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Before the mob crapped out

HAVANA NOCTURNE:
How the Mob Owned Cuba And Then Lost It To The Revolution
By T. J. English
396 pp. William Morrow $27.95

HAVANA BEFORE CASTRO:
When Cuba was a Tropical Playground
By Peter Moruzzi
254 pp. Gibbs Smith $30

Reviewed by Clive Foss

In Havana Nocturne, T. J. English gives us the story of the incredible wealth and influence of the American Mob in 1950s Cuba, its central character the colorless but supremely efficient Meyer Lansky, who rose from the slums of the Lower East Side to control the most ambitious operation organized crime has ever undertaken.

During Prohibition, when Cuba was a convenient base for bootlegging, Lansky started to see broader possibilities there. When crime’s rising star, Lucky Luciano, was sprung from jail in 1946, Lansky persuaded him to make his way to Havana, where he presided over an organizational meeting of representatives from the major crime families of the US. But he was soon shipped back to Italy, leaving the field clear for his protégé Lansky.

In 1952, Lansky, whose gambling operations in Florida were attracting unwelcome federal attention, got the opportunity of his dreams when Fulgencio Batista took over Cuba. The new dictator wanted money, for the country but especially for himself. Tourism and gambling offer vistas of vast profits, but gambling was under a cloud because of the many scams that threatened to give Cuba a bad name. Batista therefore called on Lansky to clean up the casinos. One of the great ironies of this story is that a major crook like Lansky made sure that gambling was honest, because only that could guarantee a steady income.

It worked, and by mid-1953 Lansky had a share of his own casino and was providing Batista with massive payoffs. He wasn’t the only one; the sinister Santo Trafficante also got a large piece of the pie, and many other mobsters, American and Cuban, joined in. Since English gives excellent sketches of the minor characters, the action is always easy to follow.

The partnership of Lansky and Batista really paid off after a 1955 law gave tax exemptions to big investors in hotels and nightclubs—Batista got a sizeable kickback plus a share of the profits. Construction boomed; hotels, casinos and nightclubs sprung up; tourists poured in, among them, a certain Senator Kennedy, who was set up for the afternoon with "three gorgeous prostitutes" in one of Trafficante’s hotels. Many others did the same or enjoyed tamer entertainments. Masses of them gambled. Havana appeared to be enjoying the height of prosperity. The Mob certainly was, but they weren’t the only factor operating in Cuba.

An unexpected strength of this book is the careful attention it gives to Cuba’s revolution, intertwining the stories of Lansky and Fidel Castro. Until 1957, Castro was a distant noise on the horizon, but urban violence was increasing, culminating in March 1957 in an attack on the presidential palace that almost caught Batista. The regime’s support started to collapse in the repression that followed. The mobsters seemed completely oblivious.

The winter season of 1957-58 was the best ever, with world-famous stars flying down to entertain the crowds. Lansky’s monument, the luxurious Riviera Hotel, opened in December, followed by the even bigger Havana Hilton in March. Lansky set to work planning the grandest of all, the Monte Carlo, envisioning a string of casinos, nightclubs, and bordellos stretching along the waterfront as far as one could see. Frank Sinatra bought in and planned to stage a weekly show.

On New Year’s Eve in 1958, while the Riviera was fully booked, Lansky got the news that Castro had won—Batista had fled Cuba. He rushed to collect the winnings from his casinos; by dawn the crowds were sacking the gambling joints. Lansky and Trafficante imagined that the new regime would have to come to terms with them, but they misjudged their man. As tourists vanished, the casinos and hotels piled up huge losses until Fidel nationalized them in 1960. Lansky, whose wealth had been in the tens if not hundreds of millions, lost everything; he left $57,000 when he died in 1983. He spoke the epitaph for the whole operation: "I crapped out."

Havana Nocturne is a good read about an exciting time, all long gone. Most of the characters are well drawn, though the portrayal of Batista as merely a grasping open hand doesn’t really do justice to the dictator who built up Cuba independent of the Mob. Sometimes, too, English seems to be relying too heavily on gossip, but these are minor flaws. His work presents a compelling narrative.That story comes to life in Peter Moruzzi’s Havana Before Castro, the ideal complement to English’s book.

In 1987, Moruzzi bought an old brochure from Havana’s Tropicana nightclub and began a massive collection of 1950’s ephemera that provides most of the lavish illustration his book devotes to a lascivious city. He gives enough of Cuba’s history, economics, and dismally corrupt politics to provide a useful context, and then looks back to the first tourist boom of the 1920s when mostly well-heeled Americans sailed down to Havana for what they couldn’t get at home (not just booze).

The real boom came after World War II. Abundant and cheap transportation brought Americans to hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, casinos, and whorehouses in an exotic wide-open city where English was widely spoken. They already knew Cuba from its music and dance, made popular by Xavier Cugat, Guys and Dolls, Desi Arnaz, and the rumba, mambo, and cha-cha. They liked what they saw, for Havana’s entertainments were as spectacular as any on the planet; they attracted great stars like Marlene Dietrich, Harry Belafonte, Tony Martin, and Nat King Cole.

This book gives an unforgettable image of the best nightclubs—the Montmartre, the Sans Souci, and especially the Tropicana, which offered a special deal. For $68, you could fly from Miami in a chartered plane where Tropicana artists entertained you, and then enjoy dinner, dance, a spectacular show at the club in its jungle setting, a night in a hotel, breakfast, and return. The famous bars also appear, with their daiquiris and mojitos; recipes for Cuban drinks are helpfully scattered through the book.

There are many illustrations of the famous Mob-run hotels as well as the most esteemed bordellos (operated by Cubans). In the classiest, Dona Marina’s white-coated servants poured free drinks and two trained nurses were on full-time duty. Since the author is an architectural historian, he pays attention to the buildings and juxtaposes period pictures with recent photos. For fifty years time has stood still in these places—the restaurant in the Riviera still uses the original dishes—so that Havana has the best assortment of undisturbed mid-century modern architecture you can find anywhere.

Moruzzi also introduces the Cubans with their American cars, boxing and baseball, cockfights, numbers games, street smells, singing vendors, and music everywhere. Their lives have changed just as much since the revolution as those of the crooks who ran the country and its entertainments. So has their appearance. Anyone who knows Havana in recent years will be struck by how much whiter the population was then. This reflects not only the emigration of the largely white prosperous and professional classes but also Fidel’s abolition of racial discrimination.

The mob and its activities naturally appear here, but as part of the bigger picture. Put the two books together and you get a real view of a glamorous—or sordid, if you like—dynamic, exciting, unreal time.

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Clive Foss teaches history at Georgetown University, Washington DC, where he offers courses in the history of dictatorship, as well as the fall of Rome and the rise of Islam. His most recent books are Fidel Castro and The Tyrants (both published in 2006).

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