I first traveled to Havana, Cuba in 2000, amidst the Elian Gonzalez saga inflaming tensions on both sides of the Florida Straits. I was an amateur boxer looking for a coach, and within the first week I was able to track down and secure the services of two-time Olympic champion Héctor Vinent for $6 a day under the table, which was the equivalent of two weeks' salary for what he was earning from the state training children in Rafael Trejo, Cuba's oldest boxing gym. Vinent, like the vast majority of Cuban elite athletes, had forgone millions by remaining on the island. In the summer 2007, with the failed defection of two-time Olympic champion Guillermo Rigondeaux, Fidel Castro banned Rigondeaux from ever fighting again and turned the incident into a national referendum on why all Cubans most remain loyal to the Revolution's cause lest they be labeled, like Rigondeaux, as "traitors" to the Cuban people. I met Rigondeaux for the first time, by complete accident, in Rafael Trejo only a few months later. Within 18 months, he'd left behind a wife and two children to flee the island and was smuggled across 90 miles by speedboat, destined for Miami via Cancun, Mexico. Today an undefeated world champion, Rigondeaux fights against Drian Francisco on the Miguel Cotto and Saul "Canelo" Alvarez undercard on HBO tonight. Here, an excerpt from my book .

In the summer of 2007, two-time Olympic champion Guillermo Rigondeaux and his teammate, Erislandy Lara, had been arrested in Brazil after going AWOL from the Cuban team during the Pan Am Games. The defection attempt made international news and quickly became a national soap opera, regularly appearing on Cuban news and round table discussions. Castro, though largely out of public view since stepping down from power because of his secret illness the year before, spoke out in the state newspaper Granma. Castro branded Rigondeaux a "traitor" and "Judas" to the Cuban people. "They have reached a point of no return as members of a Cuban boxing team," Castro wrote in Granma. "An athlete who abandons his team is like a soldier who abandons his fellow troops in the middle of combat." And then Teófilo Stevenson, despite his legend being built on the foundation of having turned down every offer to leave Cuba, defended Rigondeaux and Lara. "They are not traitors," Stevenson declared. "They slipped up. People will understand. They've repented. It is a victory that they have returned. Others did not."

Only a few months later, one afternoon in the autumn of 2007, I was training with Héctor at Trejo when I spotted someone out of the corner of my eye at the gym's entrance.

"Mi madre," Héctor whispered, dropping his hands slowly, looking in the same direction as me. "It's him."

"Him?" I asked.

"Sí," Héctor confirmed, then repeated gravely, "él."

When any Cuban refers to "him" in conversation, with little to no information or context provided, it invariably refers to Fidel.

"Mi madre," Héctor groaned again.

"¿Cómo?" I asked. "¿Quién?" Who?

Héctor remained frozen. It was one hundred degrees out that afternoon training in the open air of Rafael Trejo. I nudged him, but Héctor wouldn't come to. I looked around us as the silence took hold. All the proud coaches refused to look at the problem straight on, instead glancing sidelong at the entrance to the gym. A profoundly disturbing thing you discover very quickly traveling in Cuba is that the most dangerous person for Cubans isn't the police or even the secret police; it's their neighbor. Anyone can report you for anything "outside" the revolution—even if you haven't done it yet. Héctor himself had been banned from boxing before he'd ever attempted escape.

So what was this?

Was there news that Fidel died or was él paying a visit?

"It's him." Héctor repeated, this time even more softly, nodding in the direction of the entrance. "This is very dangerous for us."

"¿Cómo?" I asked. "Who?"

"Rigondeaux. There, hiding in the shadows."

All I could see was a child near the entrance. Kids came in off the street all the time to watch or hang out at the gym. I hadn't noticed anything special about this one.

"That's Rigondeaux? That child?"

"Claro," Héctor grunted. "That child is twenty-seven and perhaps the greatest boxer Cuba has ever produced. Fidel has said he will never fight again. He has nowhere to go. Anyone in sports can no longer be seen talking to him. We could lose our jobs. You can talk to him."

It was as if a Cuban version of Mr. Kurtz had stepped out of his own version of Heart of Darkness to haunt our gym. I'd never seen Rigondeaux's face without it being obscured by headgear or a photograph of Fidel he was holding up after winning a tournament. Finally I saw him, only to recognize the saddest face I'd ever seen in Cuba. He stood aloofly in the shadows wearing a Nike ball cap and jeans, with a fake Versace shirt that had the sleeves ripped off.

Without realizing it, I started toward Rigondeaux. As I approached him, in the shade under the bleachers of the entrance to Rafael Trejo, I reached out a hand and introduced myself. He did what he could, under the strained circumstances at the gym, to muster a smile. Up close I noticed his right eye showed damage, slumping slightly from his left. Rigondeaux's attempt at a polite smile betrayed the gold grill over his front teeth for a brief moment as he took another drag of his Popular cigarette.

"So where did you get that gold on your teeth?" I asked him.

Rigondeaux snickered, dropped his head, and smirked, taking a last long drag on his cigarette before flicking it on the ground and stamping it out with his sneaker. For a moment his face assumed the same hopeless expression as Lee Harvey Oswald bemoaning, "I'm just a patsy." Then it vanished and he sighed. "Oh, you know, I melted down both my gold medals into my mouth."

I didn't know where to go from that statement.

"I used to fight in this place. . . ."

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