A Boxer in Central Havana — huffingtonpost.com

I first met Enrique Hitchman in a bar with no name on Neptuno Street in the neighborhood known as Central Havana. I had been living in Cuba, off and on, for several years to research the histories of race, national identity, and boxing for my dissertation. The bartender, Pedro, was an Afro-Cuban in his late sixties. The week before, he had invited me to a funereal ceremony to reinter the bones of one of his brothers in the Abakua brotherhood, an Afro-Cuban secret society whose roots lay in West Africa and the slave trade that had brought the ancestors of so many Cubans to the island.

Read More