Boxing’s Cuba connection

By Ron Kantowski

Tuesday, July 14, 2009 | 2 a.m.

If you were around in the 1960s, you may remember the Freedom Flights, which from 1965 to 1971 brought 245,845 native Cubans to live in the United States. If you were around in the 1960s, you also may have attended Woodstock, in which case you probably don’t remember the Freedom Flights.

Anyway, about the only other way to flee Cuba for a better life back in those days was on a boat that would make the SS Minnow look like James Bond’s yacht in “Casino Royale.” Though there’s something romantic about making a sail out of an old pair of dungarees, the Freedom Flights were a much better option.

Luis DeCubas was 9 years old when he arrived at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. He was greeted by 27 inches of snow and Zoilo Versalles, who just a few months earlier was named most valuable player of the American League.

“March 19, 1966,” DeCubas says, the date committed to the place in his memory where all the other monumental occasions of his life are indelibly etched — his wedding anniversary, the birthdays of his children, they day he joined forces with the great Roberto Duran.

Today, as a boxing promoter, he’s doing his part to see that Cuban amateur fighters receive the same opportunity in America that he and his parents — and Versalles — did.

Three former members of the Cuban Olympic team — two-time gold medalist Guillermo Rigondeaux, and two other natives of the communist republic off Florida — will appear on a nationally televised fight card Friday at Planet Hollywood.

Though DeCubas is best known for resuscitating Duran’s career and launching one for former WBC lightweight champion Joel Casamayor of Cuba, it was baseball, not boxing, that played the bigger role in his family’s achieving the American dream.

His grandfather, Carlos Zarza, was a catcher in the Washington Senators’ organization and a batterymate of Cuban countryman Dolf Luque, who won 27 games for the Cincinnati Reds in 1923. DeCubas said his grandfather was friends with all of the Cuban-born major leaguers, including the many former Senators who became Minnesota Twins when the franchise was relocated. That’s why Versalles and Tony Oliva and Camilo Pascual, he of the wicked curveball, were almost like uncles to him.

DeCubas claims his grandfather was at least partly responsible for the 12-to-6 motion on Pascual’s breaking pitch. “He’d make him take a rubber ball and squeeze it until he got the grip back.”

DeCubas’ father, also named Luis, was a pediatrician at the West Side clinic in St. Paul and practiced until he was 90 years old. His mother, Mercedes DeCubas Zarza, won a gold medal in the 100-meter butterfly in the precursor to the Pan-American Games.

Eventually, after all those old Twins ballplayers got traded or retired, DeCubas moved to Miami, where he hooked up with fight trainers Chris and Angelo Dundee. Duran was thought to be old and broken down when DeCubas began managing him; together, they won the WBC middleweight title by beating Iran “The Blade” Barkley in 1989 in what was called the last great fight of Duran’s career.

DeCubas is now focusing on the young Cubans and other fighters from nations in and around the Caribbean, such as Breidis Prescott of Colombia, a world-ranked and undefeated lightweight who will fight in Friday’s main event.

“It’s amazing what these kids go through just to get here,” DeCubas says of the aspiring Cubans, many of whom seek political asylum with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

“They defect in different ways. Some come over on boats, some come across the border in Mexico. I don’t get involved in any of that. But when they get here, they come right to me.”

DeCubas says he couldn’t be any prouder to be an American but also longs for the day he might be able to return to his birthplace. He dreams of walking across the brilliant sand on Varadero Beach in Matanzas province on the Hicacos Peninsula, where beautiful people — and even Al Capone — used to cavort in the pristine blue-green sea.

From a boxing standpoint, he’d like President Barack Obama and Raul Castro, who more or less has assumed the dictator role of his ailing brother Fidel, to achieve some sort of common ground so the ballplayers and the fighters and the musicians and every other Cuban can experience the wonderful opportunities America has to offer, without fear of reprisal.

“It’s my great dream to go back,” DeCubas said, nodding to his partner Boris Arencibia of Caribe Promotions for affirmation. A former international judo champion from Cuba who defected to Puerto Rico when he was just 18, Arencibia has a smile that was practically lighting up the Planet Dailies coffee shop all by itself.

He’s still working on his English. But he made it clear how he feels about his adopted homeland by mentioning the word “freedom,” oh, about a dozen times during our brief conversation.

He also confirmed what DeCubas had been saying about Rigondeaux, who had an amateur record of 243-4 — 243 and 4! — and could turn out to be next Kid off the Cuban block to strike it big, following fistic legends of yesteryear such as Kid Gavilan and Kid Chocolate.

Arencibia flashed another megawatt smile before reaching across the table to touch my arm.

“Maybe three to five years, pay-per-view boxing from Havana,” he said.