn’t have anywhere close to enough money to continue (I’d long since maxed out all my credit cards to keep going). But in revenge I’d bet the last of my production budget on Rigondeaux winning by knockout in the first round at 20-1 odds. Enough to keep going. Enough to get back to Cuba. Enough to take the biggest risk of all and bring some footage of Rigondeaux back to his family and vice versa as way of repaying the debt of him allowing me to cover his story. Nobody else in his camp would go near betting on it, but when I asked Rigondeaux he just smiled—bearing the gold teeth he’d once told me were the result of melting one of his Olympic medals into his mouth—and suggested I put my life savings on it. Rigondeaux’s wife loved this detail. After he won and saw me step into the ring he laughed (one of the rare times I ever saw him laugh with any joy) and held out his wrapped up hand, “So where’s my cut? I did it for you.”

I showed her the picture of that moment from my camera:

With her family we looked over photos and video of her husband. In the back of my mind I was wondering how much time we had before there might be an ominous knock at the door.

“He looks very sad, doesn’t he,” she said. “I know he misses us. We miss him.”

Farah told me the last things he said to her before leaving, even though he couldn’t risk telling her when he was leaving. She told me how he stayed home from work so he could play with his small son. She told me that he called her the moment he arrived safely in Miami and that the journey—through a horrible storm—had been the most frightening of his life. She cried talking about how much Rigondeaux’s mother’s death had affected him shortly after he made it to Miami. She said his miserable performance winning the world championship in Dallas (which had nearly totally derailed his career) was because his son had gotten sick and he was terrified and guilt-ridden he’d lose the boy as he’d done with his mother, without being able to help or be with them. Farah assured me he called regularly and sent money. She assured me he was a decent human being and the love of her life. She assured me—and also her family at the same time—that he would never abandon them.

I’d had enormous trouble attempting to define Rigondeaux regardless of how much had been said about him or what he represented about Cuba and the United States. What was this human being fighting for everywhere but inside a ring? How much is revealed by what anyone fights for? Joe Louis took on the Nazis when he knocked out Schmeling. It was one of the first times white America gave a shit about a black man too. Ali took on Vietnam. Rigondeaux, like his time, was a lot more ambiguous. As with most Cubans who escaped or remained, he’d always been like a living double-exposed photograph imprisoned by an impossible choice.

Seeing is never believing. It always works the other way around. Far more people believe in angels than climate change.

Are you brave if you stay or if you leave? Depends who you ask. But nobody could have more incentive than Rigondeaux’s wife to speak badly of him for abandoning his family on some kind of opportunistic excursion while she stayed and suffered the fallout of his betrayal. Yet she spoke of his dignity in such an insane situation and when she touched on his pain she expressed her own on his behalf. She said the defining characteristic of her husband was his sensitivity.

This fact reminded me about when I’d interviewed Guillermo Rigondeaux two days before his last fight in Dublin on March 19th, 2011. He still refused to offer any details of the smuggler’s boat journey. However the expression on his face offered some explanation. The bitterness behind his eyes suggested anything he got in America in exchange for leaving his home wasn’t much better than collecting diamonds on some deserted island in the hopes one day he’d be rescued.

Twenty minutes after the interview was over, the translator knocked on my hotel room door.

“I wanted to tell you something. After you left he told me about it. But he doesn’t want people to know. He said it was the most frightening experience of his life. The Mexican officials were even worse than the boat ride…”

And then he saved the worst for last:

“He didn’t want to tell you because he didn’t want you to think he was a coward.”

I asked Guillermo’s eight year-old son, who shares his father’s name, what he thought of the father he hadn’t seen in over two years. I asked if it was hard carrying a name like his in a land that had condemned his father as the worst kind of traitor. He gave me a hard look for a second and ran into his room. Before I could apologize to his mother he ran back out to the living room with a poster of his dad and opened it up for me to see. The poster was bigger than him. “I miss him. I miss watching him fight. My father is my hero. ”

Rigondeaux’s wife smiled at her son and turned her face to me, “He’s both our heroes.”

Together with the other things she’d said, these were the first warm things about him as a person that I’d ever heard. I’d only ever heard him appraised as a political weapon for and against Fidel, as merchandise, and as the finest boxer who ever lived.

The boxing historian Burt Sugar gave me shit once at one of Rigondeaux’s fights when I asked him how fighters could be so routinely taken advantage of by everyone around them.

“Don’t you know anything kid? Boxers avoid confrontation everywhere except the fuckin’ ring.”

***

Harvey Milk said that while you can’t live on hope alone, without hope life isn’t worth living. I still believed it when I first met Rigondeaux in Cuba in 2007. Catching up with him in the US has been harder.

Something tells me that no matter what the restrictions were regarding baggage limits on that smuggler’s boat, none were traveling light. During the journey Rigondeaux and the rest of the people on that vessel left everything they’d ever known behind, perhaps forever. But the weight of their hope was their greatest vulnerability. Where could you hide it? Were the smugglers doing you a favor making it nearly impossible to bring any hope? Were you expected to smuggle it on board? Remember that where smuggling is concerned C.O.D. doesn’t stand for cash on delivery; it stands for cash or death. Yours. That’s why the captain of the boat is toting a shotgun in case you raise a fuss or something goes wrong with the plan. So viva go fuck yourself my little communist friend.

Right back to Turner’s painting of the passengers of the Zong: hope on the marketplace.

A few days later I’d arranged to meet with Farah Rigondeaux a second time. While she’d invited me, she’d never answered her phone to confirm the time. Under the table I’d hired a translator and cinematographer from Cuban television to accompany me. Both were dead certain “security” had gotten to her and were closing in on us. I was still having trouble wrapping my mind around getting arrested for sniffing around a story that highlighted the fallout of leaving the island as much as exploring their reasons for wanting to escape or remain.

“If she has not answered the phone, we should not be doing this,” my translator warned. “We will get arrested. We will lose our jobs. Our friends or family might lose their jobs. This is a vindictive system. It will not be pleasant for you either. There is a reason so few people will even talk with you.”

The cinematographer agreed solemnly. “This is a very dangerous place to go right now.”

***

We arrived at Farah’s house and climbed the stairs. Her son peeked out the window and told me his mother had left Havana for La Lisa to visit a dying relative. He was a very sad liar. He immediately tried to shut the window before saying anything else. I managed to keep him for long enough to ask him if he’d like to talk for a minute. He subtly gestured toward the direction of the camera pointed at their house. “You should leave now,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

We drove back down the hill, and the driver let me out near the Prado. I walked there for the last time and boarded my plane the next day, understanding even less than my first time leaving how easy it was to be cast away from a place so many could not hope to escape.

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I’d found the only room I could afford near the Prado in a pension that was being run as a transvestite brothel. We all shared the same bathroom. The boys called me El Guapo when they passed me in the hallways. They worked outside the gates of the Parque del Retiro while the Moroccans sold hash inside the gates or near the pond with the rowboats. The Moroccans even had business cards. It was all very civilized.

Then it was four late one night or early one morning. I hadn’t talked with anyone or slept for so long it didn’t matter. There was another argument cooking up from behind a wall in my room. The police had come the night before and left after a few minutes.

I leaned out the window looking over the little courtyard and lit a cigarette staring at the hung laundry of dresses owned by the skinny South American boys. There was an ashtray on the windowsill with a train wreck of cigarettes scattered in its palm.

I’d written her a letter and she’d promised she’d come see me.

She was going to stand me up.

I’d never gotten over her, the best kiss I had. She was a hooker. But she hadn’t told me she was. I didn’t know her name for the first few days. It wasn’t even a contrived gimmick. Somehow it just hadn’t occurred to me to ask for it.

I’d thought she was a little nervous to sleep with me because she was a virgin.

It only lasted three days.

The last time I saw her was on her porch:

“What’s wrong Brin?”

“I dunno. I just don’t have anything to ask you and I don’t have anything to say to you. I don’t know why.”

“Well, that’s when you say goodbye.”

She was right.

The night I met her I’d been working on a story about someone with the lousy luck of falling for a prostitute. When we were eighteen and first visiting Europe, a painter friend of mine had sketched a portrait of a haunted and haunting girl standing behind a window in the Red Light District and had given it to her. The real girl didn’t especially care, but the girl in my story did. And I was trying to figure out a way for them to kiss and have it mean something because I liked the poetry of prostitutes withholding a kiss and giving up all that other stuff.

The girl behind the counter at the cafe followed me outside where I was smoking and asked what I’d been writing about, then gave me a very startled look when I told her. I asked if I’d said something wrong and she asked if I could walk her home when she got off at 3am.

Along the way she told me she enjoyed the walks to the boys’ houses more than the boys.

I’d been waiting for her a long time.

I’ve been waiting for her a long time.

I’ll be waiting for her a long time.

At some point I needed to put some miles between us.

I hadn’t told anyone when I flew over to Madrid and stayed out all night Christmas Eve until that strange hour when the Chinese step out into the copper street light haze and huddle on hundreds of street corners across town clutching dozens of shopping bags full of to-go food for cheap. Chance being stuck over a toilet for 10 hours and go sightseeing through the nighttime streets that get started around 3 am. Walk until the Chinese have abandoned the street corners and turn off the Gran Via and head down to Puerta del Sol along a path where all the Africans are waiting for you peddling movies and music and scarves and sunglasses on blankets that if a whistle echoes down a corridor that Policia are approaching are packed up by the hundreds, swept up as quick as dominoes tip over, and two seconds later a thriving black market economy is a ghost echo of footsteps haunting 80 different directions, weaved into all the other squeaky Windex-scrubbed reflections on storefront windows of urgent men casting hectic glances at their fake designer watches.

Nurse your hangovers with scenic strolls down the street for some coffee near that statue of a bear reaching up into a tree who looked just like you going for a first kiss, just as shy and deliberate and off-key pilfering some girl’s museum gift shop while she was a little amused that you offered to read her palm because obviously you couldn’t read palms and just wanted an excuse to touch her.

For entertainment give Don Quixote another half-assed try in Spanish on a bench until the tourist buses roll up and the Gypsies move in like a kicked over ant nest and set up their coordinated strikes.

Then someone knocked on my door.

“El Guapo! Correo!”

I open the door to one of the transvestites with half her makeup off. I was pretty sure her name was “Daisy.” She handed me a letter. I opened it.

Just a date and a time and a place.

“I’m a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope they won’t.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald

You can always tell the people who fall for the kind of beauty that subtracts rather than adds something to their lives.

She had cigarette-stain eyes. I look into brown eyes rather than at all the other colors. I looked into her eyes and saw my own private pawnshop. I kissed her and it turned into a warehouse. Pure and complicated. The more she talked the less I knew about her. I liked the stories she told. Her body language stuttered to keep up. Holding her hand felt like sanitizing a lethal injection needle.

With no buildup or wind-down, apart from us nearly fucking, we’d said goodbye. She’d just finished doing some handstands for no particular reason. I didn’t see her again for three years.

I was outside her cafe again, long after she’d quit working there. I was leaning over a table writing in a notebook when I heard some roller skates smack the pavement. I looked up and saw her.

“Can I sit down?”

I stood up and we looked at each other for a while. I pulled out her chair and she sat down.

“I know you.”

I nodded.

“Brad?”

“Something like that. It doesn’t matter.”

“I remember. You were writing a story about a guy who falls in love with a prostitute.”

I nodded.

“It’s strange, it happened to me.”

“Hold on a second.” I tried to calibrate this. “You fell in love with a gigolo?”

“No,” she smiled. “I was a hooker.”

“When?”

“For the last 5 years. I just got out last summer.”

“You were a hooker when we met?”

“I was.”

“But you were working here.”

“Part time.”

“But you were in school.”

“How do you think I paid my tuition?”

“Your step-dad was a dentist!”

“It’s creepy you remember so much. Are you in love with me or something? I came so close to telling you but, you know, it just sorta took care of itself.”

***

In Madrid my phone rings…

“You know who this is?”

“You’re the only person who has my phone number.”

“I’m at Plaza Mayor.”

“Okay. You’re close by.”

“I’m high on ecstasy.”

“Delightful.”

“I’m drunk, too.”

“Come over.”

“You’re sure you know who this is?”

“I already answered that question.”

“Where do you live?”

I gave her my address.

“I’ll call you when I leave.”

4am. Phone rings:

“Still up?”

“No, I’m fast asleep.”

“I’ve been dancing all night. I just got out of a swimming pool five minutes ago. I stink. Still want me to come over?”

“Get over here.”

“Positive?”

4:15am. Phone rings:

“I’m getting the heebie-jeebies. I haven’t talked with you in a really long time. This is really weird.”

“Don’t worry. I have strawberries. It’s fine.”

“You have… strawberries?”

“Exactly.”

“You have strawberries?”

“Exactly. Nothing weird. Bowl of strawberries. Very wholesome arrangement. Everybody’s happy.”

“Okay.”

“Just come over.”

There was a pause and I felt something in my brain creak.

“I don’t think I––-” Raped-, pregnant-, aborted-pause. “Okay. I’ll be there in a second.”

A few minutes later I saw her get out of a cab on the Gran Via. I dug into my pocket and pulled out my keys and flicked them out the window. I heard them connect with the pavement.

She entered the room and sat on the floor and grabbed a handful of strawberries and smoked from a pouch of Drum tobacco.

She didn’t say much at first. Every ten minutes or so she’d go to the bathroom and leave the door open while she pissed. After the first time I leaned over and watched her.

“Why don’t you close the door?” I asked.

“Why should I?”

This seemed to me a very sensible answer.

“I dunno.”

“I’m peeing.”

“I know that.”

“Welllll?”

“Well, do you ever close the door?”

“Do you want me to?”

“No. It’s just weird you’re so… ”

She wiped herself and flushed the toilet.

“What?”

“I dunno,” I said. “It’s intimate.”

She came back over to the carpet and sat cross-legged facing me.

She wouldn’t say anything.

“Tell me how you got into it,” I asked, feeling like a jackass.

“Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.”

I gave her a look.

“My sister.”

“Is she still working?”

“No,” she said, pressing a strawberry against her lips. “She was a meth-addict. So was my mom. But my sister kicked it and got out of turning tricks.”

“So you worked on the street?”

“No. I worked at places they have set up for it.”

“Which ones?”

“A bunch.”

“What kinda type goes for it?”

She smiled. “There’s no type. It’s everybody. Nobody.”

“So what celebrities did you fuck?”

“Sometimes. Sure. That guy, Ruffalo. Something Ruffalo. Christian Slater was a client––-”

“Only Vancouver?”

“No,” she said. “Other places. They give you an apartment. They set you up with a room. I’d write my essays or study and the johns would come over and I’d buzz them in. They’d leave, I’d go back to the books until the next one arrived. I worked at a place in Japan for a while. Hostess thing. I didn’t go over there for it. But it finds you.”

“How’d you get out?” I asked. Are we on Larry fucking King? KISS HER.

“Roll me another cigarette.” She waited until I’d finished and handed it over and lit it for her. “You do that nicely. I always was a little crazy for how you roll and prepare those things. Well, a john approached me and I could see it in his eyes.”

“See what?”

“It happens to these guys. They fall for you.”

“But you never fall for them?”

“Anyway––-this guy was gray, gray but not ugly. He was wearing an expensive but all wrinkled-up suit. And he came over to the bed and sat down beside me. He told me I didn’t belong there. And I was pretty cold about it and told him if he was feeling something for me it was probably a useful thing to know that for me love was money.”

“You still believe that?” I asked.

“No,” she corrected. “But he said that was all right. It was fine. He took a second looking at the ground then turned back to me while he reached into his briefcase. He told me he had money. Then he asked what my price was to get out. I asked him to repeat himself—just to be a bitch about it—and he found the checkbook in that at-ta-ché briefcase of his. I couldn’t breath when I saw it. Sorry. I have to pee.”

She tried to get up but stumbled. Behind her I saw a wallet drop from her pocket. She struggled to get to her feet and made it, albeit a little woozy. With her back to me I swiped the wallet. She had the bathroom door open so I couldn’t case it.

“Had you ever put a price on getting out before?”

“Roll me another one,” she said, flushing the toilet. “No, I’d never put a price on it. Not before that moment. But I thought about it. And I just, you know, crunched the numbers.”

“What’d you come up with?”

“I told him I wanted him to pay my full tuition up to a doctorate in whatever I wanted. I wanted a car. I wanted an apartment for a year. I wanted 20 grand upfront.”

“And he tore off a check?”

“He tore off a check. We walked out the door together.”

“You were with him?”

“No. I saw him. But I wasn’t with him. It was just your average sugar daddy arrangement for a while.”

“You think so, huh?”

“Anyway, then I met somebody. And I fell in love with that somebody. That had never happened before. Or since. And I told the guy who’d gotten me out of the game and he was good about it and backed off. He gave me space with it. And the guy I fell in love with fell in love with me. We played house. Two years I was with him. And it was––I’m not sure how to put it––it was true.”

I reached over and took the cigarette from her mouth.

“Why are you looking at me like that, Brad?”

“You knew my fucking name when you were on roller skates, didn’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“Is everything you’re telling me made up?”

“Maybe.”

“Keep telling the story, Roxanne.”

“I played it straight with this boy and a lot of stuff was around the corner. Playing house was nice. But one night I’m out walking my dog and I bump into that john. The sugar daddy. He offers me 15 grand for one night. I took it. Turned the trick. And the next morning I go back to the guy I was living with and confess it.”

“Why?”

“Because I loved him.”

“I got that part. I meant, why’d you turn the trick?”

“Anyway––I told him it was a horrible mistake. I told him that I loved him. And he said he loved me and that we were done. That was a few months ago. Biggest mistake of my life.”

“So the john bought you out and bought you back in?” I felt like a CNN ticker.

“I’m getting tired.”

“Did you kiss the john?”

“I’m sleepy.”

“Sleep here.”

“Umm… I don’t think so.”

“Not with me. Just sleep here. I can’t sleep on the bed anyway.”

“Why?” she asked.

I shrugged. “It intimidates me.”

“I can’t stay here with you. I can’t stay here.”

“Why?”

“Because this is better. For you I mean. It’s a good little memory to gnaw on as it is.”

She got up off the floor and looked at me, tilting her head to one side.

“I have your name,” I said.

“Do you now? You know my name?”

“I don’t know it,” I corrected. “I have it.”

I pulled out her wallet and stood up and gave it to her. We both held onto it for a second before I let go and went over to my window and watched the dawn breaking until she came out the entrance of the apartment a suicide’s jump below my window.

Later on I had a book reading to give in Vancouver. She found out about it. She wrote me that she wanted to come. Then she fucked up the dates and missed it. She said she was going out of town for the summer but wanted a copy of my book. We were supposed to have a walk before she left but she screwed up preparing to pack and a bunch of stuff so all I had was five minutes to give her the book, have a cigarette, and say goodbye.

Then there was the issue of writing an inscription.

I went downstairs to meet her in front of my apartment building and she arrived and it was rainy and she had a hood on. Her car was crammed full of stuff and there was more tied down to the roof. She came over and I lit two cigarettes in my mouth and gave her one and my hand was shaking a little. I gave her the book and she glanced at the cover and compared the photo of me as a kid with my face now.

“That’s you, huh?”

“That’s me.”

I was watching her very carefully. I did not want that fucking inscription read until after she was out of my presence. I didn’t want to be accountable for it. Especially not at that moment. I kept thinking, Take the book hooker-bitch. Take it. Just take the fucking thing and go.

She went to open the front cover.

“Hey! Quit it. Don’t open that here.”

“Why? You gave it to me. It’s mine, isn’t it?”

She opened it.

“What does the title of your book mean, by the way? What does Sic mean?”

“It’s a dumb title because nobody gets it. You write ‘sic’ beside something when you’re saying it’s their mistake and not yours. It’s about fault. It’s attribution of blame.” I end up speaking like my father when I’m nervous.

“I get it. So, should I, like, write ‘sic’ beside this inscription?” She pointed at the word love.

I put my head down for a minute.

“Attribution of blame,” she repeated. “Fault. Whose fault is that… Brin?”

She giggled a bit and stood up and flicked her cigarette.

I walked into the rain to see how hard it was coming down. It was kinda misty.

“Do you have a pen, Brin?”

“Yup.” I gave it to her.

“I know whose fault it is.” She opened up the front cover and glared at the word.

She leaned over and I pulled back and everything was fine until she kissed me hard for a few moments, then slipped off my lips as softly as snow falling from a branch in the stillness of night.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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***

A year after I left her city I saw her again. She was on television at three in the morning. I was pining for some artsy channel with artsy foreign women to cure my insomnia. Then my search was interrupted.

First just a slim, ballerina-like stomach. Then the stomach was finger-painted with canary yellow paint. The word written was illegible. The dating-show scenario irritated me even before I knew to whom the stomach belonged. It took me a couple more seconds to take in the lines of her ribcage, her symmetry, remember the texture of her skin brailed with goose-bumps. Mostly I remembered her by the way she breathed. When the camera pulled back to reveal her face I wasn’t surprised anymore to see her, even this younger version. My version was 23. This girl might have been 20. The camera pulled back further and showed the man she was with as she painted her name across his chest. We’d sent dozens of letters to each other but I’d never seen her handwriting before. Just two weeks of letters in all–one magical week leading up to seeing her, the other feebly trying to convince her ever to speak to me again. Two sets of tracks left behind from the encounter. Timid footprints followed by a blood trail.

A year earlier, I’d flown across the continent to meet her. She laid out her offer, “If I like you, you’ll sleep in my bed. If I don’t, there’s a Holiday Inn three blocks down the street. That’s the best parachute I can offer.” I wasn’t sure what good a parachute would do.

Ten minutes before I left for the airport to meet her we were on the phone. I was nervous. She was scared.
“Are you expecting me to kiss you right when I see you?” I asked.
“Everything starts over when we meet.”
“I know.”
“Everything. Maybe I won’t even like you.”
“I know. It’s scaring the hell out of me. And you won’t feel disappointed, you’ll feel betrayed.”
“Maybe you won’t like me.”
“Hopefully. Hopefully you’re some 400-pound trough-feeding, shit-hog. But I know it’s even worse. I know you’re you and it will just be the same conversation––on the page, over the phone, in a café, in your bed. It’s the same fucking conversation isn’t it?”
“Nope. We lose the fantasy. We don’t have conversations anyway. We argue. We’re too much alike. Even if it works it can’t work. Besides, I can’t do long distance. I have a life here and you have a life there. This is doomed.”
“So what happens when we meet?” I asked her.
“We could try shaking hands,” she sighed.
“And what happens if I can’t let go?”
“Then you don’t have to.”

She hung up.

I arrived in her city at two and took a taxi to the address given. At three-thirty in the morning I was across a street staring up at her building with my back against a brick wall, trying to pick out her window. They all had the same strange intensity about them. I was looking for a window that I might be looking out of from inside her apartment.

I saw her shuffling up the sidewalk across the street in ballerina slippers. She stopped in front of her building just as a cab pulled up and a man exited with a bouquet of roses in his hand. He shouted, “Hey!” in her direction, raising the flowers. She glared at him. I walked over to the curb to have a better view. He shouted again and this time she looked around and noticed a woman in her building behind her who held the door open and the man ran over. As the cab rolled away from the curb she saw me and without even a pause crossed the street.

“Are you bored yet?” she asked.
“You look different.”
“Different?”
“I’m surprised.”
“I look different and you’re surprised. This is very flattering.”

Actresses shouldn’t look better than their headshots. She didn’t have any right looking better than that photo. I couldn’t make eye contact with her. I looked down the street for the Holiday Inn and found the sign. Despite considerable competition, this was going to be the worst mistake of my life.

I leaned in and kissed her.
No response.
I tried again.
This time she kissed back.
“Are you bored?” she asked after a moment.
“What? What the hell did you just ask?”
“Are––you––bored?”
“I’m nervous. I’m very fucking nervous. And I don’t even know how long I’ve been waiting here.”
“Are you bored?”
“Of standing here?”
She lit a cigarette and gave me the Medusa glare.
“You’re asking me if I’m bored of standing here and wanna go up to your apartment?”
“No.”

She turned toward the street and nudged her head. I followed her into a building, past a doorman, down a hallway, into an elevator, around a corner, through her door, past a roommate who, despite gracing the cover of Playboy’s Lingerie issue five months later, made no impression on me, entered her room, and finally leaned against her window looking out over the street to see where I’d sat against the brick wall. She took down her hair on the edge of the bed. She was a little over five feet tall and 98 pounds—and I’d never been more scared of somebody in my life. Punching your weight is a good rule.

Girls in ivory towers with impenetrable castles have intercoms. They have email addresses too. And Myspace accounts. That’s how I’d connected with her. First I’d seen her portrait and then I’d read her profile, which included my bookshelf as a reading list and, more importantly, answered the question of who she was looking for with, “Someone to write to.”

I asked if she’d read any of the books she had listed. She wrote back that I could go fuck myself. I asked which Salinger story was her favorite and she told me to go fuck myself again. I gave up and offered an apology. The next day she added me as a friend. I asked what gives.

“Wish you could see me laugh. I had a list of losers like you going after me and I had the delete page set up with all of them—including you, Romeo—when my computer froze. I slammed my fist into my keyboard and it added them and, unfortunately, you. I guess we’re gonna be friends.”

“Never doubt my resourcefulness or means. Irretrievable online seduction assured.”

“Loser.”

A week later we fell asleep to each other on the phone three nights in a row. With the time difference she’d fall asleep before me. But I’d lie there listening to her breathing for a couple hours. Occasionally she’d wake up and see if I was still there.

Throughout the day she’d write me little notes: “STOP thinking about me.”

And, even worse, she was always right.

Then we missed a night talking on the phone. She sent me another note, “You’re really going to make me fall asleep alone?”

I called her.

“Why aren’t you here?” she pleaded.
“That’s a dumb question.” My heart started racing.
“Why dumb?”
“Because I’ll get a plane ticket tomorrow.”
“You’re in love with me.”
“You’re doomed.”
“Admit it.”
“I’ll crush you, you pig-fucker.”
“Admit it.”
“If I was drunk I might let you blow me.”
“That’s awful.”
“I know, but my hands are shaking.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to know if you meant what you said.”
“You’ll come anyway, so what does it matter?”
“I won’t come without being invited.”
“Yeah you will.”
“No Space Invader action. We roll fifty-fifty on this, especially if a broke-ass writer is picking up the tab.”
“I didn’t tell you that your book arrived and that I brought you with me to the park today.”
“Don’t tell me that.”
“I know you love me.”

She entered a massive walk-in closet and deposited her ballerina slippers. Books were all over the place in her apartment. Good books. No shelves. She went to school studying math and literature at one of the top schools in the country.

“What are you reading?” I asked.
“Of Human Bondage.”
“Figures.”
“Let’s just sleep tonight.”
I smiled. I wasn’t sure if I was being preemptively rejected or if she’d been pleased with the results of meeting me. I was too scared to ask.
“I’m exhausted. You’re here for five days. There’s plenty of time for other activities. Hmmm… I usually sleep naked. This is a little strange.”

So we shifted into various shapes over the sheets but none fit together. The breeze tickled the blinds and made them tap against the window. I watched this for a while with her hair against my face. Tap, tap, tap––like some junkie with a syringe back home.

Early the next morning I got up to pack my stuff and leave but she grabbed my hand and I followed her into the living room where she climbed into the frame of a huge window overlooking the sunrise. She smoked in a bathrobe. I came over and she kissed my arm and slid her hand down the side of my back. It startled me.

“You built your body up like a boxer for armor didn’t you?”
I looked at her and nodded.
“Do you want an espresso?”
“No.”
“Coffee?”
“No thanks.”
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t belong here. I think I should go.”
“Why?”

I went back to her room to get my stuff. She followed me.

“I couldn’t sleep last night. I shouldn’t be here.”
“Listen. I’m not used to sleeping with somebody in my bed. It’s been a while for me. Okay? I wasn’t trying to be cold.”
“I still felt like an intruder.”
“Well, I’m going to take a shower. Am I going to do that alone?”

When she dropped the bathrobe my glance discreetly followed it to the ground. My mind’s kinda G-rated with certain things. I saw bare feet at first, ankles. Nakedness wasn’t all that important to her. In the shower she stopped me with a strong, silent hand.

“Would you like me to wash you?” she asked.
“What is that thing?”
“A loofah.”
“A what?”
“Just shut up.”
“Would I like you to wash me?”

Which she proceeded to do, side-stepping any genital contact.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked her.
“What does it look like? I’m washing your ankle.”

Drying off after. Her head back, very far back, and the hair shaken and hanging free from her neck, then hurled forward with a massive hairdryer attacking every strand, changing it, her eyes closed. There was nothing womanly about her. Years of ballet had annulled even the faintest attempt to change her. Even womanhood couldn’t have her. She was a self-portrait.

She got dressed. Maybe dropped something in the process. A bra. She reached over and took a breast with one hand, protected it almost. Even her peach fuzz looked like a thousand little fuses. While she ignored me and stared at her face in the mirror, looking at it felt like looking at a candy store window. I wasn’t sure if it was seeing my reflection or what was inside the window that I wanted to steal that made me want to smash the glass.

“Do you have to stare?”
“Yeah, I do.”

We were on the bed and I was inside her, barely.

“Admit it. You’re in love with me.”
“I came here to see you didn’t I?”
“Just say it.”
“Why?”
“Admit that you’re in love with me.”
“Of course I’m in love with you.”
“Do you have any idea how much pressure that puts on me?”
“Are you kidding right now?”
“Is this your idea of intimacy? Breaking into my life like some cat-burglar, liking what you find, and wanting to move in?”

I spent the first three nights in her bed and the last two at the Holiday Inn. They had a lousy movie she’d co-starred in on pay-per-view. I rented it two nights in a row before I flew home.

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I got stuck rereading that sentence on the plane for a long time.

For the last three years of my life I’d been following a boxer who’d risked everything to step into a smuggler’s boat and join other Cuban athletes in becoming the most expensive human cargo on earth just to have the chance of climbing wounded toward their dream. I was front row in Dallas when Guillermo Rigondeaux won a world title faster than anyone in the history of boxing. He was booed out of the stadium. He hadn’t risked anything. Mozart had opened at a Metallica concert. Nobody had ever seen anyone look so empty and resentful succeeding at their dream. Worse, hardly anyone was convinced he’d had to sell his soul to achieve anything and resented the suggestion that he had; they never believed he’d had a soul to begin with. In most people’s eyes, it seemed being a slave to an American nightmare was an improvement on living anything as ugly as Fidel Castro’s broken dream and he ought to be grateful.

I drove him and his new belt back to the hotel from the stadium that night. He barely said a word sitting in the backseat. Looking at his face in the rearview mirror, I asked him if winning a world title felt better in America than winning his first Olympic medal for Cuba. He glared at me and flashed the gold on his front teeth he’d once told me was the result of melting his first Olympic gold medal into his mouth. “Of course it’s better in America. They paid me.” I knew what he said, and the bitterly condescending way he’d said it, while not exactly inspiring, was the truth. This was the defiant headline he’d always maintained for leaving his country, the canary in the coalmine he wanted you to identify with. But I also knew the fine print for his headline: he’d never read so much as a word of a contract he’d signed in his life. Which, for my money, asked a different question of his story: is it better to be a slave in America than a slave in Cuba?

Nothin’ wounded goes uphill…

Every time I read the sentence over I imagined a different person I cared about entering the meaning as if they were entering a burning building. I imagined them violating the rule on their own terms even if they hadn’t yet, even if they’d died before they’d had a chance to.

I guess I kept reading that sentence over because it was building me up. I needed something to build me up because I was scared going into the ugly situation I was about to enter alone. Then, following the announcement our plane had begun its descent into Havana, the bald woman sitting next to me on the plane tapped my shoulder: “Are you okay?”

I shrugged while an advertisement on the screen pointed at me bragged about a company’s corporate responsibility and philanthropic exploits: The future is friendly ©

“Do you––” the woman began, smiling magnanimously and curiously pointing at my heart helpfully. “Un-der-stand––English?”

I couldn’t quite figure out if her over-enunciation implied I was deaf, a foreigner, or suffering from some longstanding severe mental handicap. Maybe I’d been pegged for the trifecta.

“I flunked it in ninth grade.”

“Oh,” she giggled. “Oh well. Well. You’re American.”

“How’s that?”

“Americans always say ninth grade, Canadians say grade nine. It’s an observation I’ve made.”

“So that’s the difference.”

“I don’t mean to sound presumptuous, but I wondered if you’d like to know why the stranger sitting next to you on the plane was returning to Havana?”

“Shoot.”

“I have a score to settle with Havana.”

I looked around at some of the other passengers on the plane. Healthy mix of agendas on all those faces. Havana’s always been a port and a crossroads at the same time.

“I’m guessing you’re not alone on that front,” I told her.

“Well, it was exactly one year ago today that I discovered a lump in my breast while I was taking a shower in an Old Havana hotel. I wanted to come back here to the same hotel, in the same room, for the anniversary as a fuck you…” She tried to cling to the anger but had some trouble with the traction. “I wanted to come back here as a fuck you to what I’ve gone through the last year fighting cancer. Because, well, I may have lost a breast and I may not be able to conceive a child anymore but guess what?”

I let out the rest of the air in my lungs and shrugged as an American Express ad glared at both of us from above my meal tray. She paused and stared at me. When I looked back at her I noticed that she looked eerily like the pretty blond my uncle had married when I was a little boy. She was the first woman I’d ever seen naked when she’d gone skinny dipping in a lagoon we’d visited one summer afternoon. I’d brought goggles I was too afraid to use in a lagoon until I knew I could swim down deep into that chilly darkness and gaze up at her with impunity. Was this… her? How long had they been divorced for?

She reached down and unzipped her bag, revealing a large box of condoms. “I can still get laid! I’m going to meet someone over there. I’m going to meet a few people maybe.”

She looked out the window with the island finally in view and smiled. “Did you know that Cubans say life is a joke to be taken very seriously?”

“When Columbus arrived they told him the island was infinite too.”

“You know, we should have dinner some night…”

***

They joke that if Spanish lacked a future tense Fidel Castro would be silenced: he’s only fluent in broken promises.

We touch down on the runway and I see the airport named after the poet Castro claimed was responsible for the last 52 years welcoming us. Miami uses the same poet in their opposition to Castro. And the same poet has a statue at the base of Central Park commemorating his time in New York that I walked past the day before. Even simple things like arriving at an airport here soak up ambiguity far too fast.

Then all those faces amidst that jungle and zoo scenery, ideas, feelings. Too many characters for any drama, let alone one that’s gone on this long. Millions of people picking at the same scab of a reality creating some of the most beautiful colors I’ve ever seen, almost to the point where I forget I’m watching something bleed and suffer. Finally a face I recognize waiting to pick me up…

I’ve been following the news. I’ve corresponded with a lot of people on the island and abroad. But what really worries me is how all over again you have to decide for yourself which the worse scenario is: crying about five times a day walking the streets of this city––60% for happy reasons and the rest for hard reasons––or being back home where you’ve walked your whole life and never cried over anything you’ve seen or felt. Which is the worse situation to be in? Which is more tragic? Is it uglier to have a sore heart all the time here or a numb heart where nothing reaches it back home?

Which brings up another funny question that turns the tables: Are you the high season crisis tourist in Havana or are they really the tourists of your crisis for being here?

I don’t want to think about it right now.

So what was I here to do again? Oh, yeah. Interview people. Interview them on camera. I mean, officially, conduct interviews on camera. Wait. You can’t do anything officially here; unless you know the right officials to bribe. But then most of the Cuban athletes themselves want bribes too. Bribe them with a hundred bucks to tell you how they turned down hundreds of millions. What’s it worth to you to meet some of the biggest uncashed human lottery tickets in the world if they only would’ve walked into the sea during their careers and washed up on American soil? What’s it worth to have them tell you how they turned down tens or hundreds of millions because of their principles and having nobody in America believe them and dismiss them as brainwashed? Between America and Cuba, who exactly has the better syrup in the Kool Aid if we can’t believe human beings can stand for anything when money is on the table? They’re telling the truth about turning down all that money and it doesn’t seem an accident to me you’ll only hear about the nominal percentage who take the cash versus the 99% who turn it down.

But while they’re telling the truth about turning it down, something tells me they’re telling the truth when they take my cash to discuss it too. Then again, if you don’t mind recognizing this kind of thing without attempting to reconcile it, you’re looking for trouble from both sides of the equation. If you don’t pick a side of the street and wander down the middle, there’s no faster way to get run over. Well, push your chips in and get in there and get a lot of illegal interviews and try not to get caught or arrested or get anybody else caught or arrested.

But what are interviews supposed to do again?

Fuck me.

Do I have a hope in hell of getting any answers that reveal more about the person I’m interviewing than my questions reveal about me?

Fuck me.

Is this what my interviews are meant to reveal or conceal?

Jesus fuck.

I had, to my thinking, a pretty ambitious list of people to interview on camera. A lot of high profile people. Banned authors, a controversial Time Magazine Most Important Person blogger who’d interviewed Obama not long ago and shown up on Wikileaks getting US funding, several Olympic champions, a teenage boxer who’d starred in a documentary who many people viewed as the next great champion. Highly touchy people as far as the government was concerned. Plus I wanted to interview Rigondeaux’s wife and child. The collateral damage. I’d been warned they had two cameras on their house 24/7.

I was assured by nearly anyone with an inkling of understanding into the Cuban government that I would never gain approval to interview any of these people by the government and if I pursued the matter in any way clandestinely I’d be escorted to the airport and probably never be able to return. Or worse. An American had just been imprisoned. Jimmy Carter must be on his way over.

Then everything fell apart before my trip. My camera guy backed out 24 hours before my flight. At the hotels in Havana 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 street.

“Beeeg brother eez watching, gringo!” I was warned by the people renting me their apartment illegally. “Welcome to Hotel California! Leezon to Mr. Henley’s words. ‘Check owwd aanee time bhat joo can never leave…’”

I’m convinced a country becomes ugly and sinister in immediate proportion to Don Henley’s lyrics carrying any significance or relevance.

Later on the warnings escalated to begging on the lives of their children that I cease anything that could get their family in trouble. The pleadings were so sincere and grave, at first I thought they were joking. Everyone was too scared to talk about anything related to Rigondeaux or other defected fighters. “You’re on your own,” I heard over and over again. “Security knows everything. Taps the phone. Checks your emails. 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. He is Judas in our country.” Surveillance had escalated. Cameras on most street corners now across the entire city.  More uniformed police. More secret police than ever I was told (How does one measure this?). The CDRs (Committee for Defense of Revolution) on every block are stepping up their vigilance! More informants! Government clamping down on everything, especially with an issue as touchy for the government as defecting boxers. Don’t you know anything, Brinicito? A Cuban’s worst enemy isn’t security, it’s his neighbor. Leave it alone. You can leave. We cannot. We live with the consequences of your actions. And if you are not careful you will not leave or ever be able to come back. What are you hoping to accomplish with this kind of work?

And I’m left to ask the same vulgar question: “Do you want my money to help or do I look elsewhere? Your choice.”

But of course whoever I ask it to starts laughing because the ugly punchline is there is no choice. Not for me either. While they have little or no opportunity to make money, I’ve enjoyed my freedom to rack up a boatload worth of credit card debt and the only way out is to somehow pull this off. I have no other qualification to speak of and the best and worst thing I have going for me is if you gave me 100 million today I’d be working on this tomorrow.

***

The first place I went after arriving was a wedding with a few friends. After it finished, I hired a gypsy cab to take me the 20 miles back into Havana. The old Ford was doing just fine until she began to overheat halfway back into the city.

“I knew she was angry about me listening to Raggaeton at this hour,” the driver shook his head, scrambling around the radio dial until he found the classical composer Ernesto Lecuona. “Even at her age she requires a little seduction at night. Now she will punish us for denying her. Cubaneo,” the driver shrugged and grinned at me in the rearview.

Only in Cuba was the driver’s last remark, tearing at the old scab. You hear it everywhere, but it always gets to me putting a new face on its meaning.

And about thirty seconds later, when a father and son pulled over with their horse-drawn carriage to offer a hand, I wondered if Cubaneo had an opposite expression meaning all the things that happen here that would mostly never happen anywhere else. The closest one I know in Cuban slang is palanca, meaning when someone helps you out of a jam.

Every aspect of life here is a jam. Literally survival itself depends on palanca on a daily basis…

But it cuts both ways. People actually give a shit about your misfortune.

Other people came by to help. Cyclists. Every Cuban is a mechanic. They have to be. In this place you can be sure everything that hasn’t broken down yet will soon. While hardly anybody has any money to replace anything, nearly everyone who sees trouble will stop and help.

I had a lot of trouble myself with the wedding. Just after sitting down, out of nowhere, a sonic boom exploded over our heads as fighter jets broke the sound barrier. I jumped out of my chair until several people came over to laughingly explain that on Tuesdays and Fridays at this hour the Cuban Air Force conducted test flights. “Tranquilo, chico. The gringos are not invading our island again tonight. Relax.”

And then, even more surprising, I did.

I never really joined in, but I couldn’t get far away either. Unlike nearly every wedding I’d ever been to, collateral damage was everywhere emotionally. There wasn’t any pageantry or much formality to it. Nothing self-conscious. No emphasis on expectations. No stiffness or tension. People were sweaty and relaxed. Despite the festivities being outdoors, the bathroom stunk out the whole place. Plumbing was shot. It was hard to concentrate on the past or the future with that stink permeating everything. Not very many photos taken. Nobody really posing for history. Lots of easy and hard tears coming on their own, without the usual cues from prescribed moments. Lots of warmth and dark humor. I felt the creepy distinction over jokes people clap at versus actually laugh at. Joy and sadness mixing on a lot of faces talking or observing, taking everything in. A certain amusement relating to how death and birth embroidered everything with the different generations brought together too. It just all felt very human with the burden of the joke shared by everybody.

A bird shat on the groom while he was reciting his vows and everyone except me exploded with joy about how prosperous the wedding would be. I was very confused. Someone had to explain to me that if shit lands on you in Cuba or you step in it, you’re regarded as lucky. Good fortune and wealth was on the way! The fact that this explanation was delivered to me with no trace of irony given the last 52 years of struggle made it even more magnificent. None of my friends had ever dreamed of owning a car. None of my friends or their parents had ever opened a bank account in their lives. During the 90s, my closest friend in Havana used a rag after she got her first period and her mother showed her how to rinse it out and use it again for the next month. Her boyfriend had fished for cats in his backyard during the same time period: hook, line, sack, hammer. “Cat cooked in lemon sauce was not that terrible.” Whoever spun shit befalling your life as a springboard to economic prosperity in this place without being disemboweled…

Will anybody believe this place existed when it goes back to being some awful, broken down circus lion?

Everyone got up to dance to Elvis while I sat down in a new chair and lit a cigarette. My closest friend in Cuba came over––visually a cross between Winona Ryder and Juliette Binoche––and introduced me to her filmmaker cousin who was going to help me with my film.

“What are you smoking, yuma?” she asked me.

“American Spirit.”

“And what does that taste like?” she smiled. “My communist lungs would like a taste.”

***

I had a fling once or twice with Fidel Castro’s granddaughter. I met her at a New Year’s party in Centro Havana. A lot of TV and Radio personalities were there. I didn’t know about the Fidel angle with her until later. She wasn’t the one who brought it up, so it actually might be true. As with just about everything enticing in Cuba, behind every silver lining is a cloud. But she was a model and caught my eye while she was dancing with another pretty girl.

After midnight of the New Year we went outside to the balcony for a cigarette. She’d just been outside the country for the first time and told me she never wanted to travel again after the experience. I asked why.

She asked me if I’d ever read Invisible Cities. I shook my head. She told me a story from it about several men around the world who had an identical dream. They all saw the same naked girl from behind, with long hair, running through an unknown city. They chased after her. Each twisted and turned and eventually lost her. After the dream all these men set out in search of that city where they’d seen her. They never found the city, but they found each other. They decided to build a city like the one in the dream. Laying out the streets, each followed their own pursuit of the girl. At the spot where they lost the fugitive’s trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream so she would be unable to escape. They all settled in this city waiting for the scene to be repeated one night. None of them, asleep or awake, ever saw the woman again.

New men arrived to this city having a similar dream. Changed streets and arcades and stairways so, at the spot where the woman vanished, there remained no avenue of escape. But they never found her either…

I wanted Castro’s granddaughter to finish the story, but I wanted a little privacy for revenge more.

We walked back from the party to my apartment, where I had access to a rooftop overlooking the busiest street at night in Centro Havana, Calle Neptuno. I live in a kind of Cannery Row with rum soaked dominos played on every street corner.

When we climbed the stairs several floors and got to the roof looking out over the other rooftops in all directions and the Juliet girls on their balconies talking down to their Romeos and the chorus line of taxis below us, instead of trying to kiss her I chickened out and went back to fishing for the end of the story:

“Tell me what happened with that city in the end?”

“Stop pretending like you brought me back here for the story when I can tell very easily you’re already looking for a place to fuck me on this roof. Have some dignity, yuma.”

She took off her shirt and glared at me. The dogs on the roof next door sounded the alarm and woke up the rooster to join in.

“Are you worried about Fidel finding out? You were quite bold until you discovered my secret.”

It turned out nobody else had the dream of the girl and everyone else who saw the city left immediately because of the ugliness of such a place invented and designed only as a trap.

Fidel’s granddaughter asked me the next morning if this was helpful tourist information.

***

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