Lansky’s name was nowhere to be seen on the list of directors for the company, though it was known by all who was the actual CEO of the enterprise. As president of the company, Lansky anointed Harry Smith, a Canadian-born millionaire who had owned a piece of the Jockey Club at Oriental Park Racetrack since Lansky’s first tenure in Cuba back in the late 1930s. Secretary of the company was Senator Eduardo Suarez Rivas, former Luciano confidant and a jack-of-all-trades for the Havana Mob.
The Hotel Riviera would be Lansky’s baby, from top to bottom. He would handpick the facility’s designer and oversee all aspects of construction. In a way, this would be Meyer’s opportunity to counteract any residual bad blood from the Bugsy Siegel–Flamingo Hotel fiasco. Lansky would show his Mob friends the right way to build a hotel-casino, with no outrageous cost overruns, no infighting, and no psychodrama of any kind. It would be the house that Lansky built, and it would be the pride of the Havana Mob.
In late November, ground was broken and construction began. Meanwhile, Lansky had realized that with all the casino construction currently under way in Havana, there was likely to be a serious shortage of experienced dealers unless something was done. Floor managers and upper-echelon employees could be imported from the States, but those working the floor would need to be culled mostly from the local population. A recruiting effort began, and in December Lansky created a stir by opening a dealer and croupier training school housed at the Ambar Motors building (owned by Amadeo Barletta), not far from the Hotel Nacional, on Calle 23, or La Rampa, as the main commercial street in Vedado was known. The school attracted many applicants and was staffed by dealers from around the United States.
Rafael “Ralph” Rubio was a young dealer working in Las Vegas at the time. One day he was approached by the assistant manager at El Rancho Vegas, the casino where he worked. The assistant manager had once been in the employ of Lansky at Ben Marden’s Riviera, a casino in Fort Lee, New Jersey, that was owned by a consortium of East Coast mobsters loyal to Lansky. The man told Rubio, “I hear from Meyer Lansky’s organization that things are opening up in Cuba. He’s looking for dealers—especially bilingual dealers. You interested?”
Ralph was born in Tampa, the son of a Cuban-born immigrant father; he’d spoken Spanish and English all his life. He thought Havana might be an exotic alternative to the dry, nondescript Nevada desert. “Where do I sign up?” he answered.
With a wife and newborn son, Rubio headed to Havana. It was late November, a time when the temperatures are mild and the skies glisten in various shades of blue. Rubio originally settled with relatives in Vedado. It was understood that he would be employed at the Hotel Riviera’s casino as a pit boss, which was an impressive position for a twenty-six-year-old. Still, the Riviera wasn’t scheduled to be ready until the following year’s tourist season. Rubio’s services were presently needed at Lansky’s dealer training school, where he would serve as one of eight to ten roving trainers.
Rubio first met Lansky at the school. Growing up in Tampa, he was familiar with the major players in the American underworld. In fact, Ralph had a family connection. His uncle Evaristo “Tito” Rubio had been an associate of Charlie Wall, the bolita king of Tampa before he was moved aside by the Trafficante family. Tito Rubio had also been a co-owner of the Lincoln Club, one of the largest and most popular illegal gambling houses in Tampa. In March 1938, Tito was coming home after a night at his club. On the porch of his house in Ybor City he was ambushed by three gunmen. They opened fire with a shotgun, blowing away Tito Rubio. The murder occurred during the city’s bloody bolita wars, and no one had any doubt who had arranged the hit—the Trafficantes.
Ralph Rubio was eight years old when his favorite uncle was taken out, gangland-style. He grew up with a deep hatred for the Trafficante name. Years later, Ralph remembered, “To me, Meyer Lansky was a competitor of Santo Trafficante. I chose to look at it that way. Working for Lansky was a way of getting even with the people who killed my uncle.”
Lansky was, according to Rubio, a “brilliant man and a gentleman”; he treated his employees with respect. He told his trainers at the croupier school, “We need good, professional people working the tables. Be patient. Turn these Cuban kids into good dealers and we’re all gonna profit.”
The school was run by two of Lansky’s most trusted associates, Giardino “Dino” Cellini and his brother, Eddie Cellini. The Cellini brothers were born of Italian immigrant parents in the steel-mill town of Steubenville, Ohio. As teenagers, they both got their start in the gambling trade as dealers at Rex’s Cigar Store, which served as a front for bookies, numbers runners, and gamblers from throughout the Steubenville-Youngstown area. Both were established veterans of the casino-gambling business, with longtime Mob connections that were well known to the Narcotics Bureau, the FBI, and other U.S. law enforcement agencies.
Dino was an associate of Jake Lansky at the Nacional. At the croupier school, he was the boss. A courtly man who appeared older than his thirty-nine years (he was born in 1918), Dino was given to kissing ladies’ hands. He was also a tough taskmaster. Ralph Rubio recalled, “I got along well with Eddie Cellini, but I had a personality conflict with Dino. He was stubborn and he wanted things his way all the time. But he was an absolute genius in the casino business.”
The opening of the school was the talk of Havana. According to Rubio:
We had more students than we knew what to do with. We recruited mostly from the airlines because the employees there were bilingual. Their salary with the airlines was around ninety-five to a hundred dollars per month. We offered them fifty dollars a week to attend the training school, with full salaries if they were hired. The training sessions were a full day. We’d do three hours in the morning, break for lunch, then three hours in the afternoon. For those of us doing the training, it was exhausting.
The idea at the school was to re-create the actual conditions in the casino. In a room filled with gaming tables, the teachers would act as players and try to trip up the prospective employees.
The Cubans made excellent dealers at blackjack and roulette, but for some reason they were terrible at craps. They just could not get the hang of that game. It was a problem for us. We had to let many of them go and recruit our craps dealers from Vegas.
In later years, Lansky sometimes cited the training school as an example of his magnanimous approach to the Cuban people. “It was hard work because they were uneducated,” he told a biographer. “It would have been easier to import Americans. But I ran it as a kind of social experiment.” It is true that Lansky was providing jobs and opportunities for many young Cuban males (there were no female dealers in Havana), but according to those who worked both Vegas and Havana, the rates paid by Lansky in Cuba were lower than those in Las Vegas. The tradeoff, of course, was that working in one of the casinos in Havana was a highly prestigious job. As the decade unfolded, croupiers, dealers, and floor managers associated with the Havana Mob were like royalty, virtual princes at the Court of Saint James’s.
Also, the job had an added benefit. The Batista government made it possible for casino dealers to be classified as “technicians” and therefore be exempt from income tax, which made it especially attractive to experienced dealers like Ralph Rubio. Although his salary might have been less than it was at El Rancho Vegas, with his tax-free status he was likely to clear more than he ever had before.
From the beginning of his time in Cuba, Rubio revered Lansky and they developed a solid working relationship that would flower over the following three years. Lansky utilized Ralph’s facility with both Spanish and English, and he often chose the young Cuban American as an emissary to various public functions, which Lansky hated to attend. He also sometimes used Ralph as a glorified errand runner. Once, he chose Rubio to deliver an expensive birthday gift to Marta Batista, the wife of the president:
It was a beautiful bracelet. I remember a car with armed soldiers came to pick me up. I was driven out to the Batista family estate near Camp Columbia, the
main army base. With the revolutionary activity going on at the time, it was a little scary. The president was there at the house, but I didn’t speak with him. I gave the gift to Batista’s wife. She was very polite and friendly. We talked for a while; she even recommended a good school for my son.
It was an exciting time for anyone associated with the Havana Mob. Over the next year, at least three major hotel-casinos were scheduled to open. The city was seemingly alive with opportunities and activity. As would increasingly become the pattern, however, much of this activity was in counterresponse to an entirely different mood that was in the air. Beyond Havana, the winds of revolution were stirring once again. And from this point on, it would become harder and harder for the forces of the Havana Mob to look the other way.
AT THE SAME TIME that Lansky was attempting to make gambling professionals out of the youth of Havana, out in the Caribbean Sea a thirty-eight-foot yacht named Granma bobbed in turbulent waters. On board were Fidel Castro, his brother Raúl, Che Guevara, and seventy-nine others representing the vanguard of the 26th of July Movement. They too had a scheme that involved the youth of Cuba, one with a solitary goal: revolution.
Everything about Castro’s latest undertaking made it look like another misguided enterprise, though the original plan was solid enough. The seventy-nine men and women had been culled from a highly trained squad of nearly one hundred and fifty rebels in Mexico. The rebels were in constant contact with rebel cells in Cuba, particularly a sizable group in Santiago led by a motivated young revolutionary leader named Frank País. The plan was for Castro and his group to sail ashore and attack military targets in Oriente Province, while at the same time in the capital city of Santiago, País would lead a rebellion. Eventually these two groups would come together, and the 26th of July Movement would control all of Oriente. The plan was then to build a unified rebel army that would work its way across the island, winning the hearts and minds of the people, before swarming Havana and unseating the Batista regime.
Problems began with the choice of boat. The Granma was a weathered vessel that Castro had bought from an American living in Mexico City. The yacht was equipped to hold a maximum of twenty-five people safely. Three years earlier, the boat had sunk during a hurricane, but Castro had had a number of people working on it to make it seaworthy. By late November the Granma still wasn’t completely ready, but Fidel was determined to deliver on his promise to launch an attack by the end of the year. On November 25, the rebel contingent left Tuxpan, on Mexico’s Gulf Coast, and headed out to sea singing the Cuban national anthem and the 26th of July march. Before long, they ran into strong winds and rough waters.
There were few experienced sailors on the ship, and almost instantly the rebels became violently ill. Che Guevara, the group’s medic, searched frantically for seasickness pills, but none were to be found. In his Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, Guevara wrote, “The entire boat took on an aspect both ridiculous and tragic: men with anguished faces holding their stomachs, some with their heads in buckets, others lying in the strangest positions, immobile, their clothing soiled with vomit.” Another account described crew members “shitting in their pants.”
At one point the boat began to take on water. It appeared as though there was a leak, so despite there being precious little food on board, the crew began throwing rations and supplies into the ocean to lighten the load. It was then discovered that what they thought was a leak was actually an open plumbing faucet that could easily be closed: the food had been thrown overboard unnecessarily.
The Granma listed off-course. The trip was supposed to take five days, but by the fifth day the boat was still far south of Cuba.
In Santiago, rebel leader Frank País had no way of knowing about the delays. On the morning of November 30, he launched an attack that was supposed to coincide with the arrival of the Granma. With a small force of twenty-eight men, País led an assault on the National Police and Maritime Police headquarters. Wearing olive-green uniforms with 26th of July red-and-black armbands, the rebels set fire to a police barracks and engaged in a gun battle with four hundred well-trained antiguerrilla troops. They were absurdly overmatched. Though Frank País escaped, most of the other rebels were killed in battle or later executed by the military police.
On board the Granma, Castro, Guevara, and others listened to radio reports of the slaughter in Santiago. “I wish I could fly,” said Fidel.
The journey at sea continued for two more days. By the time the boat came ashore in Oriente at 4:20 A.M. on December 2, the men were famished and disoriented. Wrote Guevara: “This wasn’t a landing, it was a shipwreck.” In total darkness, the men waded through the mud of a mangrove swamp. They tried to salvage armaments and supplies, but it wasn’t easy. They gathered on shore, conducted a head count, and headed toward high ground. They came upon a destitute and illiterate peasant living in a small shack cooking a meal on a charcoal burner. “Have no fear,” Castro told the man. “I am Fidel Castro, and we have come to liberate the Cuban people.” The man invited Castro and several of his men into his hut and shared food with them.
From the time of Frank País’s attack on Santiago, Batista’s army knew that Castro would be landing, though they didn’t know exactly where. A Cuban coastguard vessel searching the shore spotted the Granma stuck in the mangrove swamp and immediately called in an air strike. Castro and his men heard the explosions and scurried up a hill into a wooded area, where they decamped and spent their first night in Cuba.
The next day the rebels began marching toward the Sierra Maestra, the series of rugged hills that encompasses many miles of land in Oriente Province. Castro’s contingent knew that the hills were their only hope: with much brush cover and craggy, nearly impenetrable terrain, the Sierra Maestra would provide sanctuary. With a local peasant acting as guide, Castro and his people marched onward toward the mountains with only occasional stops for sustenance and rest over the following days. Early on the morning of December 5, they arrived, in a state of absolute exhaustion, at an area identified on a map as Alegría de Pío. The rebels set up camp, figuring they were safe for the time being.
The act of engaging in clandestine armed revolution required dedication and daring; it also put the insurgents at the mercy of the local population. Betrayal could be as disastrous as any bullet or bomb, as Castro’s contingent soon found out. On the day of their arrival in Alegría de Pío, the rebels’ peasant guide headed off to find provisions—or so he said. Instead, he sought out a garrison of the Rural Guard to report the rebels’ presence in the area.
Starving and in need of energy, Castro’s group had sucked on pieces of sugarcane as they marched, leaving behind a trail of husks that made it easy for the Rural Guard to trace their route.
At 4:30 P.M. the rebels were resting; many had removed their boots to wrap their bloodied feet in cloth. The ambush that followed caught them completely by surprise. Raúl Castro later described the event as a “hecatomb” and an “inferno.” Gunfire rained down on the rebels from all sides and the men scattered like vermin. According to Che Guevara:
Fidel tried in vain to regroup his men in the nearby cane field…The surprise attack had been too massive, the bullets too abundant…Near me a comrade named Arbentosa was walking towards the plantation. A burst of gunfire hit both of us. I felt a terrible blow on the chest and another in the neck, and was sure I was dead. Arbentosa, spewing blood from his nose, mouth and an enormous wound from a .45 bullet, shouted something like, “They’ve killed me,” and began to fire wildly…
Guevara was hit, but he was able to make his way to a tree for cover:
I immediately began to wonder what would be the best way to die, now that all seemed lost. I remembered an old story of Jack London’s in which the hero, knowing that he is condemned to freeze to death in the icy reaches of Alaska, leans against a tree and decides to end his life with dignity. This is the only image I remember.
The Rural Guard set fire to the cane fields; what had bee
n a metaphorical inferno became a literal one, with flames and black smoke blocking out the afternoon sun.
By the time the dust settled on the slaughter at Alegría de Pío, Castro’s rebel army was seemingly destroyed. The carnage was complete: of the eighty-two men who landed with the Granma, a dozen were killed on the battlefield, others by the burning cane fields. Twenty-one others were known to have been executed within a day or two, twenty-two were caught and imprisoned, and nineteen simply vanished. A few made it out of the Sierra to return home and hide, or surrender, and some were never seen again. Only sixteen escaped, including the Castro brothers and Guevara, who survived his bullet wounds and disappeared into the Sierra Maestra.
To Batista and his government, the result was a smashing success. The military victory was announced on the radio and in the newspapers. In their excitement, the government’s propaganda machine proclaimed that Fidel Castro himself had been killed. An army general said further that they had collected the bodies of the rebels and that, besides Fidel, the cadaver of Raúl Castro was also identified by documents in his pocket. Fidel was dead, Raúl was dead, the rebels were “literally pulverized.” The Revolution had been strangled in its crib.
In Havana, news of Castro’s demise wafted through the casinos and nightclubs at the height of the tourist season. Was he really dead? The U.S. media seemed to think so. The United Press bureau chief in Havana dutifully backed up the army’s claims, reporting that Castro’s body had been positively identified by the passport he carried in his pocket. Thanks to UPI, the information was disseminated around the globe. Ding-dong, the pesky rebel leader was dead. To anyone operating within the realm of the Havana Mob, it was welcome news.
Havana Nocturne Page 19