VILLEPINTE, France — The captain was down and now it was up to the flyweight to pick up the flag. He was a slender, short-haired, solid kid named Claro – Alejandro Claro Fiz.
They put Claro in the red corner and there was a Brazilian in the blue. The Brazilian looked older and a bit worse for wear. He had tattoos and a trim mustache, which you don’t often see on a boxer because the hairs get soggy with water and ointment and blood. His name was Michael Douglas da Silva Trinadade, and he was born in Belém in 2000, about the time “Traffic” came out. But the fact was, Michael Douglas was only a few months older than Alejandro Claro Fiz.
The venue was a hangar in a hive of industrial warehouses in the Département of Seine-Saint-Denis an hour north of Paris, near the international airport. But for the music and the flags and the cheering inside, it could have been Shenzhen, China. Outside, it was 35 Celsius in the shade, if you could find any. It was hot like this in Santiago de Cuba the last time I was down there, when they cremated Fidel Castro and locked his ashes in a concrete tomb, just in case.
Watching the men of Cuba box for gold and glory has been one of the paramount thrills of the Olympic century. Maybe you remember a heavyweight named Teófilo Stevenson, champion at Munich and Montreal and Moscow, and how he supposedly was offered $5-million to challenge Muhammad Ali, and how Stevenson supposedly said “I will not trade the Cuban people for all the dollars in the world” or “What is a million dollars compared to the love of eight million people?” or maybe even both of those things.
Five billion people loved Ali, but he took the money anyway. All Teo Stevenson ever got for the blows he took was a government job and a free house.
Stevenson was not the only campeón. Down through the Olympiads, the fist-fighters of Castroland, well-fed on Soviet charity, claimed 41 gold medals, which isn’t too shabby for an island that is smaller than Newfoundland. The rubles ran out thirty years ago, but the Cubans kept punching. They are punching still. They are even allowed to turn professional, but the government keeps half the purse.
In Rio de Janeiro as a light heavyweight, and in Tokyo at 92 kilograms, the Olympic champion was Julio César De La Cruz Peraza from the city of Camagüey. It was expected that he would win gold again here in la Belle France. So they named him captain of the boxing team and dubbed him to carry the red, white and blue bandera in Friday night’s flotilla.
¡Ay! Two nights ago, Julius Caesar was on his way to gold medal number three when he lost a one-point split decision in a preliminary bout to a fighter from Azerbaijan.
¡Doble Ay! The Azerbaijani, a hulk named Loren Berto Alfonso Domínguez, is another Cuban who had defected, for some reason, to landlocked Baku.
Alfonso Domínguez is about as Central Asian as arroz con pollo, but the Olympic transfer portal doesn’t much care who passes through, as long as nobody flies a model airplane over the other guy’s sparring mat. Of course, the Cubans and the Azerbaijanis have one thing in common: they both are post-Soviet.
Some context is warranted here among the easy humour. Last year and the year before, more than 425,000 Cuban migrants, fleeing a deepening spiral of penury, repression, shortages and hopelessness, flew to Nicaragua or Panamá and crossed the border into the United States while another 36,000 sought asylum in Mexico – “the equivalent of emptying two entire provinces of the island in just two years,” notes the Washington Office on Latin America, a human-rights advocacy group.
But none of those Cubans who fled was the strong little lefty in the red corner.
“Box!” commanded the Norwegian referee.
There weren’t any knockdowns, and I didn’t see any blood stain the Amazonian’s moustache, but the Cuban’s fight against Michael Douglas never was in doubt. From the opening bell, quick and confident, the Cuban wheeled and flicked and scored, and all five judges gave him every round. The victory puts Claro into the quarter-finals at 51kg flyweight category.
When it was over, they brought Claro back to the press area and only three of us showed up to talk to him. Claro said, “Our captain and flag-bearer who won the gold medal twice has been beaten and now there are only four of us from Cuba left to carry the team’s weight on our shoulders.”
“But we are still hungry,” he said, and he meant hungry for victory.
“How are the conditions for sport in Cuba now?” I asked.
An attaché from the Cuban team came over and gently put his hand on the flyweight’s shoulder.
“Conditions are very good,” was the answer. “Our nutrition is very good. We have everything we need to be Olympic champions.”