American - Journalist | 1979 -
I've been going to Cuba since the Elian Gonzalez affair.
Brin-Jonathan Butler
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Rigondeaux was Cuba's answer to Bobby Fischer who transformed into a kind of Lee Harvey Oswald traitorous creature in that society. He escaped on a smuggler's boat and toppled one of the best fighters in the world in 2013 with his obliteration of Nonito Donaire at Radio City Music Hall. He made it look so easy, his career has never recovered.
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Teofilo Stevenson won his first Olympic gold medal in 1972 and his last world amateur championship in 1986. He won 302 fights and once went an unbelievable 11 years without a loss. Had Cuba not boycotted the 1984 Summer Olympics, many think Stevenson would have won an unmatched four gold medals in boxing.
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An offer to fight Muhammad Ali came after Stevenson won his second Olympic gold in Montreal in 1976. Stevenson was at his peak. The world had never seen a heavyweight with the tools Stevenson brought into the ring.
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I traveled to Cuba with the intention of speaking with boxers who had turned down enormous offers to leave. When explaining my project to people, again and again I was met with amusement and skepticism.
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Anyone can see why an elite athlete would want to leave a small, impoverished country where their skills were effectively uncashed winning lottery tickets. All they had to do was wash ashore almost anywhere else in the world and cash in. Yet the vast majority of Cuban boxers - and Cuban athletes in general - despite that incentive, stayed.
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In the summer of 2007, two-time Olympic champion Guillermo Rigondeaux and his teammate, Erislandy Lara, had been arrested in Brazil after going AWOL from the Cuban team during the Pan Am Games. The defection attempt made international news and quickly became a national soap opera, regularly appearing on Cuban news and round table discussions.
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Castro branded Rigondeaux a 'traitor' and 'Judas' to the Cuban people.
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A profoundly disturbing thing you discover very quickly traveling in Cuba is that the most dangerous person for Cubans isn't the police or even the secret police; it's their neighbor. Anyone can report you for anything 'outside' the revolution - even if you haven't done it yet.
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I'd never seen Rigondeaux's face without it being obscured by headgear or a photograph of Fidel he was holding up after winning a tournament. Finally I saw him, only to recognize the saddest face I'd ever seen in Cuba.
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Castro always used the boxers as a symbolic war against American values to demonstrate that they fight for something more than money.
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Cuban athletes represent the most expensive human cargo on earth. They are sitting on over a billion dollars of human capital if these boxers and baseball players would come over to any other field or ring in the world and begin to ply their trade.
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