Brin-Jonathan Butler Quotes
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I have a dirty little habit of distilling every city I've ever visited into the historical person I'd have most wanted to meet and share a cigarette with.
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At a certain point, Mike Tyson and I reacted to violence a little differently. I was afraid to leave my house for three years while he became the heavyweight champion of the world. The thing was, at first, we reacted to it the same way, and our cowardice and trauma defined us.
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In the United States in the 20th century, every major event that America was going through, there was a boxer who seemed to symbolically represent it, from slavery to the Vietnam War to the Depression - all the way along, you just seemed to have boxers that carried the narrative.
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Mike Tyson notoriously looked for a way out against Evander Holyfield when it was clear Holyfield had his number. Suddenly, Tyson's cowardice in gnawing off Holyfield's ear overshadowed nearly everything he had accomplished as a fighter.
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An offer to fight Muhammad Ali came after Stevenson won his second Olympic gold in Montreal in 1976. Stevenson was at his peak. The world had never seen a heavyweight with the tools Stevenson brought into the ring.
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Exploring Castro's pawns in Cuba and exposing anything negative also makes you a pawn to all his enemies 90 miles away. Both sides don't have much of a track record for nuance of opinion.
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In film or on stage, in reflecting life through art, an actor has a second take or another day with his or her performance if something goes wrong. Bullfighters are spies crossing into enemy lines. Any mistake, no matter how minor or trivial, is potentially fatal.
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Weddings have always spooked me.
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Anyone can see why an elite athlete would want to leave a small, impoverished country where their skills were effectively uncashed winning lottery tickets. All they had to do was wash ashore almost anywhere else in the world and cash in. Yet the vast majority of Cuban boxers - and Cuban athletes in general - despite that incentive, stayed.
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Punching your weight is one of boxing's most sensible rules. It's a handy one to abide by whether your battles lie in or out of a ring.
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I was told before my first trip that no city in the world offered the dreams you could have sleeping in Havana. But nobody warned me that Havana also always feels like an exhausting nightmare that never quite fulfills the promise of what it's threatening you with.
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You can't learn to take a punch. Whether you have a glass chin or you don't, the only way of finding out is having it land.
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When I first asked my boxing coach, two-time Olympic champion Hector Vinent, what made the Cuban style of fighting distinct from the rest of the world, he smiled and told me to sit on a bench in Prado and watch the Cuban women walk.
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My mother left Hungary as a refugee, and she is not nostalgic for the life that she had back in Hungary, and yet Cubans certainly want the economic opportunity in the United States, but they're desperately homesick for the culture that they left behind.
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Castro was always using his athletes as a way of symbolically defeating the United States in the ring, and after these Cubans defeated Americans in the ring, they were turning down exorbitant sums to leave the island.
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With all of the people in Cuba who I met - many of them hugely heroic figures - I found learning about their complexity and richness and contradictions just really fascinating, and it was fulfilling to be able to offer a different side to them, to be able to have some kind of unique takeaway from the official narrative.
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At the heart of all romanticism is suffering.
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In the summer of 2007, two-time Olympic champion Guillermo Rigondeaux and his teammate, Erislandy Lara, had been arrested in Brazil after going AWOL from the Cuban team during the Pan Am Games. The defection attempt made international news and quickly became a national soap opera, regularly appearing on Cuban news and round table discussions.
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When Castro was put on trial in 1953 by Batista's government and asked who was intellectually responsible for his first attempt at insurrection, he dropped the name of the poet Jose Marti.
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Trusting the world is a risk, while not trusting it is a guarantee you'll be left with nothing.
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As far as cities go, Havana is a festering treasure chest, a primary color.
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Bullfighting is every bit as ghoulish and savage as its critics warn, but it is equally as powerful and moving as its supporters insist. Perhaps the most vexing aspect about it is that neither group is wrong: they are both telling the truth.
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I'd never seen Rigondeaux's face without it being obscured by headgear or a photograph of Fidel he was holding up after winning a tournament. Finally I saw him, only to recognize the saddest face I'd ever seen in Cuba.
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Hundreds of years ago, the most beautiful women of Havana were only glimpsed stepping in or out of carriages on this street. The first foreign writers who arrived and saw this could never get past just how incredibly beautiful their feet were.