I keep a running list in my head of moments I wasn’t prepared for.
The Story He’d Never Told
The Story He’d Never Told
Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em: Almost every subject says the same thing before we start: “I don’t have much of a story.” They are almost always wrong.
Almost every subject says the same thing before we start: “I don’t have much of a story.” They are almost always wrong.
I keep a running list in my head of moments I wasn’t prepared for.
Not the sad ones. Those I’m prepared for. After enough of these films, you learn to see the sad ones coming from about forty-five minutes out. MAybe 46.
It’s the other ones. The sneaky ones.
I’m sitting across from this man. He’s been in Houston for forty years, built a whole life here, gracious and precise in the way of someone who came up in a different era. We’re an hour in. Good stuff. Normal stuff.
And then he mentions the checkers game.
He was a university student in Havana. Mid-1950s. He sat down across from some guy he didn’t know real well and beat him at checkers. This dude was good at checkers. An assassin.
The guy sitting across from me was not happy about it. Still bitter in 2022.
His opponent, playing blacks, was Fidel Castro.
I’ve done this long enough to know the difference between a story someone’s told a hundred times and a story that hasn’t been out of the box in thirty years.
This was the second kind.
He almost didn’t mention it. Even though there was so much anger, still. Hatred. And not cuz he lost at checkers. “It’s not important,” he said. He was doing that thing where you minimize something because you’ve lived with it so long you forgot it was remarkable.
I told him it was important.
Because it was 1957. And two years later, at 2:30 in the morning on January 1st, 1959, Happy New Year! While in America they were watching the apple drop in Times Square (I think they were doing it back then), this checkers savant was standing in the street when Batista’s motorcade left the Presidential Palace for the last time. The palace went dark. The guards disappeared. A city of two million people woke up to something they didn’t have words for yet.
He was twenty-three years old.
My guy left Cuba the following year. It was not an easy journey. He never went back.
Here’s the thing about sitting with someone who was actually there for something.
Not “there” in the sense of being alive when it happened. Everyone alive in 1960 was alive when it happened. I mean there. In the street. With their own eyes. Holding their own version of the information before the world had agreed on what to call it.
The history is the history. You can read about it anywhere.
But the checkers game. The bad loser. The way he described Castro’s army marching toward Havana not like conquerors but like men feeling their way down a dark hall.
That’s in our film. Forty-five seconds, give or take. Maybe a minute.
His grandkids were unaware of why he loved America so damned much.
They know it now.
Tell ’em what ya told ’em: A man almost didn’t mention the checkers game. His opponent in 1957 Havana was Fidel Castro. Two years later he watched Batista’s motorcade leave the Presidential Palace for the last time. His grandkids had no idea why he loved America so much. They do now. That’s what we do.