Brin-Jonathan Butler

Both for Havana's beauty and decay, it's very hard to restrain yourself from staring everywhere you look.

I think the beauty and mystery of boxing is just the immediacy of how it reveals people unlike anything else.

I have no arguments to defend how brutal and disturbing a ritual the corrida is. Like all tragedies, no matter the beauty created, there are no happy endings. If it is indeed an art form, bullfighting is the most disturbing I have ever witnessed.

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.

Boxing distills and illuminates the essence of an athlete. There's nowhere to hide. Boxers live and perform at the extremes. They provide us with answers about a given contest, but more important, they ask us fundamental questions about human narratives. What does this person really stand for? How far will he go to defend it?

My documentary 'Split Decision' examines Cuban-American relations, and the economic and cultural paradoxes that have shaped them since Castro's revolution, through the lens of elite Cuban boxers forced to choose between remaining in Cuba or defecting to America.

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.

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.

In the documentary 'Facing Ali,' nearly half the fighters involved required subtitles despite speaking English, their speech slurred by the physical toll of their ring lives. This was their reward for testing their furthermost physical and mental boundaries.

On June 27, 1988, a 21-year-old Mike Tyson made in excess of 21 million dollars for 91 seconds of work. It took him just over 14 seconds to pull in more money than Michael Jordan, in his prime, made for an entire season of work that year.

While Fidel Castro used to deliver his marathon seven-hour speeches in Havana, Cubans used to joke that if Spanish lacked a future tense, their leader would be speechless. He was only fluent in broken promises, they lamented.