BOXING FOR CUBA
An
Immigrant’s Story of Despair,
Endurance & Redemption
GUILLERMO VICENTE VIDAL
Copyright
© 2007 by Guillermo Vicente Vidal.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States of America.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system without written permission from the publisher.
The material in this book is written to the best of the author’s recollection.
Photos by Guillermo Vicente Vidal.
Ghost
Road Press
Smashwords edition
ISBN 978-0-9825043-8-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007921501
Ghost
Road Press
Denver, Colorado
ghostroadpress.com
BOXING FOR CUBA
An
Immigrant’s Story of Despair,
Endurance & Redemption
GUILLERMO VICENTE VIDAL
A
mis padres,
Roberto y Marta Vidal,
que
sacrificaron todo;
A
mis hermanos,
Roberto y Juan Vidal,
que me
ayudaron a sobrevivir
To my
parents,
Roberto and Marta Vidal,
who sacrificed everything;
To my
brothers,
Roberto and Juan Vidal,
who helped me survive
“If I had known what life in exile was going to be like,” my father said often over the years, “I would not have chosen it.”
The rest of us knew precisely what he meant: if any of us could have foreseen the physical and mental suffering, the rupture exile would bring to our family, the madness it would engender in my parents, the myriad daily challenges posed by a new culture that seemed strange in every way, perhaps not one of us would have opted for the path we chose.
Yet, in the end, I know I believe in the truth of an old Cuban saying more than I believe in anything else: “No hay mal que por bien no venga.”
Even out of the worst of it all, good things come.
CONTENTS
Dos
A
Wonderful Time to be Alive
Tres
The
Bearded Ones
Cuatro
La
Pescera
Cinco
Lost
Boys
Seis
Boxing
for Cuba
Siete
Betrayals
Once
The
First Cuban on the Moon
Doce
Burial
Grounds
Trece
Volver
a Cuba
Catorce
The
House and the Mango Tree
Uno:
The
Center of the Universe
OUR HOUSE in Camagüey was named for a bar of soap. “La Villita Candado,” it was called, and Candado was a popular bath soap in the years before Fidel and his fierce compañeros swept down out of the Sierra Maestra and wholly changed our lives. The house had been a wedding gift to my parents from my paternal grandfather, who purchased it sometime in the 1940s from the family who had won it in a contest of sorts. As an advertising scheme, the soap company had built several modest villitas in cities across Cuba, announcing that a corresponding number of tokens—allowing the bearer to claim one of the houses—had been buried in bars of Candado. Sales of Candado soared; the tokens ultimately emerged from a few precious bars, and each of the houses retained minor renown for many years afterward in a nation where, for many people, owning a home was only a dream.
In my family’s case, it wasn’t our luck but our larger family’s prosperity that had allowed us to make La Villita Candado our home. Good fortune, in fact, seemed to abandon us entirely beginning at a time when I was eight years old. And our prosperity—such as it was—was the thing that ultimately labeled us enemies of the people, set our small world on its end, and profoundly altered the life I otherwise might have lived.
• • •
In my earliest years in Cuba, however, I was buoyed by the absolute certainty that the city of Camagüey—the third largest in my country—lay at the lush center of the universe. Our home was situated on Carretera Central, the busiest street in town, and the house and its ample garden were surrounded by a stucco and wrought-iron fence that made our home feel like a grand fortress to my two brothers and me. Despite our seasoned tree-climbing skills, we couldn’t scale the high fence, yet we didn’t mind. The fence simply seemed to define the boundaries of an amusement park that was exclusively ours, the twins—Roberto and Juan, whom we called Kiko and Toto—and I enchanted each day by the rainbow-striped lizards that raced to escape our grasps and the slippery tadpoles that swam in the huge earthenware pot called a tinajon, which captured rainwater from the roof. We built exotic cities for ourselves among the jungle of fruit trees and shrubs and vines, played cowboys and Indians, embarked on daring safaris, and fought great battles against injustice of every kind. We endlessly climbed the great mango tree—its highest branches, even back then, visible throughout the neighborhood—knocking its wonderful fruit to the ground with our fists, rocks, and sticks.
We marveled at our friend Marcelo, the gardener, a young campesino in his twenties already missing his front teeth. Like so many people from the country, Marcelo seemed to find a way add the word chico, kid, to almost every sentence he spoke, and his accent was thick enough that sometimes we simply guessed at what he was saying, yet he was lithe and strong and adept—the kind of young man boys like us couldn’t help but be fascinated by—and the fact that he used his machete to cut the lawn rather than the mower my father provided was proof to the three of us that he was man of exceptional skills.
It may have been true throughout Cuba in those pre-revolution years, but in our case at least, Marcelo and the others who worked for Mami and Papi were woven tightly into the broad fabric of our family. We all were related somehow, if only by our daily proximity to each other and the fact that all of us—boys and servants alike—depended for our survival on my father’s business acumen and my mother’s complex kinds of acceptance. Our nannies Romelia and her daughter-in-law Emilita; Gladis the cook; Ismaela, Felix, and El Negrito Juan—the three of them having worked for my grandparents since Mami herself was a child—were people with whom I shared both love and relation, despite the fact that, in the case of Gladis and El Negrito Juan, it was a kinship plainly complicated by color.
Like the United States, Cuba had been stricken by the blight of racism since the earliest days of the slave trade, and because Gladis was black, none of us considered it unacceptable that she was confined to the kitchen and virtually never ventured into other parts of the house. Her coal-skinned boyfriend wasn’t allowed to enter the house at all, and I remember him often waiting patiently for her to come out the back-door and join him for a bit, the two of them stealing kisses until the teasing my brothers and I made them suffer—as well perhaps as the demands of our dinner—would send him off to another Cuba, one the three of us knew nothing about. El Negrito Juan, who lived in tiny room at the back of my grandfather’s medical clinic, would seldom venture farther than our front porch. He was a kind and gentle man who had been devoted to my mother since she was a small child, and the two of them shared an important bond, one that somehow cut through the prejudices and terrible affronts of that era.
My mother was still a small girl when people began to comment about her extraordinary beauty. Marta Teresa Ramos Almendros, they would insist, surely would grow up to be the most beautiful woman in Camagüey, and their predictions proved correct. But Mami’s charm, her social graces, her family’s wealth and position, and her beauty—the attributes that had drawn my father to her—masked a deep insecurity and a strangely incurable loneliness, the products of wounds she had begun to suffer early in life.
She was born in 1924 to Juan Ramos Garcia, a well-respected Camagüey physician, and Rufina Almendros Boza, herself a storied beauty from one of the city’s wealthiest families. My grandfather owned a large home near the city center, one that housed his medical clinic as well, and my grandmother decorated the house with furniture, paintings, and statues she imported from Europe. Dr. Ramos and his young wife wanted for nothing; they led a charmed life, and they lavished attention on their two children, no doubt in part because my grandfather had lost his own mother when he was just five, was raised by an aunt when his father no longer would do so once his wife was dead, and struggled to achieve success, working his way through medical school, then serving as an army doctor for many years before he married Rufina and opened his private practice.
I often suspect that great equalizing forces exist that do not allow even the most fortunate people to live their lives free of suffering, and no doubt that lesson first came to me in the stories I heard from my mother about how her family’s world shattered when she was five—at the time when her younger brother, Juan Benito, contracted a disease Dr. Ramos diagnosed as polio.
Juan Benito, called Nene, or Baby, was only three when his father—a man quite confident in the belief that his intelligence and the sheer force of his will were enough to allow him to accomplish virtually anything—first began to restrain the whole of his son’s small and twisted body in steel and plaster casts for months at a time in hopes that the confinement would prevent his bones from growing crooked in ways they dramatically had begun to do. My grandfather studied his son’s condition exhaustively, tried every treatment about which he read, and experimented with some of his own design, yet always without success. Each time he cut the casts away, Nene’s body had grown more twisted, and with the failure of each successive treatment, my grandparents began to more sadly confront a heartrending truth: Nene could not be cured.
To help compensate for their son’s suffering, his parents increasingly focused their lives on him, virtually never letting him out of their sight, both of them sinking into terrible depression and despair as their son grew ever more disabled. And in much the same way that my grandfather had been orphaned by his mother’s death and his father’s subsequent abandonment of him, Mami, in turn, was forsaken by her parents’ desperation over their son’s awful fate. The two children adored each other, and both had brought their family great joy, but increasingly my grandparents made Nene and his suffering the totality of their world, one that contained very little room for my mother. Of course, she too was traumatized by what Nene was forced to endure, yet she was still a young girl, and she found it almost impossible to understand why her brother’s disease also seemed to push her parents ever farther away from her.
Ismaela, her nanny, Felix, a lab technician in Dr. Ramos’s clinic, and Juan, a custodial jack-of-all-trades, did their collective best to offer Mami the love and attention she longed for—tender, parental kinds of care that extended well into the 1950s, by which time she had become a mother herself—yet despite their best efforts, they could not fully replace the love my grandparents now seemed strangely incapable of offering her.
As she grew older and the measure of her beauty became apparent to everyone who met her, the blessing of her good looks was also transformed into something of a curse, not only for Marta, but for her parents as well. People cruelly—and all-too openly—referred to the two Ramos children as “the beauty and the beast;” the recognition of their daughter’s loveliness only added to her parents’ anguish over the continuing physical deterioration of their son, and it grew increasingly difficult for Marta herself to accept her beauty without feeling deeply guilty as well. Why should good fortune have come to her and not to her beloved brother? How could her future burn bright at the same time his was growing dimmer, his body becoming ever more twisted, misshapen, and repellent to others?
To Marta, there simply seemed to be no meaningful explanation. Her parents did not notice her distress, let alone attempt to console her; friends and extended family members invariably would express delight in her beauty and sympathy for her brother in the same breath, and inevitably in my mother’s mind, the two circumstances became maliciously linked. Still a young girl, the only thing she believed she could do in response was to dedicate herself to filling with joy those aspects of Nene’s life that had been left empty by his disability. Instinctively, she was sure she never could be a good enough sister, but her attempt to succeed nonetheless became her consuming passion. She focused all her energies and activities on her brother, trying her best to make each day as entertaining and as fun for him as possible. She pointedly declined invitations from friends that weren’t extended to her brother as well, and she silently acquiesced when her parents announced one day that she could no longer bring girlfriends to their home: Nene might develop a crush on one of them, they whispered to her, then suffer the added humiliation of a broken heart. It was that kind of obsessive protectiveness that came to consume their home. The family’s pleasures most often were forced, even counterfeit; the daily tensions grew huge, and although Nene’s worsening condition was impossible to ignore, everyone nonetheless rigidly refused to admit that anything other than polio might be the cause of their collective pain.
My grandfather was a dedicated and by-all-accounts capable physician; he worked tirelessly, if in vain, to help his son, and I’m sure he must have been at least privately aware that Nene suffered a more rare and insidious disease than polio, in fact. Although he would never have a definitive diagnosis, by the time he was a teenager he was terribly disabled and disfigured, and surely calling the disease polio—one common in that era, and which was acquired rather than congenital—was an attempt both to make Nene himself feel less like a freak and to lessen the family’s sense of shame.
It may have been because of that same kind of shame—or the cumulative effects of his stress or simply his ongoing grief—but whatever the cause, eventually my grandfather began to seek comfort in the arms of women other than his wife. His absences from home grew lengthy and impossible to ignore; rumors of his liaisons began to circulate openly, and they eventually reached my grandmother’s ears, of course. Rufina became obsessed with finding proof of her husband’s indiscretions; she threatened divorce—something quite scandalous in the Cuba of the 1940s—and she and her husband began to fight violently, Rufina screaming at her husband at the top of her lungs, breaking objects the two of them treasured, and terrifying her teenage children. On the day my mother came home and shared the news with Nene that, while out in the streets of Camagüey, she had inadvertently spotted their father arm-in-arm with a woman much younger than him, the two children were terrified that it would be only a matter of time before their parents divorced and they were abandoned by their philandering father.
Despite those tensions and the challenges she faced, there also were many pleasures in my mother’s life, and among the most important were the weeks she and Nene spent each summer at the family’s sugar plantation near the city of Cienfuegos on the southern coast. Away from their parents, the two lived free from the myriad rules, regulations, and slow-burning anger that filled their days in Camagüey; no one who looked after them on the plantation worried unnecessarily about Nene’s fragility, and the children were free to play with whomever they chose. And as Marta grew older, on languorous summer evenings she would go to dance-halls in Cienfuegos with fellow teenagers from the plantation, where boys would line up to take turns dancing with the patron’s beautiful daughter.
In time, young men began to pay similar kinds of attention to her back home in Camagüey. Although never a spectacular student, she loved to paint and sculpt, and she adopted an unmistakably artistic flare in her dress as well. The beautiful Marta was gregarious and charismatic, and by the time of her quinceañera, the celebration of her formal coming-out on her fifteenth birthday, she had emerged as a belle of Camagüey’s social scene. At each elaborate fiesta and at social events of every kind, she was the center of attention, something she had longed to be in the years since her parents had stopped seeing her when her brother’s needs began to grow great.
Mami was intoxicated by people’s fascination with her, and their enthrallment seemed to make her feel whole. Buoyed by the press of attention people paid her in the ensuing years, she went to college, earned a degree in education, then worked as an assistant in my grandfather’s clinic, and began to imagine finding the perfect husband—a stable, ambitious, and good man who would shower her with the kind of love her parents never had. But deep inside, the injuries her parents’ abandonment caused didn’t heal. She now incessantly sought out acceptance from others, and no amount of attention ever seemed enough for her. Like her mother, she could quickly become enraged; she regularly suffered severe bouts of depression, and something else troubled her profoundly as well: although she very much wanted children of her own one day, children whom she knew she could love and nurture in every important way, she was secretly afraid that Nene’s disease was hereditary, and that one of her children—or all of them perhaps—would be born a beast as well.
My mother was twenty-five when the twins arrived. Kiko—Roberto—was born first by fifteen minutes. Being nominally the elder would always allow him to claim a bit of seniority—and it meant that he was the one who received my father’s name, of course—but the price he immediately paid was the bumps and bruises he suffered in passing first through the birth canal. In addition to being traumatized by that passage, he was skinny and small and certainly not a pretty baby. His incrementally younger brother Juan, in contrast, slid out easily and without a scratch. Named Juan Antonio after his two grandfathers, Toto was big and strong and healthy in every way, and it seemed obvious that he had been stealing more than his share of the sustenance in his mother’s womb.
News about the twins’ appearance on the scene spread rapidly throughout Camagüey, and everywhere my parents went people were eager to have a look at Roberto and Marta’s fine new chicos gemelos. Invariably, they were impressed by what a beautiful baby Toto was; it was Toto to whom people made eyes and who they wanted to hold—and their fascinations with only one of his sons annoyed the hell out of my father. He responded by lavishing his attentions solely on his namesake son, doing his best to ensure that Kiko received as much care and affection as Toto did, doing so often enough that soon my mother was certain that Kiko was my father’s favorite.
A year and half later, I slithered kicking and screaming from my mother’s womb. I was fat as a Buddha and a mama’s boy right off the bat, crying whenever I lost sight of her, demanding her constant attention, and predictably, I suppose, my father grew convinced that my mother cared more for me than her two older sons. The truth was that although both denied having a favorite child, each of my parents did, and for Kiko and me, being allied with a particular parent—whether we had chosen to be or not—would prove to be a painful curse.
Unlike my brothers, whose names were family names, I was named after our neighbor, an auto mechanic. Mami and Papi’s sedan seemed to need constant tinkering at the time, and Memo—a nickname for Guillermo—was a mechanic they trusted and liked. He was at work on the car’s transmission, in fact, on the morning I was born, and so I became his curious namesake, though instead of being called Memo, I became “Guille,” a name that somehow stuck.
Soon after I arrived, my mother became seriously depressed, lacking the energy to get out of bed, able to do nothing more than lie with me and feed me—a postpartum reaction that few people understood in those days, least of all my father. As far as Papi was concerned, the attentions she paid me were simply proof of her tendency to make poor choices, and her lengthy depression was only one more manifestation of her erratic behavior. Unlike the birth of the twins, which had brought them some months of respite from their combat, my appearance unfortunately had the opposite effect, initiating a model of conflict that continued throughout my parents’ lives together, one in which Kiko, Toto, and I became their battleground, their prisoners of war, and their uncomprehending victims.
By the time I was old enough to remember, Mami and Papi could muster a reason to fight almost any time or anywhere. Whatever its catalyst, the normal pattern was one in which Papi would emerge the victor of sorts in a shouted war of words, then Mami, in turn, would fly into hysterics—hurling dishes, vases, and anything else within reach into the walls or onto the tiled floors. I can’t be sure why her sons also began to seem fair game, but while I was still a toddler, she began to turn her anger on us as well, sometimes striking one of us with her open hand or her fist, sometimes becoming so enraged that Romelia or Emilita, our nannies and de facto bodyguards, would have to tackle her and hold her down to keep us from suffering serious injuries at her hands. It was my brother Kiko who was always my mother’s first choice as a target, certainly because he was my father’s openly acknowledged favorite—Mami imagining that hurting Kiko was the only way in which she could injure her husband, on whom she otherwise couldn’t land meaningful blows.
Papi, in turn, would attempt to provoke her further by becoming oblivious to my very existence. He would look right through me, as if I’d simply vanished into the thick tropical air, offering the rewards of his fatherly attention to my twin brothers but not to me, even though I sat on the floor between them. Papi hit me only a handful of times over the years, but the way in which he could utterly vanquish me from his life wounded me every bit as much as fists ever did.
Toto wasn’t immune to their wounds, of course, and like Kiko and me, he was terrified on those occasions when Mami’s furies literally would last for days, her tantrums continuing without release until Papi would summon wonderful, patient Ismaela, still Mami’s great consoler, to come to La Villita Candado to hold her, to talk quietly with her, and somehow to settle her at last. And like Kiko and me, on many nights Toto would lie awake for hours listening to our parents raging in the dark of the night.
As children, we wondered, of course, how an argument could flare when the lights were out and everyone presumably had gone to sleep. It wasn’t until many years later—when Mami explained that my father had completely lost his sexual interest in her after I was born—that the reasons for their late-night screaming began to make some sense. She often would awaken, she said, from a dream in which my father announced he was leaving her for another woman. She then would waken him and beg him to ease her fears; he would tell her she was insane, and the pyrotechnics would erupt. At the time, the only thing the three of us could be sure of was that our three beds were not safe havens from the storms in our home; that at any time of the day or night peace was very precarious, and our lullabies, such as they were, likely would be screeching, swearing, crying, and the crash of shattering objects.
The fact that people throughout the neighborhood often would speak in hushed tones—conversations my brothers and I nonetheless readily overheard—about the battle that had been fought at La Villita Candado the night before helps explain how serious and how common the combat was between my parents. Yet, in time, at least they learned to flee from their suffering. Papi threw himself into his work and business investments and stayed away from home as much as he could. Mami’s refuges were Camagüey’s tennis club and country club, where she spent innumerable hours with friends. She loved to shop, and neither she nor my father nor the three of us children ever lacked for money. Our family led an idyllic life—or so it appeared to those who lived far enough away from the sounds that bespoke the truth.
It’s one of the miracles of childhood, I suppose, that kids can so constantly find happiness amidst their sorrows and fears. My brothers and I certainly possessed that remarkable resiliency, and because of it, I’m sure I remember those early years in Cuba with much more fond nostalgia than tangled regret.
If we had to watch and listen to our parents brutalize each other, we also were regularly assured by them that we were safe and deeply loved; my father even communicated his care for me in ways that subtly worked their way inside and offered me a budding sense of my place in the world. Mami was beautiful and vivacious when her mood arced upward rather than down. She would spend hours preparing herself to go out—her dark hair and make-up perfect, her nails painted bright red, her tight-waisted dresses accentuating her fine figure, one that would engender whistles from men on the street, I remember, when she occasionally wore peg-legged pants—and like the legions of Mami’s friends in Camagüey, we loved to be with her.
Every bit as important as our mother, the people who worked for us offered us the most staunch and critical kinds of support. It was Romelia who really had charge of the house. Without bearing a title, she commanded the other servants, and she possessed the ability to be relaxed and alert to dangers at the same time. She was stocky and short and would take each of us into her cuddling embrace several times each day. She loved us, we knew, and it was Romelia who constantly soothed our wounds—our scrapes and contusions as well as the serious injuries that were less easy to see.
When one of us was ill with mumps, measles, or a high fever, Romelia readily presumed it was because we were possessed by spirits and that it was time to cortar las ojas, or cut the leaves, as she would say. She was a devoted practitioner of Santería—the blend of Catholicism and African Yorùbá beliefs widely practiced in a number of Caribbean countries—and would bring avocado leaves stripped from a tree in the garden to my bedside, place them on the floor, then have me stand on the leaves in my bare feet. As she mumbled words I couldn’t understand, she would cut to pieces the parts of the leaves still exposed with a kitchen knife while Mami watched in silence, obviously hopeful herself that the ritual would be efficacious. And it was: invariably I was much better the following day, whether from the simple power of suggestion, or because of Romelia’s spectral skills with knives and leaves.
Romelia’s daughter-in-law Emilita, a plain young woman in her early twenties, was as beautiful as Mami in our eyes. She had no children of her own, so we were the beneficiaries of her bountiful maternal instincts; she was playful and full of fun and could be counted on to join in our games and garden adventures. Emilita and Romelia took turns spending the night at our house, and my memories are bright with waking up each day to one of their smiling faces.
Although we virtually never entered the house’s white-tiled kitchen, the glorious food Gladis created there kept my baby fat from falling away and ensured that my brothers and I seldom dawdled when we were called to the table. She served steaming white rice with virtually everything—most often chicken, pork, and the ubiquitous ground-beef dish called picadillo, and I loved the name we gave to simple black beans and rice—moros y cristianos, Moors and Christians—almost as much as I craved the staple itself. We ate wonderful fruits like guava and mamey year-round, and my brothers and I relished tostones, fried plantains, and plátanos dulces, sweet bananas, as if they were boyhood’s best prizes.
Papi’s treasured fifty-gallon aquarium, filled with strange and fascinating fresh-water tropical fish, occupied a place of honor in the dining room. His glass pescera brought him as close in Camagüey as he could get to the undersea wonders that always had lured him, and, like Papi, I remember staring at it for hours with almost as much rapt attention as I also regularly paid to the large, oval-tubed television that commanded notice in a corner of the white-tiled living room. My brothers and I loved watching American westerns and Flash Gordon, and I was personally such a fan of Broderick Crawford’s Highway Patrol that I could proudly growl out the words in English, “Set up a roadblock!” Televisions, of course, were far from commonplace in Cuba in those days, and surely the opportunity to watch it was partly the lure when friends and family members occasionally came to visit.
Among those infrequent guests, perhaps my favorite was Ismaela, who for my mother had been the blessed combination of Romelia and Emilita rolled into one, and who was elderly now, or so it seemed to Kiko, Toto, and me. She had silver hair and a heavy figure, and I remember relishing my too-infrequent opportunities to sit in her broad and welcoming lap, listening to her stories about Mami’s adventures and many misdeeds back when she was our age. Felix had never been married, and so my mother was his closest claim to a daughter, and we were like his grandchildren. He always had hard, bright-colored sugar candies for us when he came to visit; he taught us cubilete, a classic Cuban betting game employing poker dice, which we would play with him for hours. I still cherish a photograph I have of me standing beside him, my fat little arm on his shoulder, Felix looking at me with a kind of tenderness I never received from my father. Felix worked as a lab technician for my grandfather, Dr. Ramos, and was a colleague and close friend of El Negrito Juan, the two men living in small rooms at the back of the clinic. Juan’s skin, I remember, was as dark as a moonless night; he often wore a broad-brimmed felt fedora, even in the most sultry weather, and as we sat on the porch with him on his visits, it was obvious that, like Felix, our mother—the very Mami whose moods somehow could transform her into a different person—mattered enormously to him as well.
The two boys who lived next door—one of them was also named Kiko and his brother was Oriol—were our fast friends and our regular nemeses, and hardly a day passed when we did not spend time with them, our respective parents aware that we belonged to different social strata, if we as yet were not. Unlike the three of us, sheltered and undeniably pampered behind the wall of La Villita Candado, Kiko and Oriol Marín were free to roam the streets of Camagüey; they were bold, foul-mouthed, and obnoxious. Kiko and Oriol fascinated us, and simply being with them made us braver in misbehaving than we ever were on our own.
One time, when Kiko and Oriol were with us in our garden, we heard loud and unusual moans and groans coming from the open window of a house that backed up immediately against our back fence. The four of us snuck a peek into the window and observed a young couple energetically making love. The two were singando, Kiko Marín explained—doing the horizontal mambo, something adults seemed to think was important to do—and we watched and listened and giggled at what a ridiculous thing it was. The commotion continued for some time and when at last it was finished and we could see that the bed was now empty and carefully made, neighbor Kiko’s roguish mind was seized with a great thought. Why didn’t we accessorize the love-bed with some shit conveniently supplied by our dog Lucky? It sounded like winning plan to the four of us, and we searched the grass and found four fresh helpings, then used a shovel to lift them across the fence, through the open window and place them on the smooth bedspread. Oriol, my brothers, and I rolled laughing on the lawn and delighting in our cleverness while Kiko ran home to fetch shit supplied by his own dog, and by the time our work was done, the whole of the bed was adorned. It was a brilliantly funny thing to do, we all agreed, before we moved on with the pressing pursuits of the day.
After dinner that evening, we were watching our favorite television comedy, Casos y Cosas de Casa—about, as it happened, a young bachelor and his sidekick who constantly created mischief—when the doorbell rang and I suddenly froze, remembering rather vividly now the love making and the array of turds from earlier in the day. Emilita went to the door, and quickly returned, urging my mother to go speak with an angry gentleman, and, quite predictably, I suppose, within seconds she was answering his fury with loud shouts of her own. Their argument grew animated, even by Mami’s standards, and it was interrupted only by her repeated trips into the living room to ask us if, in fact, we were responsible for defiling the neighbors’ bedroom. We denied that we were, of course, and added tears to our denials, and finally, in an act of betrayal that Judas himself would have admired, we blamed the incident on our neighbors Kiko and Oriol. They must have snuck into our garden and done it when we weren’t watching, we insisted in the midst of our sobs, and although Mami surely knew how unlikely that was, she went out once more and furiously told the neighbor to take his complaint to the Marín’s house, then came inside and we all returned our attention to the television, never speaking about the matter again.
We discovered the next day that Kiko and Oriol, in turn, had blamed the dog-shit deed on us. But they were punished, while we were not, and neighbor Kiko was angry with us for some time afterward for ratting him and his brother out. Like he did on that occasion, we could count on Kiko to invent the cleverest kinds of capers, but he was hot-tempered and always quick to throw punches, and it was specifically for that reason that Papi once suggested we invite him and Oriol to join us at our favorite place in all the world.
Papi christened the little beach cottage at Playa Santa Lucia he built especially for us Casa Rojugui—the latter a word of his own making that combined the names Roberto, Juan, and Guillermo. A twelve-mile long, white-sand beach on a peninsula separated from the Cuban mainland by salt-flats and mosquito-ridden marshland, Playa Santa Lucia lay beside a reach of the Caribbean where the water was clear and calm and astonishingly shallow, and where the world’s second-largest coral reef lay only a mile off-shore, a magical, other-worldly place where Papi had snorkeled and scuba-dived since he was a boy himself.
At Santa Lucia, our lives had no boundaries. Our parents’ obsessive worries about us vanished there, and we were free to roam the long shoreline—fishing from the muellecito that reached out into the bay like a narrow finger, swimming, snorkeling, splashing in the warm sea that always greeted us with open arms. Santa Lucia was the place where once we pulled a three-foot octopus from the shallow, aquiline water, where we would marvel at sand-crab invasions of the beach when the moon was full—so many of them crawling onto the sand that it was almost impossible to walk without crushing one or getting pinched by an angry claw—where following the heavy rains of spring, millions of mosquitoes would seek us out as prey. We would race toward the cottage as a black cloud of the beasts blew toward us, and even inside the house, we had little choice but to dive into bed under the mosquito nets that offered us only meager protection.
For boys like us, the beach at Santa Lucia and little Casa Rojugui were the heaven we would have made if God had given us tools. Yet it wasn’t a place that was entirely free from the world’s complications. Papi had built the two-bedroom, cinderblock cottage early in the 1950s fully a mile away from his brother’s and sister’s vacation homes—their houses built side-by-side so everyone in the extended family could be together on holidays. Tio Antoñico and Tia Elda had been hurt by his decision to build at a distance; they couldn’t understand why Papi hadn’t similarly wanted us to be near all the fun, and it wasn’t until years later that he confessed that he simply wanted to ensure that Antoñico, Elda, and their families wouldn’t be frightened by the terrible fighting on nights that were otherwise hushed except for the gentle break of the waves.
Papi himself was always relaxed and at ease at Santa Lucia. He told us repeatedly that he had built the cottage for us, and I loved the fact that in naming it Rojugui, Papi had seemed to define the three of us as equals and had, with a single word, transformed the three of us into one. Rojugui was a name that in the coming years would symbolize for me the bond between my brothers and me that unquestionably helped us survive the blows that were aimed at us, and it was at Casa Rojugui where Papi first taught us to defend ourselves.
• • •
My father had been a talented boxer in his younger days—it was the one sport he truly excelled in and loved—and, in retrospect, I realize that because of this, it was a certainty that we would be boxers as well. He purchased two good pairs of gloves for us to share, transformed the cottage’s carport into an open-air ring, and for many hours a day on those beach excursions he would instruct us in the techniques that the boxers of his era liked to call “the sweet science.” We would take turns sparring with Papi so we could learn basic footwork, balance, punches, and strategy, and before long, of course, it was time to fight each other, then to lure our neighbors Kiko and Oriol to the beach so we could pummel the hell out of them.
As usual, Toto picked up the sport immediately. He was quick and well balanced; he had a great jab and a stinging right hook that he could land at will, and it wasn’t long after we began to box that both Toto and Papi were relishing the fact that he could so deftly beat his brothers. Our neighbors were next in line, and at first they were utterly unsuspecting of the trap that was being laid for them when we invited them to join us at the beach. Quite predictably, Toto beat both boys to a pulp—as he did every friend or cousin who entered the makeshift ring with him. Papi would beam with pride—convinced that it was entirely clear to all that Toto had received his skills from him—and it wasn’t long before Kiko and Oriol began to decline invitations to join us at the beach.
My brother Kiko and I were enormously proud of Toto, and not solely because of his boxing talents. Among the three of us, Toto was always the best swimmer; he invariably caught more and bigger fish than we did, and it was Toto on whom girls at our school could always be counted on to develop a swooning crush. He was our hero—his strength, athletic abilities, and handsome good looks seemed as reliable to me as the sun coming up in the morning—but my brother could also be quite stubborn and rebellious.
When Toto was in the third grade, he already was powerful and self-possessed enough that by force of will he was able to beat back my mother’s strange insistence that he memorize his textbooks. Toto believed her demands were plainly unfair, and in response he vowed to appear to be studying—studiously turning pages and mumbling as if he were diligently memorizing—yet when she quizzed him, invariably he could recite next to nothing. This frustrated Mami enormously, and Toto continued the studying ruse over a long enough stretch of time that eventually she came to believe that Toto simply wasn’t very bright. She stopped punishing Toto for what she previously had believed was his laziness; she stopped quizzing him entirely, and in the eyes of Kiko and me, Toto emerged as an even greater hero than before, having defeated Mami at her own game without suffering further consequences.
Kiko remained shorter and skinnier than his twin. Although he was not uncoordinated, he appeared awkward and ungainly in comparison with his brother, and somehow accidents always sought him out. It seemed as though if anyone threw a stone into the air in any direction, you could be sure it would find a way to land on poor Kiko’s head. He wasn’t a bad boxer so much as an unusual boxer; he had a strange and complex defensive style that emerged from his deep desire to take as few punches as possible. He seldom threw a punch and focused instead on blocking everything that came his way, and when his opponent did manage to land a blow, Kiko had the curious ability to be able to fold the whole of his body around the offending fist. Papi called him “Merengue”—he could collapse like a hill of whipped egg whites, my father would tell him—and you can be sure it was a name Kiko deeply disliked.
Kiko’s bad luck could readily get him into trouble, and if he was planning any mischief, I tried to stay clear of it because I knew instinctively that the outcome had little likelihood of being good—the full force of Mami’s wrath coming down on my father’s namesake son time after time after time. I worried a lot about Kiko in those days because my mother so often aimed her anger at him. He was the first to be spanked or hit when Mami would lose her temper, and if Mami was mad at Papi, it went without saying that she was angry with Kiko as well. Mami would fly full force at Roberto when he was just seven and eight and nine, and her wrath would be such that Romelia and Emilita would have to hold her until she was calm. I believed Kiko was in real danger, and I admired enormously his ability to take Mami’s punishment just as he so deftly took the blows in the ring.
Because my baby fat had stuck with me, I had to endure plenty of teasing. I also seemed certain to catch every childhood disease making the rounds in Camagüey, and the asthma I suffered regularly kept me home from school. I did my best to be the equal of my older brothers, and to prove that status I would fly like Superman from Toto’s high bunk-bed onto my single bed below, dive into the bathtub from the sink in our house’s small bathroom, and perform sloppy summersaults from the high-dive at the country club. I’d willingly agree to be my brothers’ front-man in mischief—all of us aware that whatever punishment from Mami came my way for a given misdeed would be less than what she would otherwise dish out to them. I was a better student than either of my older brothers, but that was a meager triumph, of course, and Papi said plainly that I was a worthless boxer often enough that I really hated the sport. If Toto was the Muhammad Ali of our house and Kiko the Ken Norton, I was nothing more than the bum of the month, and Papi made sure I understood that.
There had been a time in Papi’s life when he believed he was a contender. But although he once might have had a shot at real success in the ring—even being tabbed in his early twenties to spar with Cuba’s renowned lightweight champion Kid Gavilan—his own boxing days ultimately came to a close well before he became a father.
He was born Roberto Emiliano Vidal Pares in September 1920, the youngest child of Antonio Vidal Bautista and Caridad Pares Nuñes, each of whose parents had immigrated to Cuba from Spain late in the nineteenth century. “Don Antonio,” as he was widely known in Camagüey, was a successful businessman and, by every account, an ogre of a father. Each afternoon, Don Antonio’s two sons and two daughters were bathed and dressed by servants in preparation for his arrival home, then were required to be waiting for their father at the front door, where he would greet the girls with a perfunctory hug, the boys with a handshake. At the formal dinner that followed, the children were not allowed to speak unless they were spoken to, and, if called upon by their father or mother, their answers were expected to be brief. Because Papi always had suffered a deeply embarrassing “machine-gun” stutter, he prayed as he silently ate each night that he wouldn’t be called on—afraid that the way in which he spoke would disgust his father, even as he knew he could count on his mother Caridad’s constant encouragement and concern.
Roberto’s stutter seemed to worsen when he was around other children, no doubt because he was ridiculed by them so often—in class at school, reciting poetry or speaking his lines in plays, and, particularly painfully for him, at those times when he mustered the courage to talk to a girl. When one of his peers would mimic him, his quick temper would flash white-hot. He regularly tore into brawls with the boys who taunted him and quietly fumed at the girls. He spent his childhood in alternating states of humiliation and anger. Papi loved and admired his older brother Antonio, whom everyone called Antoñico. It didn’t help, however, that Antoñico was nothing short of perfection—tall and handsome, athletic and strong, enormously popular among the boys and capable of making the girls of Camagüey swoon.
Papi spent as much time as he could in Antoñico’s company, in hopes in part that his brother’s debonair ways would rub off on him, and also because he knew he could count on his brother to protect him. I could always see Papi’s pride in Antoñico rise in his chest—even decades later—each time he told us about how much the two boys hated the piano lessons their parents required them to take. The piano instructor’s home was a string of blocks from their own, and young toughs in the neighborhood ridiculed the Vidal brothers en route. It was clear they were maricones, faggots, the kids would taunt, because they played the piano, and throughout each lesson Papi and Antoñico could concentrate on little else except the gauntlet they would have to run when the hour was up. Virtually every piano lesson was capped by a fistfight, and Papi insisted to us that he literally wouldn’t have survived those return trips from the piano teacher’s if it hadn’t been for his big brother’s courage and physical prowess.
Because he longed to be strong and fearless like his brother, Papi began to box. He developed a disciplined training regimen, honed his skills, brought real passion to his new sport, and in time he became known as one of Camagüey’s most promising young boxers, patterning his fighting technique after Billy Conn, the American light-heavyweight who on a night in New York in June 1941 very nearly defeated the colossal Joe Louis. Papi repeatedly watched newsreels of the famous fight, noting how Conn’s flurry of quick jabs had softened Lewis up for the challenger’s heavy blows. Papi lent Conn’s style a Cuban-accent, developed it to perfection, and it was soon thereafter that he caught the eye of Kid Gavilan’s manager. But according to my father, because Papi moved too constantly and wouldn’t let Gavilan tag him with his big punches—least of all his trademark “bolo punch,” with which Gavilan swung his whole arm like windmill before finally landing what was often a knockout blow—he was only invited to spar with the champion a single time. Papi’s opponents seldom, if ever, hurt him, he liked to proclaim, yet the truth is that his nose had been broken a dozen times, something that was obvious to my brothers and me and everyone else. What once had been a fine, strong Roman nose now lay utterly flattened on his face, a condition of which I suspect Papi was secretly proud.
Although my father never overcame his stutter and the shame it caused him, he did begin to gain confidence in himself and willed for himself a bright and successful future. He became a fine student, worked tirelessly at Casa Vidal, his father’s appliance store, and my grandfather Don Antonio began to believe that it was his younger son, rather than the elder, who would be best to command the family businesses one day. While in college, both boys spent a year abroad at Bridgewater College in Virginia, learning English, delighting in the comparatively permissive American culture, and falling in love with Ella Fitzgerald and Big Band jazz.
Once he had completed his bachelor’s degree, Papi debated whether to become a doctor or a pharmacist, ultimately deciding on the later, he told us, because, “All the men went into medicine and all the women went into pharmacy. I wanted to be with the women.” In time, he left the prestigious University of Havana with a longing to become someone special, a three-pack-a-day smoking habit that helped him demonstrate his sophistication, and a doctorate in pharmacology, a degree that quickly helped him land a job as a sales representative for a pharmaceutical company, traveling throughout Cuba’s eastern provinces.
Papi was in Santiago de Cuba in early in 1942 when he received an urgent message that Don Antonio had been severely injured in a car accident. He rushed home to Camagüey to find his father on his deathbed, or so it appeared. During the visit, his father begged Roberto in whispers to quit his job, move home, and take up the family businesses. The appliance and furniture store, operated at the time by Antoñico and his brother-in-law Aquiles, was veering toward bankruptcy; a number of rental properties were faring better, and Don Antonio himself still oversaw the operation of the profitable Hotel Residencial. It’s a simple twist of fate, of course, that often points you toward your destiny, and after acquiescing to what he believed was his dying father’s final request, Papi soon discovered work at which he truly excelled, work that allowed him to exhibit the tenacity he first learned as a boxer.
Every decision he made and each action he took seemed to bring the store ever more solidly out of its financial hole; his analytical mind, perseverance, and willingness to work hard lead to the store’s recovery; Don Antonio almost miraculously recovered as well and began once more to oversee his hotel; and by the time late in the 1950s when dictator Fulgencio Batista’s regime was about to collapse—his brutal rule hated by the privileged and poor alike, Cuba’s stark economic inequities heating like a pot about to boil over—Papi had secured for his family Camagüey’s sole franchises for Philco and Amana appliances, a Fiat automobile dealership, and a mattress factory as prized additions to Don Antonio’s prior holdings. In a nation in which entrepreneurial success came only to a relative few, my father seemed born to make money; he loved his accumulation of wealth and the status it brought, and he devoted huge energy to being viewed by others as a proud member of the city’s business and social elite. He still stuttered—terribly sometimes—still was tremendously insecure in ways that haunted him, but unlike boxing, in the world of business, it seemed, Roberto Vidal would succeed.
It is amazing to me to remember how very insulated our lives were at La Villita Candado. At the beach at Santa Lucia and in Casa Rojuqui, we were free as the gulls and pipers that plied the shores. But in Camagüey—perhaps because Papi recalled all-too clearly the beatings he had taken on the city’s streets as a boy—we lived in a kind of protective isolation from the poverty, hardships, and cold complexities of contemporary Cuban life, and the Camagüey I knew was an exotic realm into which Kiko, Toto, and I virtually never ventured on our own.
The city—first called Santa Maria del Puerto Principe—was founded on Cuba’s northern coast in 1514, but its early residents suffered such repeated pillaging from Caribbean pirates that they moved the entire settlement inland in hopes of escaping the banditry. Yet when the infamous British privateer Henry Morgan and five-hundred men sacked dozens of Cuban settlements and fortifications in 1668, they virtually destroyed the new Puerto Principe, and in response, this time the city’s residents vowed to rebuild what would henceforth be called Camagüey as a kind of illogical labyrinth, its new streets twisting, turning, and dead-ending unexpectedly, the maze an attempt to dissuade invaders of every sort from entering and risking being trapped and ambushed before they could attack or flee.
On its flat inland plain, the city lay in the rain-shadow of Cuba’s high Sierra Maestra and rainfall was scant enough that the enterprising Camagüeyanos also fashioned huge earthen jars—like the one we employed at La Villita Candado—to capture run-off from roofs during the rainy season. These tinajones were everywhere, and, together with the warren of narrow and interwoven streets, for centuries they remained the foremost symbols of the city, and they are what I remember most particularly of the town of a hundred thousand people in which I spent those early and abruptly ended years.
Although I couldn’t know it at the time, the first glimpse of the city my brothers and I saw from behind the wall of our home pointed eerily toward our future. Immediately across the Carretera Central from our house was El Asilo Padre Valencia, an asylum named after the priest who had founded it many years before, an austere and forbidding place that housed the very poor and the utterly hopeless—shoeless, sometimes toothless people in ragged clothes who included both the elderly and children who had been orphaned or abandoned—and it was the asylum that my brothers and I first would think of when, in Colorado in the autumn of 1961, we discovered that we had been sent to an orphanage, the asylum a place whose image would utterly torment my parents when they learned in letters where their young sons now lived.
Because Papi insisted on spending as much time at Casa Vidal as he could, it was Mami who was our chauffer on most of our excursions out into Camagüey. A notoriously bad driver, she could make the shortest of journeys an adventure—the combination of her frightful driving and the city’s twisting cobblestone streets ensuring that our outings were every bit as harrowing as they were fun. Five days a week we donned the short pants and blue shirts we were required to wear and traveled to El Colegio Champagna, a parochial school run by the Marist Brothers, and on occasional Sundays we drove to mass at La Iglesia de Las Mercedes, the church where my parents had been married. A visit to my grandfather’s medical clinic—even when we were sick—meant we would see our great friends and mentors Felix and Juan, and, of course, our grandparents and Tio Nene. We loved having the run of Don Antonio’s five-story Hotel Residencial, where we would join our cousins in mischief of every sort, including the time we enraged our grandfather by spitting from a hotel balcony onto pedestrians on the sidewalk below. And there was always something special about our trips to Casa Vidal, which proudly occupied a corner of the Plaza de las Mercedes. I loved to walk the aisles among the many white-enameled and round-shouldered refrigerators and ranges, the marvelous portable dishwashers you could connect with hoses to a kitchen sink, the big-eyed television sets in their boxy wooden cabinets; and the patio furniture in rainbow colors that seemed to offer everyone a life of pleasure and ease. There was something pleasingly contemporary, progressive, and abundant in the dazzling array of wares, and I was quietly proud that Papi was the greatly respected dueño in charge of it all.
The modern world was a wonderful place, Casa Vidal seemed to affirm in 1956, and my father and mother and Kiko and Toto and I couldn’t imagine looking toward the future with anything other than anticipation and swelling confidence. Good fortune had visited us in so many forms, we knew. We were as lucky as the handful of Cubans who once had won houses in bars of soap, and our corner of Cuba, Papi and Mami assured us, was the center of the universe.
El
Negrito Juan, Tio Nene, and Felix outside my grandfather Dr. Ramos’
clinic in the late 1950s