Boxing for Cuba: An Immigrant's Story of Despair, Endurance & Redemption

Pete Warzel

Friday, November 16, 2007

Boxing for Cuba: An Immigrant's Story of Despair, Endurance & Redemption* Nonfiction. By Guillermo Vincente Vidal (Ghost Road Press, 239 pages, $19.95) Grade: B+Book in a nutshell: The year is 1961, the setting Pueblo. Orphans - some teenagers, some much younger - stand in a tight circle cheering and pushing two other boys back into the center of the ring, making them fight to the bitter end. No rules, no rounds. One boxer is a white American punk, the other a Cuban refugee - the author's brother. He is boxing for Cuba, "in the sacred name of justicia."

Vidal is now the deputy mayor of Denver. This is the story of his life and of Castro's revolution in the author's homeland of Cuba. It's a story you would think was fiction, considering the insensitivity and even cruelty he endured, but surely it is not.

Vidal's father was a successful businessman, and the family owned two homes, one a beach house where Vidal and his brothers lived an idyllic life in spite of their parents' rocky marriage. But Castro's revolution soon became a nightmare as the paranoia of the government turning to communism pitted neighbors against each other. Children were surreptitiously flown from the country by their parents who hoped eventually to join them in escape from the turmoil Vidal terms a return to the Stone Age. OperaciÃn Pedro Pan (Peter Pan) assisted some 14,000 Cuban children, including Vidal and his two brothers. They ended up in the orphanage in Pueblo, where they were often disciplined with an iron fist for childish pranks.

Best tidbit: A pre-adolescent Vidal shakes Castro's hand in Cuba and then does the same with Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, who officially greets the refugees in Chicago on their way to Colorado - an ironic juxtaposition of the times, as Castro and Kennedy were bitter foes.

Pros: Normally, I would shy away from a book written by a politician, but Vidal writes a wonderful firsthand story about family, not politics, pulling no punches about the mistakes, bitterness and harsh shortcomings of his own.

Cons: Vidal can be a bit too romantic at times, taking the edge off what is really a remarkable story.

Final word: As Vidal writes: "No hay mal que por bien no venga. Even out of the worst of it all, good things come."