The Domino Diaries

April 27, 2015
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

April 1, 2015
Though categorized as a memoir, the most compelling parts of this disjointed narrative concern the Cuba that the author has explored trying to come to terms with a story. Butler (A Cuban Boxer's Journey: Guillermo Rigondeaux, from Castro's Traitor to American Champion, 2014) delivers colorful writing and insightful analysis, but a slight shift in perspective would have resulted in a better book about the author's subject: Cuba and why some athletes choose to defect and others remain. Plainly an author with literary ambitions beyond journalism, Butler writes of the essence of boxing and his discovery of it, of his alcoholic father, and of the sense of mission that compelled him to visit Cuba, return multiple times, and put himself in political peril there. He is oddly reticent for a memoirist on other parts of his life, including his marriage, mentioned only as an afterthought as he details his relationship with a beautiful woman of Cuban descent. Butler invokes many literary antecedents, not only the obligatory Hemingway, but also Kundera, Calvino, and Strindberg. Rather than enhancing his portrait of Cuba, its ineffable beauty and sorrow, its athletes who face a dilemma in which there is collateral damage to friends and family, its women who are as available as they are irresistible, his excursions away from his focus on the island only serve to distract. "What's a million dollars to the love of eight million Cubans?" the author quotes Olympic boxing champ Teofilo Stevenson, the Muhammad Ali of Cuba, who spurned more than that to fight his American counterpart (but who only consented to an interview with the author for money). Yet for the woman who would become his mistress, "Cuba was a bear trap where the only means of escape required amputating vital portions of her soul." The book is by no means a political polemic but a nuanced portrait of the grays where reality lies between the black and white. When Butler maintains his focus on Cuba, vivid passages and provocative experiences illuminate an island of ambiguity.

Starred review from May 1, 2015

Butler (A Cuban Boxer's Journey) asks you to imagine walking down the street and encountering a beautiful, sensuous woman. You catch her eye and she smiles, baring rotted teeth, a situation that is too common in Cuba. He also asks that you consider that many Cubans love their education and health-care systems and still praise the revolution; while others, despise their living conditions, set out on rafts to escape; and yet others, such as prominent Cuban athletes who are revered for staying home even though they could become wealthy in the United States, are conflicted. These disconnects typify the Cuba that Butler, a Canadian drawn by a love of Ernest Hemingway and boxing, found during visits over a dozen years to this paradoxical island. Just a few of the experiences he relates are interviewing the person who was the inspiration for Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and even boxing legend Teofilo Stevenson, who turned down millions to stay in Cuba and ultimately died an impoverished alcoholic after bedding one of Fidel Castro's granddaughters. VERDICT Focusing on Dickensian characters as well as boxing, Butler's gonzo journalism should have broad appeal.--Jim Burns, formerly with Jacksonville P.L., FL

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2015
As his documentary Split Decisionon Cuban boxer Guillermo Rigondeauxremains unreleased, writer-boxer Butler fortunately covers in broader form the nature of a postrevoutionary Cuba that has essentially invented modern Olympic gold-medal boxing, while inducing many of its champions to spurn international riches and remain, impoverished, on the island. And so Butler, who arrived on the island a stranger, would find himself quickly befriended in Havana and training with two-time gold-medalist Hector Vinent for $6/day (plus $2/day for the women who looked after the gym palms had to be greased ), all while exploring a culture that would beguile his literary hero, Hemingway, even as it thumbed its nose at Americans for generations. Butler is a sensitive observer, imparting in a most visceral way the smells, sounds, visuals, and, most gloriously, the unblushing sexuality of a Cuba on the precipice of another, larger, perhaps most fatal American invasion: tourism.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)