The Domino Diaries: My Decade Boxing with Olympic Champions and Chasing Hemingway’s Ghost in the Last Days of Castro’s Cuba

In this striking memoir, writer and filmmaker Butler examines his bittersweet love affair with Cuba through the lens of boxing. Butler, a trained fighter himself, first visited the island to write about the national boxing team, which has grabbed 67 Olympic medals since 1968 (in a country with a smaller population than the New York metro area). As Butler pursues boxers, he finds himself immersed in the chaos and contradictions of Cuban society: shortages, sex work, police surveillance, desperate immigration, and the citizens’ sardonic patriotism, humor, and endless creativity. Shuttling between the stories of two of the greatest Cuban boxing champions—one who left (Guillermo Rigondeaux Ortiz) and one who stayed (Teófilo Stevenson—Butler delineates the costs of defying Uncle Sam for a half century. Cuba lies at the heart of the book, but Butler’s quest also leads him from his hometown of Vancouver to Mike Tyson’s Vegas mansion, an affair with a prostitute in Madrid, and a boxing match in Tijuana. More artist than journalist, Butler approaches his material slantwise, and much of his prose is fluid and searching. As he watches Havana’s labyrinth of jury-rigged 1950s cars and decaying mansions slowly succumb to the market economy, Butler makes clear that this is not an unmixed blessing. At times, Butler can lapse into abstraction and his hardboiled romanticism can become too familiar, but he has produced a book worthy of Cuba’s beauty and sorrow. (June)