Mike Navarro sings a little ditty while studying his hand.
“Oh, don’t tell me you don’t love me,” he warbles in Spanish, shuffling the smooth domino pieces around on the little wooden holder where they sit and stare up at him. Navarro plucks one from the end of the row, holds it in his fist, then leans over to examine the line of dominoes zigzagging across the table.
The scene is the back dining room at Quesadillas, a West Town restaurant, where an informal domino club, made up mostly of Cuban-Americans, has taken up residence on Tuesday nights. (They just moved to Quesadillas three months ago after three years at Cafe Bolero and Grill on North Western Avenue.) There are four tables going, each with four players, each with its own rattle and clack, its own blue nimbus of cigar smoke.
The games of the ancient pastime, in which the object is to match the numerical tile played by the previous opponent and amass the most points, go by like lightning, with a thunder of grunts and protestations after each hand. “How could you do that to me?” Hermes Bory complains to his partner, who didn’t cover him, forcing him to pass twice in a row.
Between games, there’s small talk, gossip, a little flirtation with the waitresses or the one or two unattached women who may wander into the game. Nostalgia abounds but only in quick bursts: there’s Jorge Soberon, for example, expounding on the virtues of real Cuban cigars versus those from other countries. But there is, curiously enough, absolutely no political discussion, no mention of Fidel Castro.
“Ah, yes, senora,” Navarro says gleefully in the direction of Irma Gonzales, who runs a jewelry store. He places a double-three on the table. “Let’s see if you sleep as well as you snore,” he mock-threatens. (What he means is he thinks she’s bluffing, that she’s all out of threes.)
As Navarro, who is in the real estate business, waits for Gonzales’ move, Jose Fonteboa stands up, bends over another table while puffing on a fat Dominican cigar and uses his open palms to shuffle the dominoes, which make a racket. The other players stare, as transfixed as if he were stirring a witches’ cauldron.
“Domino’s much better than poker,” says Fonteboa, who learned the game back in Cuba more than 50 years ago from watching peasants play on Sunday afternoons in the park. The Quesadillas guys play with women, much like the peasants did back then, but Fonteboa says the old private pre-revolution domino clubs in Havana were male only.
Navarro and his partner, Miguel Rivas, are like artists tonight, snaking the pieces across the table. Their motifs are formed quickly, with a hollow clicking sound and a deft hand motion that sends the dominoes spinning across the table for placement at the end of the line. Their designs are sleek and long, never crowding other players or running into dead ends.
But the Tuesday domino partidos are about a lot more than creating interesting patterns on the table with the playing pieces.
“It’s camaraderie,” says Bory, a salesman, who seems to know everybody. “It’s about being with friends, with your people.”
It’s also a forum for cubanidad, the way Cubans express their Cubanness, if you will, with all its charm and arrogance. While it may look both familiar and simple on first viewing, what they play at Quesadillas is no ordinary domino game. It is Domino Cubano, a rare and extraordinarily difficult version. Most domino rule books do not list it — a fact that “Domino Cubano,” the bible of the Cuban version, states in capital letters and exclamation marks with a peculiar pride.
“I think that when we play domino, we’re not really at Quesadillas in Chicago, but in our home countries,” says Fonteboa. “We’re in the place where we first learned it, where we first made that discovery. For me, I’m in Cuba, always.”
Played with a set of 55 pieces, Cuban-style dominoes uses a double-nine — as opposed to double-six in regular dominoes — as its highest piece. It’s played in teams of two, each player beginning with 10 pieces, leaving 15 face down and out of play during each hand. At Quesadillas, they play to 150 points per game, which can mean anywhere from four to eight hands each of one to two hours duration. It’s not unusual for the games to go to 1 or 2 in the morning.
“I love the chance to be a real Cubanaso (super-Cuban),” says Luis V. Martinez, one of the younger players and an assistant state’s attorney. “Through dominoes, not only do I use my Spanish more, but I get to associate with other Latinos, other Cubans, and it helps me keep my heritage alive.”
In Martinez’s family, dominoes is a rite of passage for males, but he didn’t get into it until a few years ago, when the domino gene just seemed to kick in. Now he plays Tuesdays with the Quesadillas gang and at a private home on Thursdays.
“It’s addictive,” he says. “It requires all these calculations and strategies. What’s been played? What’s still out? What does your partner need?”
At Quesadillas — a Mexican restaurant owned by a Puerto Rican — the players are all Cuban with the exception of Navarro, who’s Mexican. The Caribbean guys let him in, however, because he was once married to a Cuban woman.
“She destroyed him, she cleaned up with him,” Rudy Fernandez says with a laugh.
“I had great fun with that little Cuban lady,” admits Navarro good-naturedly. He learned to play Cuban dominoes with his ex-father-in-law. “Who’d heard of Cuban domino before that? It’s new around here, as of the last 20, 30 years, because there was no real Cuban immigration before that.”
“You know what? You wrap him in a tobacco leaf and he’s Cuban, he really is,” says Fernandez.
“What I love about the game is how it awakens your mind, it makes you think,” says Navarro.
“Everybody is equalized by this game,” says Fonteboa, a dry cleaner.
Domino Cubano requires extreme concentration, a quick mind, and a certain amount of telepathy with your partner. “Supposedly, the game was invented by a mute and you’re not supposed to talk,” says Fonteboa. “But the problem is, we’re not mutes so we talk and talk.”
In fact, no one really knows where dominoes actually started. Most scholars place it somewhere in Asia almost 3,000 years ago — and most domino sets continue to be made in China or Taiwan. But what’s certain is that it made its way into Arab culture, traveled to Spain and, in the 19th Century, wound up in Cuba, where the more complicated version was developed. It’s related to mah-jongg and certain dice games.
The name itself is also in some dispute. Most players claim it comes from the Latin word dominium, to dominate. In fact, when players win they routinely shout out, “domine.” But there’s also evidence to suggest it may have come from Dominican friars in 1800s Spain, who idled their time away playing the game. The friars were said to exclaim, “Benedicamus Domino” or “Benedictus Dominus” — thank you, Lord.
“In Mexico, we play with double-sixes and there’s more control,” explains Navarro. “And in Puerto Rico, they don’t discard any of the pieces. You keep fishing, taking pieces, until all the pieces have been played.”
“Guess nobody else can count to nine, eh?” kids Fernandez, a boyishly handsome fellow from Havana whose leg shakes continuously as he plays.
Fonteboa, taking Fernandez’s comment personally for an instant, raises an eyebrow. “Hey, I’m from Oriente, from Guantanamo,” he says, referring to the town where the U.S. naval base sits in Cuba. “We play both double-sixes and double-nines; we’re a very flexible people.”
Fonteboa’s a quiet player but Fernandez plays loudly, calling out each piece. “Nine!” he asserts. He’s all harmless macho poses, high-fives and winks. “Double-twos!” he yells as he slaps each domino down hard. “An eight — that’s life! Seven and one — a horse!” (The language of Cuban domino is as esoteric in Spanish as in English, with each piece and move having different regional names.)
At Navarro’s table, Gonzales, a domino player with a poker face, finally smiles and surrenders. Navarro has called her bluff with a dazzling move. “You win,” she says reluctantly, revealing a couple of high-number pieces. She adds the dots up aloud and fast — no need for a calculator here.
“Domine,” Navarro boasts, shaking hands with Rivas, one of the game’s elders at Quesadillas, and arguably the best player in the room. “We are masters,” Navarro continues, rubbing his hands together.
Rivas, a smooth, carbon-skinned man, smiles like a priest in a secret sect. Then he sucks on a cigar and stares off into the haze.
