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Episode 24—Brin-Jonathan Butler Takes Us to Cuba
124 Plays9 years ago
Brin-Jonathan Butler's memoir "The Domino Diaries" is now out in paperback (go buy it). It's about his time in Cuba boxing with world champions, chasing Hemingway's ghost, and spending 10 years of his life in Castro's Cuba. Sound good? That's because it is. Enjoy!
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:01
Speaker
Hey, what's going on CNFers? This is the hashtag CNF Podcast, a conversation I have with writers, reporters, authors, and documentary filmmakers about creating works of nonfiction.
Discussing 'The Domino Diaries' and Cuban Experiences
00:00:18
Speaker
And here, Bryn Jonathan Butler comes back for round two to talk about his memoir, The Domino Diaries, now on paperback. So go buy it, and it's about his time in Cuba.
00:00:30
Speaker
It is in all Cuban episodes, so I hope you brought your salsa shoes because this is a good one.
00:00:39
Speaker
Bryn Jonathan Butler, he brings it every time, just a wonderful mind. He's gonna offer some tremendous insights and it's just a, it's kind of fun just to be with him as he just thinks through things and just makes you think because he's just such an inquisitive person and a thoughtful person in that sense. Couple matters of business, go ahead and subscribe to the podcast or I ask you to, it certainly helps.
Listener Engagement and Newsletter Promotion
00:01:06
Speaker
Definitely rate it.
00:01:07
Speaker
But I'm not going to be one of those people that says only rate it if you're only going to give it five or four stars. If you think it's a one star podcast and you're going to take the time to do it, by all means give me one lousy star. I'm going to be mad at first, but it can only make me better in the long term, right? So, go ahead, one star, two stars. I'm used to it. I've got thick skin. In any case, we'll have fun with it. Maybe we'll even have a segment reading the one star reviews, but in any case,
00:01:38
Speaker
One star's fine. Whatever. Do what you gotta do. Also, I have a newsletter at BrendanOmera.com. It is a monthly newsletter, so at most you'll receive 12 over the course of the year instead of 52. And the way I go, and sometimes the way I'm sort of not consistent with it, you may get lucky and only have 10 or 11. So, look at that. So, go ahead and do that.
00:02:04
Speaker
And that's about it.
Diving into 'The Domino Diaries' and Butler's Motivations
00:02:05
Speaker
Enjoy episode 24 of the hashtag CNF podcast as Bryn Jonathan Butler strikes back. Thank you.
00:02:15
Speaker
commend you on a job well done with this book. This was like a ton of fun for me to read. And I found myself like always when I had to put it down for whatever reason, like I always found myself wanting to like run back to it, which doesn't happen very often. You know, maybe 10% of the books I read every year, it feels like that. And yours was definitely one of them. So like job well done, man. I'm really glad you liked it.
00:02:39
Speaker
So I wonder, as with anything that's sort of memoir driven, especially people who are reporters and such, I often wonder what compelled you to write this book, specifically a memoir of your time in Cuba?
00:02:57
Speaker
i think trying to make sense of a very complicated place and also the fact that i would i just moved to new york not long before i i sort of started the book so it was another way of kind of making sense of a new life and a new chapter in the united states because the book concludes with what i thought was the last time i'd ever be able to go back so
00:03:25
Speaker
It was interesting to kind of turn the page to a new existence acclimating to New York and being in a new country while looking back on my 20s, like closing the door on a decade. So it's rare that you have an opportunity to do that and be able to support yourself doing it at the same time. So I felt very lucky to be able to, I don't know, it wasn't a therapy, but you know,
00:03:55
Speaker
It was just very much on my mind. Did you struggle at all with the idea of writing memoir, or was this something that kind of came naturally for you? Yeah, I don't particularly like being on stage, the spotlight on me. I much prefer watching and observing.
00:04:21
Speaker
but i also recognize that the easiest way for readers to to be able to uh... connect to cuba would probably be through through me as somebody who was an outsider in new to it and i think coming at it very quickly where all my preconceptions were sort of detonated by the reality i think that's always an interesting place to start where
00:04:46
Speaker
You're not looking for answers. You're just exploring a lot of questions. And those are those are very often my favorite books to read where it is nonfiction. So there was it was kind of unavoidable, unavoidable. I wasn't going to write it.
00:05:02
Speaker
as a history book. I did do a biography of a boxer, but it was very difficult to tell his story before I did the memoir without including the journey to find out about him, which itself becomes almost half the story in a country like Cuba where these stories are forbidden to be told.
00:05:22
Speaker
Yeah, and the sort of central question that you like to explore in this book is that the
Cuban Athletes and Cultural Insights
00:05:34
Speaker
the choice that athletes or people make between staying in Cuba and defecting and that sort of tug of war within their minds about seeking the millions that they may get in America versus staying home and having the praise instead of money, you have the praise of the millions of fans in Cuba and that adulation.
00:05:59
Speaker
is its own form of currency and I wonder what was it like for you to explore that question throughout the book and throughout the whole decade that you spent time in Cuba.
00:06:10
Speaker
yeah i i i think just just add on to that also living for principles that are very difficult in a world that world that it largely i don't know if they discredited those principles but i mean most of the world is is bought and sold i mean in capitalism everything is a commodity everything even rejecting capitalism can be commodified as an angle which is incorporated in capitalism you know che Guevara is omnipresent on t-shirts that are bought and sold which
00:06:39
Speaker
So...
00:06:41
Speaker
i i liked that to stay or to go just explored why we do anything you know people are selling themselves out with their work here in new york every day i mean people are not spending enough time with their family they're not prioritizing things that they look back on with regret in cuba yes there was the currency of the ideal adulation of the people but there was also a recognition that prior to the revolution
00:07:11
Speaker
uh... grandparents parents were living in extreme poverty and squalor uh... in rampant illiteracy people dying on the streets from curable diseases and that change the changes that
00:07:26
Speaker
eradicated illiteracy and and a lot of these metrics for the health of the society with disease and universal health care these didn't just happen they happened as a result of that revolution and they felt beholden to that they felt honor bound
00:07:44
Speaker
to be examples of that because they've seen the benefits of it in their own families i mean most of these boxes are from the east of cuba that was the most hard hit prior to fidel castro seizing power so there there's that angle as well and i i think just naturally i tend to size people up and maybe it's a bad quality but just as kind of underdogs or whores cuba had that struggle you know where
00:08:13
Speaker
in miami you were considered uh... a whore to fidel castor you were afraid if you stayed and according to fidel if you left you were called the busan or were so there was no middle ground with that and what i discovered pretty pretty early on was that it took enormous courage to stay and it took enormous courage to leave so it seemed like a unique position about this issue of to stare to go
00:08:41
Speaker
is that the decision itself was the victim rather than which choice you made and that seemed to be something that allowed me to talk to people across the spectrum of viewpoints and include their point of view and give it equal weight so that the reader would be left to come to their own conclusions and i thought that was an interesting place to go and and respectful of a reader's intelligence
00:09:04
Speaker
that maybe they'd be on some of the same roller coasters that i was on meeting these people with a different calculus in each situation uh... of whether to stay or to go and also just forces you to examine your own choices about where
00:09:19
Speaker
You know, there are not easy choices. The decision is not clean. It's messy and it's dirty. And with the athletes, it's just a more extreme version of the choice that every Cuban has to make with just infinitely more money on the table and more stakes in terms of how they're used in that society. So what were your impressions of Cuba before you made your first trip?
00:09:50
Speaker
uh... my school my first impression was through through hemmingway with the old man in the sea that was one of the first books by everything is the first novel i ever read and i was just struck on the one hand of of you know what simple fisherman in a quiet fishing village uh...
00:10:10
Speaker
struggling struggling in a failed journey and There was just so much beauty that he was able to find in that and it seemed Allegorical in the sense of Cuba seemed to be the ultimate
00:10:26
Speaker
david versus goliath in standing up to the most powerful for some in the world against the united states in the united states values uh... i've always been interested in people who stand up to a bully and and the dynamics of that i i think a lot of writers i enjoy or are very much uh... underdogs or losers advocates i think losers in general have uh... a tremendous amount of self where awareness that they're
00:10:55
Speaker
it that system posed on them by virtue of losing your force to reflect whereas i find most winners quote-unquote winners are are pretty oblivious because they're never really confronted with much of why they're winning what their reasons are it's it's it's an interesting
00:11:14
Speaker
observation just that we think of winners requiring the character not to lose but it's it's just so often that that losers have to demonstrate so much character and we've just seen again and again so many of the people who are wildly successful their character in the end does get exposed as being highly questionable so i'd just saw so much dignity and character in the cuban people uh... in this common struggle that
00:11:43
Speaker
yet it seemed impossible that they could ever succeed in yet there were many successes and there were many things that i explored there you know everybody's warned about how impoverished it is over there which is very true in a material sense but in a social sense in the sense of community of relying on your neighbor of your kids not being afraid to move about in in Havana
00:12:09
Speaker
all of those things they seem to have you know a tremendous bounty of human connection and empathy and concern in the sense of social responsibility that i never grew up with and and i certainly don't live with here in new york where homelessness is you know abundant everywhere you go you're inundated with homelessness and i don't think i've ever seen a homeless person in Havana in eleven years of traveling there and yet
00:12:38
Speaker
the monetary conditions are very very difficult also it's just it's an interesting thing that uh... when obama was at the baseball game in Havana and i was there ESPN took photographs off the side of the the stadium uh... latino americano saying meanwhile here here's Havana trying to shame them about the poverty and many americans i think to their credit sent photographs on twitter
00:13:06
Speaker
reflecting the neighborhoods around baseball stadiums across the united states and just abject poverty that surrounds them including bristol connecticut the home of the s b m so it's just it's just always interesting that we can be so critical where we where we look at others but we're we're often just oblivious to our own situation we don't look around and and notice it and i just found cuba really forced you to confront a lot of that on a not just a daily basis but almost a minute-to-minute basis
00:13:36
Speaker
And I didn't expect that.
Cuban and American Societal Comparisons
00:13:39
Speaker
Yeah. And it's funny that you mentioned you really appreciate them as a people or as a country for standing up to the bully and how the kid's not being afraid to move about. And through the first quarter of the book, we learned that
00:13:56
Speaker
You were beat up in school and it made you very timid and that's what kind of ushered you towards the boxing culture as it means at first of self-defense. But as we later learn when you connect with that first punch, you don't want to be a fighter anymore. You want to learn how to protect people.
00:14:16
Speaker
And in what sense did you, just by the fact that you're echoing that standing up to the bully and the kids not being afraid to walk around, that must have been a very strong connection you felt dating back to your childhood when you moved to Cuba.
00:14:33
Speaker
well it certainly did and and let's remember i mean being raised in canada there's i don't think there's any animosity towards the united states i mean we look at we looked at the united states is our big brother uh... the longest unguarded border in the world
00:14:50
Speaker
uh... i think you know you look at the entertainment industry it's littered with canadians in a in a hugely disproportionate number of people who feel that to make it they have to come to the united states and you don't hear very many of them who come over who were whining about it all god i'm in the united states like i mean i think with a lot of us had a a bit of an inferiority complex in canada with uh...
00:15:14
Speaker
the arts being subsidized by the state you know there's a feeling of being second rate a little bit to remain in canada if you were legit as an artist you came to the u.s so i certainly never thought of the united states as a bully i bought into the rhetoric in the propaganda that everything the united states fought for was good and anybody who opposed it was bad and uh... you know some of the first
00:15:40
Speaker
first times where i heard anything about cuba was my father talking about being in school as a kid and having to hide under his desk to prepare for the after effects of the cuban missile crisis and you know nuclear holocaust and that kind of thing and i thought fidel castro is responsible for this and the people behind him back him they must all be crazy like you must be crazy to stand up to the united states
00:16:07
Speaker
and you get over there you just learn a little bit about their perspective on things and notice how much more nuanced it is compared to the america's america's media perception of cuba and you just think this is very strange this isn't what i expected when they have no free press that the people are so critical of their own system and also just critical of the propaganda you know it
00:16:32
Speaker
if you're actually reading between the lines and all people um... there it's like they know the media is full of shit so immediately they're reading between the lines in unlike i think in the u.s. where i mean to this day i don't know what the percentages of americans who think obama is a muslim but at some points it was thirty or forty percent i read and you just think well how can that exist like shouldn't our system be weeding that out in a healthy democracy
00:16:59
Speaker
And yet, I just found most Cubans that I met had a far more thorough understanding of how the US Congress worked than most Americans I meet here. And I was just very, very surprised by that and very curious to see America from this different perspective, which isn't to say I came away
00:17:20
Speaker
you know believing all of it hook line and sinker but it was just very interesting to see it from an adversary's perspective and i'm very intrigued by exploring any issue that that i have a strong emotional response to intellectually from as many different angles as i can to try to learn more about it and and again look look for questions rather than answers
00:17:44
Speaker
Because I find that that allows you to have a lot more conversations. If you come at anything from an answer, it's a fixed point of view. Any judgment just stops a discussion. So I found that the conversations were a lot more robust there about what the United States meant to their lives and some people were
00:18:07
Speaker
literally almost killing themselves to try to get over to miami for for the american dream but they had a romanticized view of what that meant and i think very quickly i had a tremendously romanticized view of what cuba meant and stood for uh...
00:18:24
Speaker
because they had a lot of things that i i had never seen growing up in the way that they depended on one another in the decency and integrity and generosity of the people there when i thought how can you be generous if you don't have anything to give but again that was only true in a material sense uh... so so that was that was just very it was just very surprising and and disconcerting uh...
00:18:50
Speaker
And it also took, you know, this memoir started, you know, 11 years after I'd first gone there. So I did have some real time to ruminate and to explore in books and conversations with a lot of the people who've written the books. And I was just hoping that that would offer something new and fresh for readers. Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Cultural Lies and Social Dynamics
00:19:10
Speaker
You know, I think, too, when I was reading it early on, I kind of got this census undercurrent of
00:19:18
Speaker
asking or looking at the the lies that sometimes we or the stories we tell ourselves or the the lies that the our sort of culture and government tells us to kind of like keep us in our little place like in America we're told that the American dream is this possible tangible ideal and it's sometimes anything but and um you know in Alfonso one of your one of your friends in Cuba I believe he passed away correct
00:19:47
Speaker
Yeah, very quickly. Well, one of the things that you haven't – you quoted him saying is, quote, much is a lie here just as it is in America. I think Cubans believe the bullshit less than you. Cuban advertising tries to help individuals get over human weakness while American advertising encourages you to give into it.
00:20:09
Speaker
I was wondering what thought you gave to the lies we tell ourselves or in some sense the lies that are told to us to maybe just keep us in line or keep everyone in lockstep and so to speak. Well I think that there's this interesting clash between the
00:20:42
Speaker
well innocent in the sense of we tried it we try to come up with rational reasons to object to things that were opposed to but most of the i think the key decisions that people make and i think we make it with society we do it with the stock market we do it with tons of decisions we make our emotional they're totally irrational that govern the decisions we make like the real rudder we have with decisions is emotional and so
00:20:54
Speaker
like the Dionysian and what's the other one, the Apollonian?
00:21:09
Speaker
Everything in Cuba seemed totally irrational. It seems wildly irrational to want to exist in an anachronistic society, which isn't aspiring to all the wonderful material things that you can get with the American dream. Having a credit card to buy a lot of stuff that you don't need, and who cares if you're in debt? You'll figure out a way, but in the meantime, you have the big screen TV and on and on and on. In Cuba, you can't have any of that.
00:21:39
Speaker
your you know technology was the thing that was so limited there and i think the popular view is my god how could anybody not want to have wifi wherever they go and all the apple
00:21:54
Speaker
products and those kind of things because that's what makes life wonderful and fast and convenient and all those kind of things. But the flip side to it is if nobody has cell phones there, everybody's committed to spending time with you with their full concentration in a way that doesn't exist here. The social fabric was
00:22:17
Speaker
much older in terms of how people related and it's it's what the nostalgia in america is where we look at sports or we talk about all so-and-so is not doing this for the money it's for the love of it and everything in cuba you're forced to live that you're forced to if you're playing baseball you live in the neighborhood you walk to the stadium you have your gear hung over your shoulder in a duffel bag
00:22:43
Speaker
you know and everybody can't use money to create distance from other people uh... if you don't have a phone in your house you think my god it's so tragic not to have a phone but what it means is the twenty people a day knock on your door to come and see you and to have coffee with you and they need eggs and you have some extra rom you have some connection for that and your uncle has cigars and on and on and on so
00:23:07
Speaker
Survival depends on a network of 50 people within 10 blocks of you and that just created so much human interaction. I'm in a city like Manhattan which is such a tremendous high concentration of people but the feeling of isolation and loneliness here
00:23:27
Speaker
you're on a subway, everybody is nodding into their phones. I mean nobody is interacting or if they are, it's frustration and friction and sort of displaced anger. So there just seemed to be a lot more patience there and obviously a tremendous amount of frustration too if you want to do a
00:23:50
Speaker
what should be a 20-minute commute from just outside of town, it would take three hours of waiting for the bus. But it does lead to other things in terms of how human beings relate that I think are meaningful. If you don't have access to Facebook, you actually have to meet people in person. And while you're meeting them, you have to spend time with them and be present.
00:24:11
Speaker
uh... you're not always checking your phone you you can check your email and i noticed the conversations were a lot better i think by virtue of the fact that people were present that technology wasn't so fundamental to people's existences and i think in our society progress in the next thing is so vital but we never are really permitted to ask like because we can do something new should we do it
00:24:39
Speaker
you know it's it's it's always assumed tacitly that it's better you know we need the next thing in the new thing and we look at i wonder often if cell phones if they if they do make a link with brain cancer something like that will become just like cigarettes where you know we know all the links of cigarettes with cancer and still twenty percent of adults including myself smoke i wonder if the same thing would be true with cell phones i wonder if
00:25:06
Speaker
conclusively there was some way to prove all this talk of climate change if anybody would do anything different I mean in terms of the people who deny it I just think human nature is quite interesting that way and that intellectually we can understand these things but emotionally we don't want to do anything to change and and Cuba Cuba was
00:25:29
Speaker
The Cuban people were forced to be in a situation that was so stifled from what the rest of the world was, and in many ways they were desperate to have those changes and to have Wi-Fi and all the wonderful material objects and stuff that
00:25:50
Speaker
make life more convenient but there was a real benefit to not having those that that was interesting to to have imposed on yourself for periods of time while you were staying there
00:26:02
Speaker
When you first went down there, the internet as we know it was in its nation stages and it definitely predated the social media that we know. By the time you were done with this period of time in Cuba, that's when everything started to pick up steam here in terms of the social networking via internet.
Cuba's Transformation Post-Castro
00:26:25
Speaker
What was that like for you?
00:26:27
Speaker
Because you weren't as sort of handcuffed to it the way most of us are now When you move initially move there, so you could actually there was a certain change that you were undergoing Technologically speaking as as well as you know going back and forth to Cuba where you know by and large stayed the same by and large it did stay the same until
00:26:50
Speaker
until fidel castro step down in two thousand six and then when raul came to power and made some significant changes with private business and allowing more and more internet usage i mean i was just there for obama's visit at the end of march there were wifi hot spots all over havana it was clusters of hundreds of people next to all of those those hot spots at any time of the day
00:27:18
Speaker
A lot more tourist money was in. Cruise ships were coming in regularly. Now the first American cruise ships are coming. They were filming The Fast and Furious. Transformers, the movie is slated to be filmed there. There was a Chanel fashion show down the Prado walkway that I wrote about, which used to be a slave auction center. There are huge changes just in five years where it's a different world.
00:27:48
Speaker
I had some people after publication write to me to say, you know, can you kind of curate a list of things to do for a couple weeks so I can see the things that you saw? And I was kind of forced to say, like, they've been gone now for several years.
00:28:04
Speaker
it's not to say that there isn't some some amazing things for you to go find but the cuba that was there in two thousand or two thousand five uh... that that's long gone and it's never coming back even the malecon the most famous site in Havana now i was told has two massive chinese hotels being built next to this four hundred-year-old lighthouse forever if you're trying to film a movie of of of Havana you're gonna have to
00:28:34
Speaker
use the use technical good green screen or something to technologically remove how ugly these hotels are going to look next to architecture that's just breathtaking you know they're trying to help uh... an economy that was in free fall for many many years it's just it it has its its cost on the other side as well that
00:28:58
Speaker
uh... a place that was like no other is is very rapidly moving to to be similar to other places in that you know there's expectations when american tourists go places that they want a standard of living and soon enough you know americans are going there to beat americans like them going there you know they don't want to become what americans will create down there like them they don't want to see starbucks they don't want to see modern cars they don't want to see holiday ends but
00:29:27
Speaker
That is also exactly the kind of amenities that they will criticize to the hilt if they're not there. So that's an interesting dichotomy in itself for me.
00:29:39
Speaker
So I wonder, so tell me the story of your first trip to Cuba. Your grandfather had just passed away and he left some money and your mother asked you, if you could go anywhere, where would you want to go? And you said Cuba. And she said, well here's the money, go book your ticket. So what was that experience like? Everything from booking your ticket to getting on the plane to landing in a really exotic, exotic country.
00:30:09
Speaker
well the the first thing that happened that totally changed it forever and have no idea what it would have become was meeting meeting somebody who was an antique bookseller on the plane right over uh... who was illegally buying antique books uh... along kayo biz boat the street where having what used to drink and where he wrote from the bell tolls and embossed windows hotel uh... there's also this
00:30:35
Speaker
a wonderful selection of stalls of antique books and he would go there and for pennies on the dollar buy some first edition and then come back to Toronto where he was living he was Guatemalan and sell it on eBay or sell it wherever he could and
00:30:52
Speaker
He asked me if I would help buy him drinks after the stewardess cut him off because he was just drinking so excessively. He had cirrhosis of the liver at that time, which I didn't know. And we kind of struck up a bit of a friendship and he knew Pan American silver medalist in the 100 meter dash and all of the athletes over there know each other because they travel together.
00:31:18
Speaker
they have to live in compounds because so many of them try to defect when they're traveling internationally and so that that was able to plug me into the olympic boxing community so it only took a couple days to secure a two-time olympic champion to train me at boxing and um... on the other side of it he as a as an antique bookseller was very up on all things hamming way over there
00:31:45
Speaker
And he helped arrange a meeting with Gregorio Fuentes, the old man in the sea, in Cohemar. He was still living in the same town with his, I think his grandson, who was sort of like the representative to take the $15, which was given to the government.
00:32:03
Speaker
I couldn't believe that there was a place that you could visit that was not only as beautiful as Havana was, but also offered things like this culturally so affordably, but I mean it was just very dreamlike and surreal that
00:32:23
Speaker
that something like this could be permitted you know uh... but it was another another element of of communism kind of leveling everybody unit so-called egalitarian society uh... people aren't kind of walled off you know if you you came to the u.s. and said hey i want to get batting lessons from gary jeter and i'd like to hang out with gator lease to get some pointers on writing like
00:32:50
Speaker
good luck but it's a different story in Havana because six dollars a day to a two-time Olympic champion is two weeks salary that he can use to help out his family and Gregorio Fuentes welcomed celebrating his relationship with Hemingway and felt that Hemingway was a very solid ambassador about Cuban values with the book that he'd written about it
00:33:16
Speaker
Based on himself and I was I was very
00:33:24
Speaker
It was a definite starting point for me with Cuba about how a society could honor America's most famous writer when it was thought to be a society that was totally opposed to everything that America stood for. How could they embrace this writer and how could Hemingway spend the last 20 years of his life there and give them the Pulitzer Prize and
00:33:46
Speaker
and the Nobel Prize and declare himself a Cuban and use the old man in the sea's boat, the Pilar, as a means of smuggling explosives in support of Fidel Castro and the revolution. I thought, how did Hemingway get a pass from being this, not just a communist sympathizer, but aiding and abetting this whole revolution? I mean, he was so vocal about it.
00:34:10
Speaker
Hemingway's also somebody we have to remember, that when he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, Fidel Castro was reading that to get pointers about guerrilla warfare up in the Sierra Maestra for the two years he was there before he took over the government. And when Obama was running against John McCain, both of those politicians cited Robert Jordan, the star of For Whom the Bell Tolls, as their
00:34:35
Speaker
Favorite literary hero, so there's some odd symmetry and kind of poetry in there about people I guess finding some things to cling on to and dismissing others sort of conveniently, but All of that just just really intrigued me
00:34:54
Speaker
So Alfonso also said, you guys touched down and he said, meeting a city for the first time at night is like making love to a woman before you've ever spoken with her. And he said, I'm very envious of you tonight. So what was that like? Describe the scene of seeing Havana for the first time with the sundown.
First Impressions of Cuba and Emotional Observations
00:35:18
Speaker
Yeah, it's
00:35:22
Speaker
Havana is a place that you feel like it just directly is working on your subconscious as you're looking at it. It has that feeling of a nightmare, like in every nightmare, it takes a little while to sort of sort out that everybody is there, understands why they're there except you. And when you understand kind of what's going on, suddenly you're like, oh, I'm in a nightmare. And that's usually when you wake up.
00:35:50
Speaker
And it feels a bit like the scenery and the whole apparatus of Havana, especially at night, the trees and the jungle and the intensity of the people, and it's loud, and the music is rumbling.
00:36:05
Speaker
things are literally falling down everywhere all you know the buildings that people are saying oh wow it's such gorgeous architecture post-colonial architecture cubans are saying it's falling fucking down it's it's killing people the roof is caving in the plumbing doesn't work and on and on so all of that kind of intensity was was really overwhelming but then you find that
00:36:28
Speaker
This nightmare, like the wardrobe of nightmare that the city has, is masking this overwhelming kindness and sense of playfulness. A huge unbridled sexuality.
00:36:45
Speaker
So there was just such a sense of welcome that felt really unearned, like you just show up and people take you into their lives. If they have a few drops of rum in a bottle that's been there for six months, they'll share it with you. And they don't make a point to let you know that they're sharing it with you. It's just their sense of treating you, I guess the best way to distill it is hearing from some people
00:37:13
Speaker
this proclamation that everybody deserves to have Havana as a hometown.
00:37:18
Speaker
But not hoarding that, not keeping that from people, but sharing that with people, letting them feel that as much as they possibly can. And that's a very different value system. I remember distinctly in Vancouver, one of the nicest drives you could have was an area where mansions had been built so that there was no public park or space where you could enjoy the view that wealthy people could enjoy.
00:37:45
Speaker
And I remember thinking even as like a kid, do they have that view so that they can enjoy it or do they have it so they can deprive it from everybody else who can't afford it? And I wonder which was more pleasurable to them.
00:38:00
Speaker
distinctly like I just remember feeling like that. It seems like there's been effort put to prohibit people who can't afford to enjoy this view, to enjoy them being off on the sidelines. And Cuba didn't have that feeling with the wonders that Cuba offered, which I think primarily is the people themselves.
00:38:22
Speaker
They're on the hunt to find you and to infect you with with their sense of enjoyment and If you bring any kind of knowledge and and have put in time to learn the language or to learn the history They're so flattered and thrilled to have discussions and and I don't think there's anybody that knows how to throw a better party than Cubans and
00:38:47
Speaker
on the other side people people who are in a lot of pain tend to be really funny people so cubans consequently are very very funny their jokes hurt and people are crying a lot people have moist eyes it's it's a very easy way to distinguish a cuban from anybody else who looks similar to them as is their eyes look very close to tears whether they're upset or moved by something or whether they're telling a joke that's so funny that you're crying and
00:39:15
Speaker
All of that kind of intensity of emotion was something that was very new to me coming from a place where it seemed like the ultimate social violation was giving people a story to tell. What are you doing? Why are you trying to stand out? It was a very provincial bourgeois kind of attitude in Vancouver, I thought, where
00:39:39
Speaker
you know the weather wasn't small talk in vancouver was a serious discussion and and that was not pleasing to me that's somebody you know who more than anything like i'm not interested in landscapes i'm interested in people i mentioned learning how they work in
00:39:56
Speaker
And in Cuba, Cuba covers you, I think, as much as a writer, as a photographer, is that it takes genius to take bad photographs in Cuba. It takes genius. And I think the same thing is true with telling stories. Find anybody, anybody you run into at random.
00:40:14
Speaker
and i guarantee you either they are somebody very close to them is living a life completely at the extremes so how do you write a bad story just simply reporting on what their basic day-to-day existence is an overcoming the quotidian conflicts and and obstacles of their daily life uh... so maybe it it covered a lot of my flaws as a writer to have subjects who were just
00:40:39
Speaker
so colorful and and leading leading a life in a place that i knew very very early on that if you know i don't have kids but if i had kids are grandkids they would never believe that cuba existed even if i was told and telling them you know the gospel of exactly what i saw they just couldn't believe that human beings could ever live this way and that's a that's a magical
00:41:06
Speaker
way to live just from roosters screaming on the rooftops next door to you to wake you up to when you go to sleep at night and everybody's dancing or dominoes or music's playing or people are holding hands walking outside the door and people are outside. They're out there because their homes are not pleasant places to live in. There's too many people living in each space.
00:41:30
Speaker
I learned Spanish mostly from watching the Brazilian telenovelas that would shut down the city, but often I felt like these people were learning their lives from telenovelas. Every story I encountered was a kind of telenovela script plot line of extremity.
00:41:50
Speaker
All that stuff was just, it took me years to be able to synthesize it from journals and just my own ruminations into something that would approach a story to tell.
00:42:06
Speaker
Yeah, and it's alluding to the Cubans how they always look like they're close to tears. I pulled that line right out of the books. I have the hardcover edition, so it's on page 68. Cubans eyes often look close to tears. Tears never seem far away because both their pain and their joy are always so close to the surface. And I almost felt like, wow, that's
00:42:32
Speaker
That's like a killer opening line, but I think it opens a chapter, or at least opens a page break. That just throws the hammer down right away, and I think that sums up. If you had to sum up your experience in one sentence, that seems as close to it as possible. I agree, and I think the counterpoint to it was
00:42:56
Speaker
uh... reflecting on the cuban coming that seems like a tragic condition to be and i think many people would agree but from where i came from there was a certain despair i forget who's had the quote that most people live lives of quiet desperation they are all yeah yes i was right and and i think that that was vancouver to me like the streets where i walked in the people i saw just made me increasingly feel now
00:43:26
Speaker
to be with people who were feeling, being moved to tears by joy or by sadness, at least they were feeling things. And it doesn't mean I'm advocating a system that creates that kind of dynamic, but it seemed, just from a humanist perspective, to be pretty vital to our existence and not an accident that so many people in our culture are medicated so heavily just to deal with and regulate their emotions.
00:43:52
Speaker
you know they're we're we're scared to feel anything in the society anything you feel that i guarantee there's a medication deal with it that they've been comfortable and cuba makes you very uncomfortable if you're not drunk if you're not banging women's you know as prostitutes were there if you're not touring cigar factories if you're not doing the hemmingway tour but you're actually
00:44:15
Speaker
uh... walking this you know ninety nine percent of the vanna still which is amazing is pretty much untouched from what you see in every others every other major city in the world where they all sort of become an aspire to be the same cliche they're not just cliches the aspire to the cliche and ninety nine percent of the vanna still is is itself
00:44:37
Speaker
And I found that just to be very overwhelming and a really interesting glimpse into what America was. There was so much symmetry there into what was Brooklyn in the 1950s that people go on and on about just how magical a time it was. Well, that's long dead and that will never come back in this country. But it was alive and well there, this conservative American wet dream was all over the place.
00:45:05
Speaker
And I just thought, oh, isn't it interesting that Americans are so afraid of this for various reasons or their government won't allow them to go see it? But if they did, I think it would be such a throwback to stories that have been told to them by their grandparents.
00:45:22
Speaker
And it might open them up about why have they been told to avoid this? Maybe there is some value in some of the things that are here, correctives that are here, which is what I think brought Hemingway there. I think Hemingway very much was this huckleberry fin who wanted a river to fish in that was his. And that was long dead in his own country.
00:45:43
Speaker
But it was alive and thriving in Cuba for a long time, despite a lot of other problems going on. I think that was a big part of why somebody who had the choice to live anywhere in the world chose there. It didn't surprise me for a second after spending a day there why he would choose it. Speaking of Hemingway, aside from the Nick Adams stories, for someone who's such a titanic American writer, did he even write a novel that was set in America?
00:46:14
Speaker
Uh, did he write a novel that was set in America? I guess, uh, to have and have not. Okay. Okay. Yeah. The Florida, the Florida keys with the, but again, smuggling over to Cuba and stuff like that. Yeah.
00:46:26
Speaker
uh... that's the one i can think of your your but i think i think you're right to say the nick adams stories are all about kind of looking back in the past that small towns that have literally been burnt down you know going back into this past and him always wondering was it there in the first place that's that seems to be the magic of those stories is this
00:46:46
Speaker
almost radical ambivalence about, can we trust memory in relation to our nostalgia? It's definitely what makes those stories endure for me. And yeah, and that's a big part of Cuba too, is people always looking back in the rear view and a younger generation saying, fuck that, let's look ahead. This past that you're always talking about wasn't there. And I think you're seeing that also on the other side of the 90 miles with
00:47:15
Speaker
A lot of the books written by the exile community kind of waxing poetic about the paradise that Cuba was, and a lot of people who were still there saying, fuck you, it wasn't a paradise. I don't think this revolution happened. It's because of how unfair things were. The book, too, is so inquisitive in nature.
00:47:38
Speaker
Right from the opening sentence, you say maybe the real subject of every interview is how you really can't learn much about anyone from an interview. Throughout much of it, you pepper a lot of people with questions and you're that conduit to get us into this culture.
Interviewing Cuban Athletes: Risks and Reflections
00:47:57
Speaker
Despite you coming out and saying that for a sentence, it still doesn't keep you from trying and earning the interview
00:48:07
Speaker
earning the interview from trying to learn to try to learn something. So I wonder, what are you still trying to accomplish if you admit you can't learn much about anyone by interviewing them routinely?
00:48:19
Speaker
well i think that can be balanced off also by i don't think anybody can give their phone number without giving away a lot of who they are and a lot of what people you know where do you learn more about somebody from what they're trying to sell you on about what their narrative is and who they are or by what they're trying to conceal from you
00:48:39
Speaker
you know who who don't they want you to think that they are what are the narratives that they've noticed they've acquired they don't like that they're trying to shock and doing everything they can to try to try to reinvent themselves i mean america's famous for being if you know the first place in centuries where you could come to reinvent yourself be be gatsby and and that kind of thing i mean that's the the magic of
00:49:05
Speaker
of what i think the american dream promised was this idea of reinvention and the ideal of a meritocracy where you could rise up despite where you came from and that kind of thing so i mean i just think that
00:49:23
Speaker
I always kind of view people not as riddles or crossword puzzles, but as poetry. And poetry is something that changes every time you return to it. You notice how it's changed, and in the process, you notice how you've changed. And I like exploring that and not really exploring it with the intention of, I don't know, trying to fleece it of its complexity or its ambiguity.
00:49:51
Speaker
And so yeah, I mean, I like conversing with people. I don't know if it gets to the bottom of anything particularly, but I think it's maybe it's just a dynamic I've always had and just existentially, I kind of feel like.
00:50:07
Speaker
existence is a bit like being in Grand Central Station. There's a bunch of people around you. You're not sure what people, you know, they have tickets about where they're going. You don't know which ones have the same ticket as you and are on the same train. Most people are not. I like talking to strangers and
00:50:27
Speaker
I think that's a big part of this book is everybody I met over there was a complete stranger that led me to more strangers, but sometimes you meet strangers who it's as if you've known them an awful long time and you can be a lot more candid and open with them than you could with people who are in your inner circle of trust or your family.
00:50:51
Speaker
That dynamic, I guess there's an element of displacement in that I had a lot of issues with where I was born and
00:51:01
Speaker
family and community and social connections and it didn't fit very well where I came from so I sought to find surrogates elsewhere and Cuba is a strange place to find it but I did find a lot of those things or if I didn't find it
00:51:22
Speaker
i guess i found a place where those those human connections were more valuable than anywhere else that i've been maybe it's it's sort of parallel to what oscar wild said that you know if you're starving go to a place where the food is the best and if i was emotionally starving from family and social stuff cuba was definitely place where i'd never seen families
00:51:46
Speaker
have more purchase in a society or friendship or a sense of community or a sense of patriotism rallying around principles of common struggle. So I just found that a very vibrant, intense
00:52:07
Speaker
kind of ethos to exist in that that moved me you know i just found the right music to to you know the right soundtrack to accompany my own film you know of of life uh... right i feel like i could move to it finally i i couldn't where i came from nothing fit
00:52:27
Speaker
So it's hard not to feel a great deal of gratitude and generosity to a place that offers that to you, especially when you're not from it. I wasn't trying to go native with it. I was very much still an outsider, but I just sure enjoyed those moments and wanted to savor them for as long as they were there because I knew Cuba as I encountered it was not going to last for very long.
00:52:56
Speaker
So what was it like for you with every, essentially every question you ask was in a lot of ways committing a sort of Cuban suicide for you because you were going up the ladder of people who, if you asked them or got caught interviewing them, it was going to lead to your either like banishment from the country or worse, maybe getting arrested and thrown in prison, especially as you're trying to approach like Tiafalo Stevenson.
00:53:24
Speaker
and these high profile athletes. It's almost like the very inquisitive nature that you have was also going to be your Cuban undoing. So what was that like for you as you kind of like lit the fuse of your own bomb there by asking these questions? I guess I wanted to get deeper
00:53:52
Speaker
I wanted to get to the kind of fulcrum of how this insane revolution functioned.
00:54:05
Speaker
I guess the unique angle that I wanted on it was that I'd heard how both sides of the 90 miles had weighed in about the issue, but I hadn't heard in a setting that was more informal and natural how these people felt themselves, and how did they live? What was it when they weren't on camera or behind a microphone, but just with you in their living room?
00:54:35
Speaker
you know what what was it like just to see them interact where tv cameras weren't following them i wanted to see behind the curtain and i think i just increasingly got addicted to that pursuit and uh...
00:54:51
Speaker
In the process, I got a few other people behind me who would financially support that endeavor where I had obligations to not let everything collapse, but I had to go further and further and pull it off in a weird way.
00:55:11
Speaker
san diego with the big fish you know like you you want the big one but it it definitely has the risk of uh... causing a lot of problems that your way out into deep waters where you don't know how to deal with it and i certainly didn't want to get arrested i certainly didn't want to get put in prison for the perception that i was trying to lure athletes off the island uh... i was meeting people who were doing that uh... outside of cuba who'd gone there to secure
00:55:40
Speaker
Cuban athletes for very little money to get them into smugglers boats and that kind of thing taken to Mexico held hostage until ransoms were paid and that kind of thing it just seemed like this these these stories hadn't been told much and
00:55:56
Speaker
it was just such a an insane world to enter into uh... and try to engender trust with the people to tell their stories and i think part of it was just that they didn't know what the hell my angle was and i wasn't sure particularly i'd just uh... just listen to people give them an opportunity to talk uh... and then i guess the only way to
00:56:21
Speaker
To go further was to start recording it you know with with the camera or with a notepad and that does up the stakes because the cuban state certainly wants control over the narrative.
00:56:34
Speaker
of where their their highest profile athletes stand uh... and anything that clashes with that narrative they will try to suppress by any means that they have at their disposal so it becomes a scary society when literally on every block is a spy agency called the committee for the defense of the revolution where any non-revolutionary activity is reported and
00:57:03
Speaker
I would hear stories of even petty violence of a tourist having a camera stolen could result in like a quarantined area of 10 square blocks where, you know, the army would come in and go door to door until they found the assailant. So where athletes were concerned or any kind of
00:57:26
Speaker
you know spokesman against the revolution or you know anything quote-unquote counter-revolutionary i just met many reporters who are doing a lot less than i was in in trying to secure interviews be deported immediately so there's always a bit of dread that you're going to get that knock at two or three in the morning and be escorted to the airport and be blacklisted ever come back or or be arrested while you're doing these interviews because there are very clearly defined channels
00:57:55
Speaker
Officially to secure these things and I had no standing in terms of working for a legit Publication or TV network or something to make it to make it at all reasonable for them to agree for me to do it so I just went sort of through the back door everywhere I could and never knew if it would work never knew what obstacles were there because I
00:58:20
Speaker
I mean, you don't know when you've kicked over the hornet's nest over there until they're all on you.
00:58:27
Speaker
so i think maybe it was a combination of having been there for many years where i didn't stir up any trouble to then really expeditiously going after the biggest names i possibly could uh... with with some intimate knowledge of people who knew them uh... acting as liaisons to create it so i i i don't know what the calculus was to allow me to get away with it to get away with
00:58:52
Speaker
footage that could immediately be put on the front page of the Miami Herald because they saw the value of it in terms of ammunition against the revolution, which was certainly not my agenda at all. I was trying to offer a more nuanced portrait of these people who I felt were caught in the crossfire of both societies.
00:59:14
Speaker
So where does the fearlessness to tell these kinds of stories come from? Because you weren't afraid to go into heavy credit card debt to finance your projects. It was totally a story that you deeply believed in. So I wonder where do you think that fearlessness to confront this stuff comes from? Well, I think it's more desperation than fearlessness.
00:59:43
Speaker
I mean, the credit card thing is kind of a similar thing to the access in Cuba is that I had immaculate credit. I mean, I never made any money, but I had immaculate credit until I went $50,000 in debt. I'd never missed a credit card payment. And then it was like, do you stop? Do you just stop cold? Or do you go all in?
01:00:04
Speaker
And at that point, I had a few of those decisions with this. I had camera equipment stolen when a Cuban was fighting. I had no way to go forward, so I bet everything I had at 20 to 1 that he'd knock the guy out in the first round and got lucky.
01:00:21
Speaker
going in with uh... the irish men who signed a number of cubans and was the first one to get them off the island uh... for him to agree to tell his story he said uh... i'm going to want to watch one of these fighters fight if if you want to come with me the risks are that the miami mafia that works with the mexican mafia in this human smuggling operation have told me explicitly
01:00:51
Speaker
we will kidnap you we will get a hit man to murder you or we'll get the police to frame you with drugs when they arrest you if you come if you come across the border and he took the threat so seriously well i should say his security team took the threat so seriously that they said we will not go with you to tijuana right now which at the time had as many murders as as iraq
01:01:16
Speaker
So he said, if you want to go with me, my whole family is all in tears begging me not to go, but fuck them. I'm not letting them push me around. So if you come along with me, I'll get you this fighter. I'll give you a full access to him. You can get in the ring with him in Tijuana. You can interview him before the fight, after the fight, and I'll tell you my whole story.
01:01:39
Speaker
And it's just one of those decisions you make. Are you content with the life that you have? Or do you want a passport into the life that you want? And there's risk. But the desperation or the unhappiness I had with where I was at was enough incentive to take that risk. And I got lucky.
01:02:03
Speaker
and same with the credit card that is i just thought you know what can they what can they really do to me okay my credits ruined but what if what if i succeed with this and i get to
01:02:15
Speaker
I get to be a writer, I get to have a story that's worth telling that can find me a place like Random House and McMillan jousting with each other to secure a book deal with me to tell the story. I understood that I had to lead a life that was worth writing about that would capture these people's interest and
01:02:36
Speaker
I never went through the conventional channels of an MFA program at Columbia or something to just be like a draft pick. I had to find a way in that was more unconventional and I really just see it as desperation.
01:02:53
Speaker
And occasionally, you know the important moments in your life while they're happening. Most of the time, you don't. But based on that, you can make the best decision you can about whether the risk is worth it. And I just kind of felt, what do I have to lose? And I don't think that ever bespeaks courage or bravery. It's always desperation. And would you say the risk was worth it?
01:03:22
Speaker
Absolutely. Now, would I be saying that if I was in a Cuban prison right now? Would I be saying that if I was stuck in Canada with a $50,000 debt and no ability to write the book because I couldn't get those interviews? Would I be saying if I couldn't have finished the documentary because he didn't knock him out in the first round? I don't know. I'd probably be a baby about it and be like, no, I should have done the responsible
01:03:51
Speaker
common sense thing, but I didn't want that life. And I feel like to gain access to the people who are your heroes on some level, you have to take some gambles that impress them enough to want to
01:04:09
Speaker
you know allow you into the conversation where that where they'll treat you as somebody worthy of just having a straight conversation it's not just the vertical all your my mentor you're my hero but actually have real conversations and so i tried to tried to here and there take some long odds on and and create something that might might be worthy of uh...
01:04:36
Speaker
you know that that's my big thing is to get to get access to the people who inspired me and to do something worthy of of them so that they they are inspired to start a correspondence with me so i can learn more about them and i've been very fortunate that most of them i've been able to do that
01:04:56
Speaker
Well I think I speak for untold thousands of people by saying like thank you thank you thank you for taking the risk so we get a chance to read your work and you continue to do the work you do and you're only going to get better and better as you keep doing what you do because it's truly a pleasure anytime I get to see the Bryn Jonathan Butler byline and I know I'm
01:05:22
Speaker
I, and untold thousands, are in for a wonderful reading experience at the hands of your talent. I think this is a wonderful point to end
Conclusion and Farewell
01:05:33
Speaker
on. I just want to thank you again for coming on the show. The book is The Domino Diaries, my decade boxing with Olympic champions and chasing Hemingway's ghost in the last days of Castro's Cuba. Thank you again, Bryn.
01:05:48
Speaker
Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Brandon. Yeah, always a pleasure and we'll be in touch. Take care, man. You too.