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This image is taken from Brin-Jonathan Butler’s Twitter.
Brin-Jonathan Butler is a journalist, sportswriter, filmmaker, and perennial boxer. His work has appeared in Vice, Deadspin, The Wall Street Journal, Salon, Harper’s, The Paris Review and The New York Times. Hee is the author of A Cuban Boxer’s Journey: Guillermo Rigondeaux, from Castro’s Traitor to American Champion and The Domino Diaries: My Decade Boxing with Olympic Champions and Chasing Hemingway’s Ghost in the Last Days of Castro’s Cuba. Largely composed of interviews he’s hustled into existence or conducted beyond the reach of Cuban state surveillance, his writing is a dense archive of opinions, witticisms, and commentaries on Cuban culture–its discontents, its happinesses, and its dazzling inconsistencies. He often describes Castro’s Cuba as “1984 if Charles Dickens had written it,” and in his experience, Olympic-grade boxers struggling to leave Cuba without trading in their Cubanness for international cash are some of the story’s most dogged protagonists. He’s interviewed celebrities from Mike Tyson to Slavoj Žižek, hustled tourists at chess, and had an affair with Castro’s granddaughter.
We spoke near Union Square in Manhattan over iced coffee that only partially staved off the city’s infernal summer heat. With his ultimate fighter physique and pleasant attitude, Butler reminds me of either a bald Matt Damon or Residente, the lead signer of the Puerto Rican rap fusion band Calle 13 (Butler says he gets the Puerto Rican thing a lot.) He’s got a Canadian propensity to taking himself with humor (he assures me that this trait is endemically Canadian),and a practiced speed-chess player’s rapid-fire articulacy. We talked about his work, the work of Italo Calvino, books in general, Goya, Quebec, the democratization of information, billionaires, the inhumanity and erotic iconography of bullfights, and the Hungarian language. The portion of this conversation having to do with Cuba is reproduced below.
Lucas Quatrecasas: So, in his talk on the “baroque and the marvelous real,” [the Cuban novelist] Alejo Carpentier says that “America, a continent of symbiosis, mutations, vibrations, mestizaje, has always been baroque…” You often write of Cuba, of Havana as a city, as a place of this sensory excess; there always seems to be too much going on, too much beauty to take in at once. But at the same time you note that Havana has this profoundly human element. It’s totally different from the kind of sensory excess engendered by late capitalism: advertisement, conspicuous consumption, etc… What did it feel like to walk into this totally different kind of “baroque”?
Brin-Jonathan Butler: In a way it feels like something from that society, that culture, throws a love letter to you that’s stuffed inside a Molotov cocktail. And if it doesn’t ignite and blow you away, you try as I did with this book [The Domino Diaries] to throw it back, return fire. And I think that’s what this book is. It is a love letter where there’s a viciousness encompassing all those contradictions and paradoxes. So entering Havana one of the first things I identified as a profound confrontation to where I come from is hearing “prepare yourself for the poverty of Cuba.” True—but strictly in a materialist context. So, OK, I’m ready for that. My mother came from Budapest, she came from communism; she left as a refugee, her father left as a refugee. Tanks were rolling through the streets. But she had no nostalgia for where she’d come from, whereas Cubans have profound nostalgia for where they come from.
So the first thing I notice is that there’s no advertising making people feel bad to create a need to consume things to deal with your emotional void, your inadequacy. So what happens? Women seem very confident, anywhere you go. Their children feel safe to go everywhere. There wasn’t a sense of the isolation that wealth and luxury provide.
LQ: A sense of private space separated from public space.
BJB: Right. I mean, literally, the walls are crumbling everywhere; everything is falling apart. But what’s the byproduct of that metaphorically? Well, if the walls are all crumbling down you can see into everyone’s house. You cannot avoid what you’re looking at in terms of feeling compassion for how people are struggling and for how you yourself are struggling. So that identification of being part of a struggle, together, is something I don’t think is part of our experience in the United States of today, where if you have money, what’s the first thing you do with it? Build walls.
LQ: Keep retreating into that private space…
BJB: Have bigger space and less people living in it. Even in Vancouver, where I came from, over the past thirty years you now have half the amount of families residing in twice the amount of space. But I definitely felt, walking into those houses, that people who had money, living in security, were not generous. And that’s an interesting thing to encounter in Cuba: how generous people are with nothing. And I think that’s because not having enough and striving to get it is far less taxing than having and and losing it or being afraid of having it stolen, which is our system.
Socialism advocates largely to get past yourself, to start looking around. The way you’re benefitting in terms of healthcare, education—that’s because of the sacrifice of other people who risked their lives to build a society. The bottom is the biggest beneficiary of the massive institutional transitions that were created. And Castro, let’s remember, came from the ruling class; he came from money. He had an easy life being paid as a lawyer, and still he looked out for blacks, especially rural blacks, illiterate blacks, the proletariat… And they did do considerably better than they did pre-revolution, which is why you saw that those who were white and those who had money left. Why?
LQ: Because they were there ones whose interests were at stake…
BJB: They were the ones losing factories.
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This is a picture of Rigondeaux in 2012, after he had already gone professional.
LQ: Well, for me what seemed kind of paradoxical about that was that these Cuban boxers that flee Cuba under such, like, invasive surveillance—I mean the biggest example is [Olympic champion] Guillermo Rigondeaux, who fled Cuba in 2009 and was later on ridiculed and derided, even his father turned against him. But he seemed to be chasing, if not just success, a standard version of the American Dream. How does that ideology start to pervade the Cuban system, when we’ve disowned it?
BJB: I think—speaking to that paradox of being proud to be Cuban and wanting to retain the cultural benefits of what’s been established while at the same time making a lot more money—that’s every Cuban. Nobody aspires to be the proletariat. Nobody aspires to be poor—because it’s so fun, right? But Che would have you believe that they do, that just through benevolence, or reaching for benevolence, everybody can be thrilled to join ration lines and that kind of thing. That has not worked out. I’ve never met a Cuban who was like, “I’m thrilled to have to wait three hours every morning to get bread for my family.” No, it’s disgraceful. And when there’s no bread to have, and your kids are going to starve, people would go out on the street and scream, “Fuck you. Fuck the system. What I’m seeing on television and what I’m seeing every time Fidel comes to give a seven hour speech—this is not the life that we’re living.” Which is why I have the chapter on “if Spanish lacked a future tense, he [Fidel Castro] would be speechless.” Because it’s all broken promises. So that’s a big part of the frustration. But it’s not, on the other hand, like people don’t believe in social justice as a principle, care about the welfare of the absolute weakest and the most vulnerable. It’s just that the institutional corruption that necessitates people to have to deal with the black market—which is bigger than the existing, official economy—in order to survive, that breeds such resentment and bitterness of this inner split between the official person I have to be and the real person I have to be to survive. And they know the government understands it. So there’s this tacit, implicit understanding of what people are going to do, since nobody could survive if they all obeyed the laws.
So, Rigondeaux. He knows he has to jump on a smuggler’s boat. Does he have ten to fifty thousand dollars to pay for it? No. Well, whoever’s paying that fee—he [Rigondeaux] obviously feels he owes it to them to pay it off and probably has to sign an extensive contract for these services, where they’re receiving a third of his income once he becomes a professional boxer. Is he thrilled about signing a contract for five years for fifty dollars? No. But the the rumor that I heard is that he was signing more contracts than autographs. Why? Because he had no understanding of the legal system once he came over here, which to me does seem a lot like indentured servitude.
LQ: There’s actually a scene in your memoir that I thought was intriguing if not hallucinatory. You described seeing Rigondeaux before you met him, you couldn’t see his face, he was totally obscured, and then after winning a fight he holds up a picture of Castro and just puts it over his face. What do you make of that gesture in the light of his flight from Cuba and everything that came after that?
BJB: Well, the Olympic team is by appointment, it’s not a meritocracy. Their attitude is that the only superstar in Cuba, as far as sports is concerned, is the system that’s producing all these great champions: “If you think you’re bigger than the system, we’re not concerned, there’s going to be more where you came from. We’ll find another one of you in Santiago de Cuba, in any back alley.” So that was something that was really intriguing in Rigondeaux’s case. He thought, “I’m the crown jewel that Fidel has for boxing. Even if this goes wrong in Brazil [during his 2007 a ttempt to defect from the Cuban team at the Pan-American games], he’s going to have to take me back so that I can win a third gold medal.” And Castro was like, “forget that.”
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Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Parte di ampio magnifico Porto all’uso degli antichi Romani (Part of a spacious magnificent harbor in the manner of the ancient Romans) (ca. 1749–50) Piranesi’s fantastical reconstructions of a crumbling Rome form an invisible city comparable to those of Calvino or Havana. Many of his etchings seem hallucinated, even totally impossible, and bear the unmistakable character of a city stuck somewhere in the past.
LQ: In your memoir, I was excited by the references to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities; I thought that they were really apt, and there was a quotation that I wanted to read from later on in the book from his description of a “continuous city”: “You have given up trying to understand whether, hidden in some sac or wrinkle of these dilapidated surroundings there exists a Penthesilea the visitor can recognize and remember, or whether Penthesilea is only the outskirts of itself. The question that now begins to gnaw at your mind is more anguished: outside Penthesilea does an outside exist? Or, no matter how far you go from the city, will you only pass from one limbo to another, never managing to leave it?” Does that speak to the experience that you and other Cubans—especially these boxers—have had of Havana? Does it follow you?
BJB: Oh absolutely. That Thomas Wolfe [book], “You Can’t Go Home Again.”—I think it’s the opposite: you can never leave home. There’s another line in Calvino, in Invisible Cities; and I don’t think I included it, but I probably should have. It’s when Kublai Khan—it’s about two thirds of the way through—confronts Marco Polo and says “OK, you’ve told me about all of these different cities, but the one you haven’t mentioned is where you come from: Venice.” And Polo says, “What else do you think I’ve been talking to you about?” That to me is so interesting because it comes back to the first line of the book [The Domino Diaries], which is that the subject of every interview is how you can’t learn much about anyone from an interview. Similarly, there is no way I can ask a question of anybody that reveals more about them then it does about me. And that’s the bind we’re all stuck in. I’m curating all of these experiences, and I’m ostensibly trying to project:, “Here’s what I’ve discovered.” But more so I think I’m burrowing in to illuminate me: these are the things that caught my eye, but how much did I miss? Ninety-nine percent of what I saw is not included because it doesn’t vibrate these internal sensors of what’s relevant; and that speaks to where you come from. For Cubans, once they leave, the desperation is like, “I’m on this deserted island collecting diamonds, but I have nowhere to cash them in, and I have no loved ones to share the riches with. And I don’t have the culture that I want to be in.” Their perception is that they go to Miami, close themselves off, stay with Cubans. Rigondeaux arrived here in February of 2009, so we’re what, six and a half years since then? Does not say yes or no in English—as far as what he’s accumulated of our language. Not yes or no.
LQ: So that speaks to the insularity of the culture.
BJB: Yeah. And the resistance—“because I’m a Cuban.” And my question is, as an outsider—Marco Polo to Kublai Khan—is “what Cuban? What does that mean? When you wear the Cuban trunks when you’re fighting to win a world championship for Cuba, which Cuba? Because the Cuba that produced you is the one that you abandoned, along with your family and culture and all of that. So what do you mean? What does it mean if I parse that?”
LQ: You mentioned in your memoir that while you were in Madrid you lived in a transvestite brothel between the Prado Museum and the Atocha train station. And first, I mean, that’s an interesting nexus, because you have this road leading out of Madrid, right? And then you have this huge emblem of what Spanish culture is to be defined as. I was wondering how, going to Havana from Madrid after having been at the Prado and the Reina Sofia, you dealt with this celebration of Spanish culture in very frank terms and then seeing its colonial legacy in Cuba.
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Francisco de Goya, The Third of May (1808).
BJB: I mean, Goya’s my favorite artist.
LQ: And there’s a lot of Goya in your writing.
BJB: Well, I think that a lot of what I try to do that is travel writing is like that—you know, Goya had the Napoleonic Wars. Which is interesting because of all of the places that Napoleon traveled to, what’s the place that caught him? Spain. The pride of Spain. Spain was defeated, but they refused to be defeated in a conventional way. That’s where guerilla warfare gets its name. Goya was sitting there on the sidelines, watching some parts of it but imagining a lot of others. But I was very struck, because I’m very fascinated by Napoleon also. And when you think of his pride, the pride of being French—even though he’s Corsican and spoke French with an accent, let’s remember—that kind of patriotism; he goes in there with the Napoleonic code and all that, and they tell him, “You know what? If you think we’re going to love France more than we love our own country and our own values, best of luck.” And five years later Napoleon leaves.
I see that kind of attitude being the same as when Columbus arrives in Cuba in 1492. “Is it an island?” he asks. “Yeah, it’s an island, the locals tell him.” “Hm. I see a lot of gold around here”—which has no value to the Taíno people—“can you get me some more of it?” “Yeah, sure.” And then they begin to think that he’s sick, because he’s so obsessed with gold. But it’s not good enough that they do this as an act of goodwill. They’re all enslaved. All of them. Then, what? Thirty years later they bring the Africans over, and you have this fascinating triangle of the Ivory Coast to Havana up to the United States. And all the money that was made by Northeastern families. So, is Spain any worse? Every culture on Earth has used some form of slavery or a free labor force to build a flourishing society. America was built on what? The genocide of one people and the enslavement of another. It only flourished after World War Two because there was no industrial competition. And let’s remember that the United States tried to buy Cuba, going back to Thomas Jefferson and offering a lot more money going forward then was offered for Alaska from Russia and the Louisiana Purchase from France. They were always trying to get it, and Spain wouldn’t sell. And then we have this convenient thing, the Spanish-American war, and in all but name the United States owns it.
Now, the Cuban system is in shambles; it’s not working. But in terms of the chessboard with the United States—Bay of Pigs invasion, [the] Mariel [boatlift], “let the people leave”—it takes almost genius to make worse decisions than American presidents historically have made.
By Lucas Quatrecasas ’18
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