Click on the following link to watch a United States
television show broadcasted from the Riviera Hotel in Cuba a year before the revolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBmYIfP7WX0
by Carlos Rodríguez
Martorell, Daily News, July 17, 2008
Glitzy
casinos, a rousing mambo-fueled nightlife and a lurking gue-rrilla have made
1950s Havana the stuff of legend.
“Most
Americans, everything they know about this era is from the movie Godfather II,”
says writer T.J. English. “Which is 15 minutes of the movie and it’s
fictionalized.”
So English
set out to find out what American mobsters were really up to for his recently
released nonfiction book “Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It
to the Revolution” (William
Morrow, $27.95).
What he
found after years of research and interviews — both in the U.S. and Cuba — make any previous fictional account pale in comparison.
“People
didn’t know about the extent in which mobsters owned banks and controlled
financial lending institutions in Cuba,” says English.
Cuba’s
strongman Gen. Fulgencio Batista emerges in English’s fascinating account as
much more than an enabler who allowed the Mafia to build casinos all over
Havana’s malecón.
“I would
say [Batista] was an equal partner with the mobsters,” says English, a
50-year-old New Yorker of Irish background who is the author of several books
about the mob.
“The mafiosi
— Meyer Lansky, Santo Trafficante — couldn’t have done what they did without their
relationship with Fulgencio Batista.”
According
to English, the American Mafia interest in Cuba goes all the way back to Al Capone in the ’20s, but only took shape after the
fabled 22-member conference at Havana’s Hotel Nacional in December 1946.
Over the
following decade, New York-based Jewish mobster
Lansky presided over an unprecedented empire of casinos that took over the
whole island’s economy.
“Literally
every tunnel that was built, every highway — and there was a lot of
construction going on in Havana at the time — was being financed by money from
the mobsters,” says English.
The allure
of the Tropicana and other gambling and entertaining havens provided an
incessant pageant of celebrities: Marlon Brando played congas, Frank Sinatra partnered in the casino business, and Sen. John F. Kennedy took part in a three-call-girl orgy at the Comodoro Hotel courtesy of notorious Mafia kingpin Trafficante,
according to the book.
All to the
tune of Latin music’s golden age.
“I always
say that what drew me to this subject was the rhythm of the clave,” says
English, who professes to be an “amateur conguero.”
“Although
organized crime and gangsterism is obviously a moral corruption, you have this
positive consequence,” he adds. “It made it possible to hire huge orchestras
and nightclubs that made this era of entertainment second to none in history.”
The
mafiosos biggest miscalculation was, obviously, Fidel Castro, the privileged son of a landowner who provides an
enthralling twist to the story.
“It was
particularly interesting that someone like Batista and Lansky, who’d come from
extreme poverty, wound up being the protectors of the bourgeoisie,” says
English. “And yet Castro, who was from the bourgeoisie, became the leader of
the downtrodden.”
When
Batista fled the country on New Year’s Eve 1959, paving the way for Castro’s
triumphant entry in Havana, people took to the streets and looted the casinos,
which the revolutionaries had opposed.
But Castro
didn’t immediately chase the American gangsters, and even reopened the casinos,
following advice that without the gambling revenue the island’s economy would collapse.
But the
bearded leader’s tolerance was not to last, and soon afterward the government
seized control of all U.S. corporations’ holdings in Cuba, casinos included.
crodriguez@nydailynews.com
