Havana Nocturne
How the Mob Owned Cuba—And Then Lost It to the Revolution
T. J. English
Dedication
In memory of Armando Jaime Casielles
(1931–2007)
y para el pueblo cubano
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
Part I: Mobster Mambo
1. Feeling Lucky
2. The Mob’s Playground
3. El Judio Maravilloso (The Marvelous Jew)
4. Well-Charactered People
5. Razzle-Dazzle
6. The Ghost of José Martí
7. Gambler’s Paradise
Part II: La Engañadora (The Deceiver)
8. Arrivederci, Roma
9. A Bullet For El Presidente
10. Carnival of Flesh
11. Tropical Vengeance
12. A Handmade Woman
13. The Sun Almost Rises
14. “Get the Money”
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Notes
Sources
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Other Books by T. J. English
Copyright
About the Publisher
Epigraph
And in my imagination’s dreams I see the nation’s representatives dancing, drunk with enthusiasm, eyes blindfolded, their movements dizzying, their momentum inexhaustible…Amid this sinister splendor, a red specter lets out a strident
cackle. They dance…Dance now, dance.
—José Martí, Cuban patriot
She can wiggle her ass, but she
can’t sing a goddamn note.
—Meyer Lansky on Ginger Rogers,
opening night at the Copa Room,
Havana, Cuba, 1957
INTRODUCTION
ON STORMY DAYS AND NIGHTS IN HAVANA, CUBA, THE ocean batters the sea wall that rims the northern edge of the city. Waves crash against the rocks and splash upward, spraying the sidewalk, avenue, and cars driving along the famous waterfront promenade known as the Malecón. Briny saltwater rushes inward sometimes as much as a full city block. Huge puddles ebb and flow as the result of turbulent winds that sweep down from the north—Los Nortes, Cubans call them. Pedestrians and cars are forced to use inland streets to avoid the expanding pools. Water seeps into cracks and crevices, eating away at an already crumbling infrastructure. On days and nights like these, it is as if La Habana were under siege from a powerful, pounding deluge that threatens to undermine the very groundwork on which this glorious Caribbean city was founded.
Half a century ago, another kind of tempest swept across this storied island republic. Unlike the tropical squalls that form in the Gulf of Mexico and assault the city from the north, what happened in the decades of the late 1940s and ’50s was initiated from within the country’s political and economic structure.
At first, this upheaval appeared to have a positive side: if it was a malignant force, it was a malignant force that came bearing gifts. Over a seven-year period—from 1952 to 1959—the city of Havana was the beneficiary of staggering growth and development. Large hotel-casinos, nightclubs, tourist resorts, tunnels, and highways were constructed in a whirlwind of activity. Neon, glitter, the mambo, and sex became the hallmarks of a thriving tourist business. The allure of organized gambling, along with fabulous nightclub floor shows and beautiful women, brought an influx of money into the city.
The flash, ample flesh, and entertainment venues in Havana were the most obvious manifestations of the gathering storm. The gaudy gambling emporiums, racetracks, and back-door sex shows brought in the tourists and created a veneer of prosperity, but the true force behind the maelstrom was bicoastal in nature.
The fabulous nightlife was a lure used by the Cuban government to attract foreign investors, mostly from the United States. The country’s most precious resources—sugar, oil, forestry, agriculture, refineries, financial institutions, and public utilities—were all up for sale. Foreign capital washed over the island. Throughout the post–World War II years and into the 1950s, direct U.S. business investments in Cuba grew from $142 million to $952 million by the end of the decade. Such was the extent of American interest in Cuba that this island, roughly the size of the state of Tennessee, ranked in third place among the nations of the world receiving U.S. investments.
The financial largesse that flooded Cuba could have been used to address the country’s festering social problems. Hunger, illiteracy, subhuman housing, a high infant mortality rate, and the dispossession of small farmers had been facts of life in Cuba throughout the island’s turbulent history. It is true that Havana had one of the highest standards of living in all of Latin America, but this prosperity was not spread evenly throughout the nation. And as the decade wore on, the gulf between the haves and the have-nots continued to widen.
To those who cared to look below the surface, it was apparent that Cuba’s startling economic windfall was not being used to meet the needs of the people but rather to pad the private bank accounts and pocketbooks of a powerful group of corrupt politicians and American “investors.” This economic high command would come to be known as the Havana Mob.
It is a historical fact—and also a subject of considerable folklore in Cuba and the United States—that the Havana Mob comprised some of the most notorious underworld figures of their day. Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Santo Trafficante, Albert Anastasia, and other gangsters who came to Havana in the late 1940s and 1950s were men who had honed their craft and amassed or inherited their wealth during the “glory days” of Prohibition in the United States. These mobsters had always dreamed of one day controlling their own country, a place where they could provide gambling, narcotics, booze, prostitution, and other forms of vice free from government or law enforcement intrusion.
Gaming and leisure were only part of the equation. The idea formulated by Luciano, Lansky, and others was for Havana to serve as the front for a far more ambitious agenda: the creation of a criminal state whose gross national product, union pension funds, public utilities, banks, and other financial institutions would become the means to launch further criminal enterprises around the globe. The Havana Mob could then bury the profits from these criminal operations underneath the patina of a “legitimate” government in Cuba and no one would be able to touch them.
Political developments on the island would play a large role in determining the Mob’s fortunes in Cuba, but its efforts were also shaped by events back home. Luciano and Lansky may have wanted to establish Cuba as a base of operation as far back as the 1920s, but history sometimes got in the way. Economic downturns, wars, and the efforts of U.S. law enforcement caused retrenchments and changes in strategy. The plan was not formulated in its final form until the postwar years of the late 1940s, and even then there were interruptions. Much of the onus would fall on Lansky, who would devote a good portion of his adult life to formulating the necessary relationships and providing the impetus.
By the 1950s, the plan appeared to be coming to fruition. Through force of will, shrewd organization, and the judicious use of political repression, violence, and murder, the mobsters seemingly achieved their dream. Havana seethed and sizzled. The money that flowed from huge hotel-casinos was used to construct nightclubs that attracted major performers, Cuban, American, and European. A fabulous epoch was created—perhaps the most organic and exotic entertainment era in the history of organized crime. Elaborate floor shows at places like the world-famous Tropicana nightclub set the standard for generations to come. Smaller cabarets allowed patrons to get closer to the dancers, who were scantily clad, voluptuous, and sometimes obtainable. Varying
levels of burlesque clubs and bordellos were sprinkled throughout the city.
Havana had always been a place of great music, but in the era of the Havana Mob a generation of musicians found their voice. In the late 1940s, arranger Dámaso Pérez Prado and his band, along with other renowned orchestras, created a craze called “the mambo.” The mambo was both a type of music and a dance, a sensual transaction between two people engaged in mutual seduction. The mambo was the unofficial dance of the Havana Mob, and the sultry Latin rhythms that inspired the phenomenon were to underscore the entire era.
Luciano, Lansky, Trafficante, and the other U.S. mobsters became local royalty. Since casino gambling was legal in Cuba, the gangsters operated more openly than was normally their custom. Various mobsters and their associates served on the board of directors for banks, financial institutions, and powerful corporations. Since Meyer Lansky & Co. were outsiders in Cuba, their operations had the look and feel of an act of prestidigitation, except that in truth none of it would have been possible were it not for the cooperation of the ultimate insider: El Presidente Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar.
On March 10, 1952, Batista took over the government by force. It was a bloodless coup only because Batista, who had ruled the country before, from 1933 to 1944, was a well-known figure. A mostly self-educated man, with the physical appearance and bearing of a Hollywood matinee idol, Batista owed his power to his “special relationship” with the military, from which he had risen through the ranks from private to sergeant to major colonel before becoming president.
As a leader, Batista was a classic strongman, an all-too-familiar postcolonial Latin American type. A brutal dictator who had assumed the position of president by hostile takeover—and would therefore never be seen as legitimate by many in the country—Batista embraced the dictates of the American mobsters. The casinos and nightclubs generated capital, which was used to build elaborate public works and attract investors, who were then fleeced by Batista and his underlings. All Batista had to do was keep the Cuban rabble in their place. It was his job to make sure that the revolutionary fervor that was as much a part of Cuba as sugar and rum did not spill over and threaten the Golden Goose. With intelligence operatives, soldiers, and secret torture squads within the police serving as his enforcers, President Batista was the muscle behind the Havana Mob.
Violent reprisals on Batista’s part toward any and all “subversive activity” brought about a phenomenon well known to physicists: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Political upheaval had been a staple in Cuba since the island’s nominal independence from Spain in 1898. The stench of colonialism lingered on, creating resentment, bitterness, and a strong sense of righteous indignation. Political leaders bullied their way into office and were then toppled, many of them more corrupt than those who came before. One president lasted a total of five days in office before being overthrown. Even among this cavalcade of despots, Batista achieved a new level of infamy. He had taken over the government by force, suspended the constitution, and was in the process of creating a capitalist Shangri-La in Havana. To those who opposed his fraudulent regime, the casinos, nightclubs, sex trade, and mobsterism in the capital city became a symbol of everything they despised about the plundering of Cuba by outside interests.
A showdown was destined to occur. In the interior mountains of the Sierra Maestra, revolution was brewing, with a small band of anti-Batista guerrilla fighters hunkered down in anticipation of the coming storm. They were led by a charismatic lawyer and former political candidate named Fidel Castro Ruz.
It is impossible to tell the story of the Havana Mob without also chronicling the rise of Castro and the revolutionary movement he founded. For a time, these two stories ran on parallel tracks, with season after season of revelers gambling and partying in Havana while the revolutionaries starved and plotted in the hills. The inspiration for the resistance ran deep and could be located in the writings of José Martí, a poet, journalist, and activist who was one of the architects of Cuba’s long-running struggle for freedom. Martí was killed during the War of Independence, but his writings, and the example of his life, lived on. Castro’s revolutionary movement was inspired by Martí, and historical in nature, but it found its focus in the criminality and economic exploitation of the Batista regime.
Comandante William Gálvez Rodríguez was a young rebel leader entrenched in the Sierra Maestra during the Revolution. Years later, he recalled: “It would not be accurate to say that the [mobsters] in Havana were the reason for the Revolution—there were deeper reasons that went back to the beginning of Cuba’s formation. But it is a fact that the casinos and the money—and most importantly the connections among the U.S. gangsters, U.S. corporations, and the Batista regime—became a symbol of corruption to us. Even though we were away in the mountains, we knew of the prostitution, the stealing of government funds, the selling of the country to outside interests. We vowed that when—not if; when—we were in power, this was going to change.”
The revolutionaries had little in the way of soldiers, guns, or resources, but they did have a clandestine network of supporters spread throughout the island. Fidelista resistance fighters and spies infiltrated Batista’s army and circulated in the casinos and resort hotels. Occasionally, the guerrilla war that was being fought in the outlying provinces erupted right in the middle of the mobsters’ playground. People connected with the government—and by extension, the Havana Mob—were kidnapped and sometimes assassinated. Student protest rallies turned into occasions for armed combat with the police. Homemade bombs exploding in the night and the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire sometimes sounded alongside the revelry that spilled out of the casinos and cabarets owned by the Mob.
How did Lansky and the gangsters react to the ominous trade winds? With more development: bigger hotel-casinos, flashier floor shows, and larger doses of “investment capital” designed to reinforce the status quo and drown out the forces of revolution. Havana became a volatile mix of Monte Carlo, Casablanca, and the ancient Spanish city of Cádiz all rolled into one—a bitch’s brew of high-stakes gambling, secret revolutionary plots, violent repression, and gangsterism.
The legacy of these years has entered the realm of legend. In modern-day Havana, the remnants are everywhere. The gambling casinos are long gone, but many of the old hotels are still in existence, some ragged and faded, others shining monuments to the past. At the exquisite Hotel Nacional, where Luciano and Lansky once lived and held secret Mob conferences, there is a special room off the lobby called the Salón de la Historia. Its walls are adorned with life-sized murals of gangsters intermingled with celebrities and movie stars. At the Hotel Sevilla (formerly the Sevilla Biltmore), framed black-and-white photographs of the mobsters who once operated there line the walls of the Roof Garden alongside the panoramic view of the Malecón, the ocean, and beyond. In the streets, vintage American cars from the 1940s and ’50s are everywhere, as are the flickering neon signs and air of insouciance that contribute to the city’s allure. The effect is hallucinatory: on certain nights, it is as if the ghosts of the past are still alive, a spooky, spectral testament to the era of the Havana Mob.
Beyond Cuba, the story still resonates: the premise of the Mob in Havana has been fodder for innumerable novels and movies. A mythology has evolved over the years based largely on fictionalized accounts, most notably The Godfather Part II (1974), the venerable Hollywood movie that dramatized the last days of pre-Castro Cuba through the eyes of the Corleone family. More recently, Cuban-born Andy Garcia directed and starred in The Lost City (2005), which portrayed Havana in the 1950s as a kind of Paradise Lost. There have been other movies and more than a few crime novels, of varying quality, all of them based on a skimpy public record or pure imagination.
This book constitutes the first nonfiction, English-language attempt to tell the full story of the Mob’s infiltration of Havana. It is impossible to understand the present-day stand-off between the governments of Cuba and the United States witho
ut first knowing the details of this era. For forty-six years the U.S. government has maintained an economic embargo of the island (referred to in Cuba as el bloqueo or “the blockade”). Unprecedented in length, this act of economic strangulation has done little to alter the monolithic trajectory of Cuban politics, though it has succeeded in fostering decades of isolation, ignorance, and mistrust. The roots of this epic antipathy can be traced in part to the influx of mobsters and the plundering of Havana that took place in the late 1940s and ’50s. For some, it was a time of diversion and fun. For others, it was a moneymaking proposition. To the revolutionaries and the government of Fidel Castro that followed, the era stands as an example of capitalist exploitation at its most venal.
However the story is viewed, the era of the Havana Mob represents a time in history that defines the current reality. Fifty years after the fact, the empire presided over by Lansky, Batista, and the rest is gone, but the consequences of that time are still very much alive. Ten U.S. presidents have come and gone; Fidel inches closer to a date with the Grim Reaper. But the legacy of the Mob’s adventures in Cuba continues to inflame the imagination. The professional gamblers have all departed, but the sounds of the slot machines and the intoxicating rhythms of the mambo and cha-cha-chá linger on, still relished or denounced, depending on which side of the gaming tables you were on. Few are willing to forgive or forget.
—T. J. English
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