"Order me two more drinks and I can help you. I know athletes over there. Not in boxing, but they all know each other. They all wear their Olympic Cuban tracksuits like uniforms on the street. Stick with me when we get off the plane. I can help you there. But they will hold me at immigration after the flight. They always do. They treat me like a criminal every time I arrive and leave. It's just a routine thing for me over there. They are afraid I'm stealing treasures over there for peanuts and selling them back home for millions. They treat me trafficking books like I'm smuggling Cuban heroes off the island myself."

"What do you buy?"

"Rare books. Cuba may be famous for old cars and sports, but they have collectibles in many other rare things, too. People are making fortunes off of baseball cards right now. But I love books. That's the extraordinarily beautiful thing about a country that makes certain books illegal to read; it reminds you that books still mean something. If you enjoy gray, the paradoxes over there are like nowhere else on earth."

"I don't have a place to stay in Havana. I was just going to find something when I arrived."

"That's a bad idea. Jineteros-those are the hustlers and prost.i.tutes, latterly 'jockeys'-love people like you to ride. They will hiss at you all over the tourist areas. Let me take care of everything. Just wait for me after the police questioning and this drunk stranger you just met can give you some keys to open some interesting doors. Havana is my favorite city in the world. Whenever you return to Havana you will always find me here and have a friend. And all my friends will be your friends."

When we got off the plane, just as he'd predicted, Alfonso was taken in for questioning in a private room and held for three hours by the police. Before we'd gotten off the plane Alfonso had given me some money to buy him a twelve-year-old bottle of Havana Club and a carton of Popular cigarettes from the little airport shop to resuscitate him. I waited for him in airport arrivals until midnight, when they finally released him. Alfonso trudged out of the holding room soaked in sweat, his face blanched, lugging two huge articles of luggage that I ran over to help him carry.

"Brinicito, don't worry about my luggage. Where's my f.u.c.king medicine?"

I gave him the bottle and cigarettes as he stumbled over to a chair in the arrivals section of the airport and collapsed on his stomach, moaning. His hands were trembling.

"Do we need a taxi or a f.u.c.king ambulance?" I asked him.

"Neither." Alfonso rolled over and tried unsuccessfully to unscrew the bottle. "Can you do this for me, please? My hands shake too badly. Hurry, please."

I took the bottle and unscrewed the cap and handed it to him. He slumped down over two chairs and held it over his head with one hand while tearing open the carton of cigarettes.

"I don't need an ambulance or a driver. I have an eighteen-year-old nurse waiting for me where we're going. And our driver has been waiting for us all this time in the parking lot. Just give me some time to recover from that ordeal. Maybe get me some Bucanero beer from the little shop. A twelve-pack, please."

When I came back with the beer I saw he'd consumed half the bottle while chain-smoking his way through a twisted ma.s.s of cigarettes resting under his chair. He was upright now, with the color having returned to his face, eyes alert, hands steady. Miraculously, Alfonso looked almost energized.

"My friend, I'm sorry for how long you've had to wait before meeting this beautiful city. But now you'll always remember your first meeting with Havana at night. That will put a spell in your heart always. Meeting a city for the first time at night is like making love to a woman before you've even spoken with her. I'm very envious of you tonight."

I stepped outside into Havana's muggy, tropical embrace. Before my eyes could adjust to see anything beyond palm trees swaying in the moonlight, the intensity of Cuba's perfume entered my bloodstream and I dropped Alfonso's bags on the ground. All at once the swirl of belched diesel fumes and cigar smoke, highlighted with the stale sting of oxidized alcohol, hit me before the stench of some nearby forever-unflushed toilet almost knocked me over.

"Even the smell of Cuba has the intensity of a priest giving in to s.e.x." Alfonso smiled, lighting another cigarette. "Don't talk anymore until we're inside the car. Let's go, our ride is waiting for us."

We walked out into the moonlight toward a mostly empty parking lot when something violently hissed at us. Alfonso laughed and an engine turned on a car about twenty yards off. A lanky, nervous Bill Cosby lookalike in a Cuban tracksuit quickly approached us and grabbed the handles of Alfonso's luggage from me.

"Do I let him take them?"

"Of course. Montalvo is family."

After we loaded the trunk of his small Lada with our belongings, I got in the backseat while Alfonso threw his arm around the driver. As soon as the car lurched forward it promptly stalled.

"Cubaneo!" Montalvo slapped the steering wheel. This expression, I later found, was used to describe the particular strain of bad luck indigenous to Cuba.

"Hermano!" Alfonso laughed, taking another slug from the bottle. "My brother, it is always so good to see you. But always so serious! Brinicito, this is Montalvo. Montalvo was a silver medalist in the hundred-meter dash from the Pan Am games. He's an even better person than he was a runner. Forgive us, but I have some things to discuss with my friend in Spanish, so we can sort out where you will stay and all that."

We were out on the highway now and it struck me that I had no idea who the two men in the front seat of the car were or where we were going. The Cuban night felt less like reality and more like the dreamscape of Fidel and his people. The Cuban highway was anarchy, with American cars manufactured in the 1950s, Russian-made Ladas, and military trucks with soldiers sitting in the back raging over the broken-down pavement while horse-drawn carriages and bikes drifted along the road shoulder. In addition to the nightmarish jumble of the scene, the highway lacked streetlights or any highway signs, and the only updates about our progress toward Havana were the occasional ghostly billboards that were illuminated in our flickering headlights, featuring political exhortations I couldn't understand.

As we got closer to Havana I thought of Alfonso's description of meeting a city at night for the first time. The silhouettes of palm trees whisked past us, and after a while I could see the dim copper glow of Havana spread out like broken gla.s.s shattered across the hulking darkness of the city's skyline. We turned off the highway and entered a narrow, pothole-laden side street winding into a neighborhood like a hand reaching into a dark cupboard. Finally there were a few streetlamps and I could read some of the billboards on the side of the road. A painting of Castro's beaming face was situated beside the words VAMOS BIEN!

"What is that referring to?" I asked Alfonso.

"That everything is going well. It's always going well."

Alfonso translated what he'd said to me to Montalvo and Montalvo moaned in response, "S, s. 'Vamos bien.' Cuarenta y un aos y siempre vamos bien! Dios mo."

"There is a joke about the revolution, which says that literacy, health care, and sports are its great achievements. And its failures are breakfast, lunch, and dinner. When I first started coming here during the worst of the Special Period in the early 1990s, parents would name their pets Breakfast, Lunch, or Dinner to protect the children from attachment before they ate them."

We pa.s.sed another sign on the side of the road with a Che Guevara mural next to an illegibly scrawled sentence.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"'Be like Che!' You'll find out how it is. Much is a lie here just as it is in America." Alfonso laughed. "I think Cubans believe the bulls.h.i.t less than you. Cuban advertising tries to help individuals get over human weakness, while American advertising encourages you to give in to it."

"Does Montalvo have a place for me to stay?"

"We're taking you to somewhere that should be available near the Plaza de la Revolucin, the huge square where you will be able to see Castro give a speech while you are here. Seven-hour speeches sometimes!"

"Seven f.u.c.king hours?"

"This is what Americans always say. But in Lincoln's time he did the same thing. The population was informed and had an attention span. Remember what Gore Vidal said about genius in America?"

"What did he say?"

"That if students year after year insist American history is the most boring subject, you need look no further than American history teachers to find geniuses at work. Look out your window, that's the Plaza. We're close to where you're staying."

The Plaza itself looked like one enormous vacuum of an empty parking lot surrounded by distant, stale government structures, and then I saw Che's face glowing, six stories high, stenciled against the side of a building.

Cuba's secular saint was once declared by America's CIA as the most dangerous man in the world before they gave the order in 1967 to execute him in Bolivia. The man who pulled the trigger still proudly wore Che's watch in Miami as a souvenir he claimed from the execution. This country's adoptive hero was America's terrorist distilled now into a mouse pad, T-shirt, the flotsam of kitsch. Out the other car window a three-hundred-foot-high marble tower, seemingly donated by the Klingon Empire's most distinguished architect, loomed as a monument to the poet Jose Mart. Shadowy buzzards circled over the tower. In all of the darkness the junglescape felt like a nightmare predator ready to spring into action and blindside you.

That first night, watching the scenery slide by outside my window, every inch of the island I saw was accompanied by the reminder that this population had rallied behind a leader who had been instrumental in bringing the world closer to oblivion than at any point in human history. Castro had closed every casino and outlawed all gambling, yet this was a man who was willing to risk destroying the world itself rather than cave an inch against the American way of life.

"The monuments here mean nothing." Alfonso laughed. "Fidel doesn't have a statue or a plaque anywhere. There's no cult of personality. It's these f.u.c.king people themselves and their culture that are bigger than any pyramid or Empire State Building. If Cuba contributed the eighth wonder of the world it would be the Cuban people themselves. You'll see. My friend lives close to here and you'll be staying with him at the house of Jess. Tomorrow I'll send a friend over to get you who can be your tour guide, and I'll sort out getting you in contact with the boxers."

Montalvo turned off the Plaza and drove around a bend surrounded by groomed hills that merged with the jungle. Even in the shadows it was evident the area was heavily guarded by bereted soldiers either patrolling or staring out from treehouse-like towers. Motorbikes and a fleet of bicycles loaded down with girls pa.s.sed by on the shoulder of the road as we turned down a quiet side street that Montalvo carefully navigated to avoid potholes and stray cats skittering across the pavement. I could see children playing stickball on the next street under a flickering streetlamp. As we neared, the streetlamp cut out and Montalvo stopped the car, his headlights the only illumination left for their game.

At night in a broken, new place it's easy to lose your thoughts and find them drifting toward people you care about who are holding bad cards. Sometimes they have their own deck and sometimes they've invited someone else's into their lives. You think about faces you've loved getting older. I was warned Havana was a heavy place on a lot of people. Many lives worn out searching for things they can't find.

"You see the small man pitching to his son?" Alfonso asked. "Both are wearing the Industriales baseball caps. Industriales are the New York Yankees of Cuba. That's Jess and Jesusito. They'll look after you. Jess has a little apartment attached to their home."

I got out of the car with my bags just as Jess lofted his pitch well over his son toward me. "OYE!" Jesus hollered, as the kids laughed. "Think fast, gringo!"

8.

PUNCHING YOUR WEIGHT.

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.... Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, "wh.o.r.es, pimps, gamblers, and sons of b.i.t.c.hes," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men," and he would have meant the same thing.

-John Steinbeck JUST BEFORE DAWN MY APARTMENT was caught in the crossfire of roosters on the rooftops scattered across the block declaring morning. There was a knock on the door; completely disoriented, I opened it to find Jess still wearing his Industriales baseball cap from the night before, holding a tray of sliced fruit while his son handed me a thermos of coffee. Jesusito was wearing the same cap as his dad and might have been eleven, but they were nearly the same height at around five feet. They shared the same kind face and intelligent eyes.

"My friend, breakfast is early at our house. My English no goo'. No baa', but no goo'. I have to go work soon."

"Where do you work?"

"I am an engineer. First I wanted to introduce you to your barrio. Finish breakfast and we go meet our neighborhood before your friend come to show you Kid Chocolate and boxing in Habana Vieja."

"Do you guys sleep with those Industriales hats on?" I asked them.

His son looked up at his father for clarity.

"Industriales is our team, my friend. Cubans love boxing, but baseball is life and death in my country. The stadium is five minutes from here. We go. You understand everything. Last night there was a riot in the sixth inning. The government sent the military over to Latinoamericano stadium. Today when you go into Habana Vieja, you ask your friend to take you to Esquina Caliente where they discuss the beisbol."

"How far are we from Old Havana?"

"An hour walk. But your friend will explain and show you how taxis work here in Havana. Much easier. The Ladas are for tourists and expensive. Ex-lawyers and doctors drive them and pimp jineteras-prost.i.tutes-for tourists. The Cuban taxis are cheap, but you need Cuban pesos and some more Spanish. If polica stop a Cuban taxi with a tourist, they can lose their car. Be careful. Any Cuban on the street who walks with you can be stopped by the police and taken in for questioning. If he does not carry an ID card to show the polica he can be taken to the police station for the night."

"Are you serious?" I asked Jess.

"Claro," Jess said gravely, but cracked a smile almost as quickly. "But we Cubans say that life itself is a joke to be taken very seriously. You'll see how the game is played. Eat and we meet my family and the rest of the block."

"Everybody is already awake?"

"Of course. This neighborhood is your home now while you stay with us."

My mother has lived in the same house for the last thirty-two years (we moved there when I was three) and we hardly ever knew our neighbors, let alone anyone on our block. When FOR SALE signs went up and new people moved in around the neighborhood, n.o.body ever welcomed them. I have a close friend that I've known since I was five. He lived two blocks from me during our childhood and I visited his family home hundreds of times and was never invited for dinner. A lot of homes I visited as a child sounded a kind of silent alarm when you stepped through the door that seemed to say, "Welcome! When exactly are you leaving again?" And here was my first taste of Havana, where you were supposed to be trespa.s.sing safely into the tragedy of Cuban lives caught beneath the wreckage of a broken system. Maybe Cuba was frozen in time, but this first glimpse into the human cost I was warned about instead mirrored the breakdown of families and neighbors and support systems where I came from.

As dawn broke, Jess, holding his son's hand, their small family sausage dog in pursuit, escorted me to each front door on the quiet, leafy street. From every home I could hear radios or televisions talking about Elin Gonzlez and returning the boy home to his country and family. More marches were planned. More speeches. From what I could gather, Castro had found yet another winning angle, by making his adversaries in Florida look like fanatics defending a kidnapping. The best argument made against sending the boy back to his father and country was that doing so amounted to child abuse. How could any child wish to live in such a society inflicting so much harm? And this protest against child cruelty offered from the wealthiest nation on earth that also permits one child in five to grow up below the poverty line.

We knocked on the front door of the home across the street belonging to Cucho, a Ricardo Montalbn lookalike eighty-one-year-old who had received his house from a state-run lottery many decades before. Cucho was the patriarch of the twelve family members residing in his home. We were invited in for coffee served in shot gla.s.ses as I was introduced to his family, each female leaning over to give and receive a kiss on the cheek. Cucho had worked at the Hotel Nacional in the 1940s, when it was run by gangsters like Lucky Luciano, and moved over to the Havana Hilton at the end of the '50s, right up until Fidel Castro rolled in and set up his government headquarters in the top two floors at the newly named Habana Libre. Cucho was also the neighborhood CDR (Committee for the Defense of the Revolution), a neighborhood watch program that escalated in darker times into spy operations that reported to the government on fellow citizens.

Cucho's neighbor was a frail young doctor with a failing heart named Jorge, married to a Penelope Cruzsumptuous wife named Nancy. Ernesto lived in the next home, 250 pounds of seething bitterness as he stared down a government-required year's wait to join his wife, Blanquita, who had just left to join some of her family in Spain. Cuba's answer to Doogie Howser, Manolo, a surgeon in his forties who looked like a teenager, lived by himself after a divorce. As we had another cafecito with Manolo, there were three separate deliveries of produce, freshly butchered chickens, and cement brought over in a little dragged wagon. "Have you heard the word palanca before?" he asked in perfect English.

I shook my head.

"Palanca is slang for offering a helping hand. Since you literally cannot survive in this country without breaking the law, corruption is inst.i.tutional. The black market economy is larger than the traditional economy. We all offer something to someone in exchange for something. So don't be surprised to see deliveries at all hours of the day of things that may seem very strange to you."

There was a knock at Manolo's door and Jess got up to answer it. He returned to the dining room with a linebacker-sized dark-skinned Cuban, not much older than me, dressed in matching canary-yellow dress shirt and pants. He stared at me with such warm antic.i.p.ation I felt like I was meeting a pen pal I'd been corresponding with for years.

"h.e.l.lo, my friend! I'm Lesvanne." I was quickly discovering that every Cuban deserved his own eponymous sitcom. "You must be the writer boxer I have heard so much about. Obviously Hemingway helped bring you here, I take it? Of course he did. Montalvo and Alfonso asked me to show you around and help you with finding your way in our city. Today I take you to Rafael Trejo gym to find a trainer, too, no?"

"I would love that," I said.

"Also transportation." Jess grabbed my shoulder. "Walk around until he has more of a tan and then show him our taxis and get him some Cuban pesos."

"Of course." Lesvanne smiled.

"Where did you get these clothes?" Manolo teased him, pinching a sleeve. "These are not from Calle Obispo."

"What's Obispo?" I asked.

"Obispo is a street for tourists," Lesvanne explained casually. "I was just in Miami and brought back some clothes. Only three weeks in Miami visiting some family."

For both Jess and Manolo this was a bombsh.e.l.l they endured in silent shock. I was fairly confused by how matter-of-fact Lesvanne was about a journey such a high percentage of his countrymen had died trying to make. His tone suggested that of a man taking a whirl on the Staten Island ferry. Who exactly was this person that Alfonso had lined up as my guide? Who exactly was Alfonso?

Suddenly Lesvanne's face twisted in agony. "MariCN! I gave my a.s.s a paper cut this morning. Cubaneo. The first luxury I miss from Miami and Gringolandia is the availability of toilet paper. A page from Jose Mart's poetry slit me open this morning and I am still bleeding."

Lesvanne put his hand on my shoulder and turned his wide, conspiratorial smile toward me. "Obispo is the Hemingway tourist street. The El Floridita bar where Hemingway would have drank himself to death, if not for the suicide. La Bodeguita del Medio for the mojitos is five minutes, but every Cuban knows he never drank mojitos there and the owners just made it up. There are no better capitalists than communists. And the Ambos Mundos hotel where he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls is near the bottom of Obispo. Fidel carried that book with him in the mountains to help learn guerrilla warfare. At Obispo there is much shopping, too, if you have tourist dollars to spend. The high-end jineteras work Obispo for the lonely tourists who wish to pretend they can seduce all the pretty Cuban girls."

Jess laughed. "Should we arrange a girl for him tonight?"

"He doesn't need a pimp." Manolo smiled. "I'm sure you can find the right girl on your own. You come back and tell us everything or we'll report you to Cucho."

As soon as we left our block, Lesvanne informed me he needed a couple gla.s.ses of guarapo for energy and led us zigzagging down a few streets to find some. "A girlfriend from Texas leaves tomorrow so I must have energy for her so she is faithful back home. I'm so madly in love with this woman. If you heard her accent calling my name! And she's big as a Texas woman should be. I love that. She's forty. So beautiful."

He pointed out the direction of some peso fruit markets and another supermarket for American dollars that had a security guard out front. "The tourist apartheid is everywhere. I can't walk with you into a hotel or a nice bar. It used to be illegal for us to carry even one American dollar." Lesvanne shook his head. "During the awful Special Period, one market existed that had actual supplies and good food while everything else had nothing. People were starving. We called this market with everything 'G.o.d's Market' at that time. Things are better now since that period, but still very difficult." Finally we arrived at an open garage that was surrounded by sweaty construction workers huddled in the shade wiping the foam from their lips and patiently holding out gla.s.s cups waiting for refills.

"This is a guarapotera. Guarapo was what the African slaves who first came to Cuba drank. Good for energy to work or to f.u.c.k really good if you meet the right girl. We love it. It's very good and fresh. You can find them all over Havana and have a gla.s.s for only a Cuban peso. There are twenty Cuban pesos to each converted peso for tourists. These two currencies are very important to be aware of because you will be cheated if you are not careful. So be careful to get your change and to keep it when you first use the converted peso. Until you write a bestseller or win the heavyweight championship, Cuban pesos are good to have to use for transportation or food that tourists are not allowed to use. I'll show you how our taxis work soon."

I watched as a dwarf woman jammed huge stalks of sugar cane into a ma.s.sive metal grinder that she worked over with a crank when the stalks were inserted deeply enough. She had the sneer of a male p.o.r.n star as she worked. The dwarf's coworker was a woman who looked like she was born a hundred years before when the Platt Amendment was signed. She collected the juice from a pail and dumped it into carafes full of ice. Once the carafe was full with the milky-yellow juice she refilled the cups of the eager construction workers on their break. We waited our turn for a gla.s.s and I watched Lesvanne wipe the chilled foam off his lips before my gla.s.s arrived.

"You just came back from Miami?" I asked.

"Yes." He grinned shyly. "My first time."

"Your first time?"

"The first time I have traveled anywhere in my life outside of this ... place. Miami is paradise. For a nonbeliever, it is the closest thing I have ever seen to heaven on earth."

"We're going to have a strange day together, aren't we?" I asked.

"What is a normal day in a place like this, which no one will ever believe existed two weeks after it's gone? Pick up a newspaper this morning in Miami, and things have never been worse here. Pick up our newspaper and things have never been better. That is the reality we live with every day of our lives. This is normal to us."

He was right: the only place where normal seemed halfway as slippery as here was in America. Guidebooks spoke of Havana as frozen in time like wreckage, but that was only true if you looked everywhere but at the people. When Napoleon first encountered the Sphinx he measured every inch of it. I didn't know how to do that here. I didn't have the right equipment. For the Cubans I saw, time had slowed in an entirely different way than I'd been told it would, along the edge of a blade. Life at the extremes is always slowed down, magnified, surreal. It was as if, all around me, forty-one years' worth of Cuban society was in the backseat of a car Fidel had used to run through one of the world's most profound red lights, and instead of finding oblivion as its consequence, it created a different kind of tragedy by just keeping going and going. It wasn't long before that Fidel was nominated for a n.o.bel Peace Prize and was having charges brought against him in Spain as a war criminal at the same time. Communism had petered out everywhere else and given way to the real revolutionary force with legs that swept the planet: capitalism. But here everyone was popping a tire on communism's last bend of memory lane.

Still, I wasn't sure how to approach the obvious question: Why hadn't Lesvanne stayed in Miami? How had he gotten out? Why wasn't Cuba's answer to Sophie's Choice something that devastated Lesvanne the way it seemed to everyone else?

Just then Lesvanne's name was hollered from down the block. We looked over and saw a large woman smiling as she held the hands of four little girls wearing red scarves and school uniforms at her sides. As I finished another gla.s.s of guarapo, Lesvanne patted my shoulder and headed in their direction to say h.e.l.lo. "I come right back. This is a close friend of my mother. I love this woman." The construction workers and I watched him kiss the cheek of each member of the group and offer a bear hug to the woman that lifted her off the ground until she squealed and playfully flailed her arms to be put down. The girls all reached over to take Lesvanne's hands as they walked back up the street toward me. Lesvanne introduced the group and each child stared up until I bent down to say h.e.l.lo and offered a cheek for them to kiss. I kissed the cheek of Lesvanne's mother's friend and she apologized before insisting the children were late for school and they had to leave. The construction workers around us waved at the children and the children smiled and waved back.

"Is everyone here so comfortable with strangers?" I asked.

"But you're not a stranger, you're a visitor to our home."

"One of the first things I was taught as a kid was not to talk to strangers. Stranger equals danger."