The Fight

When you live in a foreign country anything that tastes like Cuba or reminds you of Cuba is welcome. From finding in a mall Conchita guava bars, canned guarapo (sugar cane juice) to hearing two guys in a café spitting pingas and cojones out of their mouths knowing, of course, that supposedly nobody understands them. That is why when on Friday night Carlos, another friend who chose the painful distance, calls you to invite you to Macho´s house (another fellow countryman) to watch three fights of Cuban boxers who deserted and chose professionalism, you cannot resist although you are tired to death. Carlos tells me that the fights will be broadcast by ESPN2, and the boxers are Erislandi Lara, Odlanier Solís and Yuriorkis Gamboa, the latter said to be one of the most spectacular professional boxers.

In that context, that is, surrounded by friends and beer and high doses of nostalgia, those boxers are not defectors or traitors, they are just Cubans, and as such we sit in front of Macho´s TV set, with a beer in hand, to support them, as if we were in Cuba and they were fighting in the Playa Girón tournament or the Pan American Games. And every time one of them won we were feeling happier because they are Cubans and being a Cuban is not whatever they taught us at school when we were kids. We were happy because we were watching those fights live, but at the same time we were sad for the amount of fans in the Island who had to be conformist and wait to watch them weeks or months later in an underground recording and we were also sad because instead of being in Cuba, with a bottle of rum, we had to be here, many degrees below zero. There was happiness, but there was also a certain contained anger, but everything was quite peaceful. We, as those boxers, had our own fight: a fight against nostalgia, a fight against distance.

Boxing and volleyball, after baseball, are the most followed sports in Cuba. During that time when you are sitting in front of the huge screen, watching them exude talent before other worthless boxers, at least in terms of technique, you start thinking of the amount of Cubans scattered around the world and, as an average Cuban, you think of how good we Cubans are. Ah, the Cuban boxing school, the Cuban baseball school, the Cuban ballet school, the Cuban piano school. We Cubans are so good, you think, but you don´t say it aloud, so that the little chauvinistic bug that always chases us does not bite you.