In The Godfather Part II, a famous scene is set in Havana, Cuba. Michael Corleone is taken by his brother Fredo and some friends to a nightclub where they watch a live sex show. It is in that sleazy establishment that Michael realizes Fredo has betrayed him. At the same time, communist revolutionaries are taking to the streets to fight and soon after the Mafia flies back to America. While this is a fictional story, it isn’t far from what the situation truly was in Havana, 1959. Fidel Castro’s revolutionary 26th of July Movement was destined to clash with the American Mob because the presence of American organized crime gangs was one of the reasons the revolution happened. It’s all explained in T.J. English’s Havana Nocturne.
This book follows two main threads, that of the Cuban revolutionaries and that of the high level Mafia operations. The latter begins with two well-known characters in Mafia lore, Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. At the end of World War II, Luciano was released from prison and ordered to leave the country. And Lansky was ambitious after having successfully opened the Flamingo hotel and casino in Las Vegas. With big plans in their minds, the two National Crime Syndicate bosses arrived in Havana and moved into luxury suites in the Hotel Nacional.
Meyer Lansky had a vision of turning the entire island of Cuba into a luxury resort packed with casinos from Matanzas to Oriente. Ex-president of Cuba. At the same time, Fulgencio Batista, was living exiled in Florida when he came into contact with Lansky who talked him into running for a second term. During the election of 1953, Batista slid behind in the polls so he launched a coup that ousted then president Carlos Prio, canceling the elections and becoming Cuba’s next dictator. The party leading in the polls was the Ortodoxos, running an anti-corruption campaign. Although unknown at the time, he most famous member of the Ortodoxo party was a young lawyer who would become the most polarizing figure in Latin American history. His name was Fidel Castro.
When Batista seized the governor’s palace, he brought the American mobsters in with him. A new era of greed, graft, tourism, and crime was initiated in Cuba. Meanwhile the common people were stuck in the redundant cycles of poverty and illiteracy, reinforced by state control through the mechanisms of torture, police brutality, and censorship. While the citizens suffered, bribery ensured that the Mafia got special treatment.
When the US government learned Lucky Luciano was comfortably living in Havana, they put pressure on the Cuban government to deport him. After Luciano made one last move to his final home in Italy, Santo Trafficante moved in to take his place. Trafficante rose to power as a Mob boss in Tampa by running the bolito racket. As a trilingual speaker of English, Italian, and Spanish, he was well suited to be a crime lord in Cuba. Even better, he was well-acquainted with Cuban cultural ways through his running of illegal gambling operations in Florida. He wasn’t on good terms with Meyer Lansky though. Despite their differences, the two oversaw a growing casino industry that was linked to the nightclub scene and the tourist trade. Lansky had an honest streak and he caused his casinos to flourish by cleaning up the business, kicking con men and corrupt pit bosses out. He knew from experience in Las Vegas that casinos where customers are treated fairly draw bigger crowds. Lansky also didn’t like violence so he kept his gang’s assassinations and strongarm tactics to a minimum. He preferred to do business the gentleman’s way through financial favors and tax evasion. He was a macro level gangster who didn’t concern himself with small rackets. Under Lanksy’s and Trafficante’s guidance, the Cuban branch of the American Syndicate also made inroads into banking, real estate, and hotels.
The narrative alternates between the story of the Mob in Havana and the story of Fidel Castro and his rise to power with the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Castro started out as a young boy with ambitions of becoming a Catholic priest. In college he joined a political gang. Later he became a lawyer then led an attack on the Moncada military barracks. The failed coup landed Fidel and his brother Raul in prison where they plotted a bigger venture in seizing power from the unpopular Batista regime. After their release, the Castro brothers fled to Mexico where they organized a militia, bought a boat, and sailed for Cuba. While hiding in the Sierra Maestra mountains and training for guerilla warfare, Fidel Castro was interviewed by a journalist from The New York Times. He also bought arms from the American Mob who possibly acted as middlemen and traffickers for the American government. Clandestine connections between American intelligence agents and Castro are hinted at by the author but never fully explored. Word of the Revolution spread rapidly throughout Cuba and soon Batista was on a plane to the Bahamas after being persuaded by the CIA to step down. This meant the end of American organized crime in Cuba as Lansky, Trafficante and pals were chased out of the country.
Aside from these main threads, there are a lot of side stories. A brief but detailed account of the history of the Mafia from the Castellamarese War to the forming of the National Crime Syndicate to the Kafauver Committee congressional hearings and beyond are all told. A lot is also said about the Cuban music scene and the culture of hotels, casinos, and nightclubs like the legendary Tropicana. Also of legendary Cuban lore is the unregulated underworld of vice that mostly catered to tourists. During the Prohibition era in America, Havana became a haven for lushes. Along with that came a seedy underbelly of whorehouses, cocaine dealers, hit men for hire, and pornographic movie theaters. Slightly more respectable were the fully nude dancers and live sex shows. The character called Superman, who gets it on with a lady tied up on a stage in The Godfather Part II, is actually based on a real person. The real Superman was an Afro-Cuban man who was hung like a horse. He made a living by perfoming in sex shows, pornos, and working as a gigolo to pleasure white female tourists from El Norte. And he did all this for a living even though he was gay. According to the author, the Mob didn’t actually having anything to do with this kind of sordid, street level sleaze. Their sights were set higher on bigger fish to fry like gambling, hotels, and politics.
These side story passages are interesting, but they amount to little more than padding to fill in a thin story. Most of these passages aren’t directly related to the Lansky-Trafficante activities. However, they do give some context and information that isn’t easily available in other sources. These are some of the most vivid and detailed accounts of Havana night life before the Revolution that I’ve encountered so far. But actually the Mob wasn’t in Cuba long enough to do anything too exciting. Fidel Castro killed Meyer Lansky’s dream of a gambling and offshore banking paradise long before he got a chance to build anything more than one ultramodern hotel on the Malecon. The strongest part of this book is its account of the Cuban Revolution which is short on fine details, but direct and comprehensive enough to be of value to someone who wants to learn what happened without plowing through dense historical tomes like those of Hugh Thomas or Tad Szulc.
There are a number of stray details I find questionable. T.J. English, for example, claims Fidel Castro was a Marxist from the start. A lot of other sources that go into greater detail about the dictator’s biography say otherwise. While Castro had studied Marx, he didn’t actually embrace communism as a political system until after he seized power. In the beginning he wanted to maintain trade and diplomatic relations with the USA, but John F. Kennedy snubbed him so he turned to the USSR for support and recognition instead. Fidel Castro was a puritan, a moralist, and an orator, but he was no ideologue. He was an adventurist, a man of action, and a narcissist more than anything else. Tad Szulc covers this extensively in his biography of Castro, which English uses as a source for this book, so it is surprising that this error was made.
Also questionable are some anecdotes about Frank Sinatra and John F. Kennedy. English claims Sinatra worked as a courier fro the Mob, carrying suitcases full of money and guns from New Jersey to Havana. He also claims that when Kennedy was a senator, Meyer Lansky arranged for him to have an orgy with three Cuban prostitutes in a hotel while Lansky watched through a two-way mirror in the next room. Given Kennedy’s reputation as the Don Juan of the Democrats, it wouldn’t surprise me if he went to Cuba for sex, but the part about Lansky watching doesn’t ring true. These stories sound like yellow journalism or conspiracy theory fodder more than fact, but of course I can’t know what’s actually true. In these days of the Epstein files being released, it’s hard to know what to believe about people in power. Still, stories like this seem too sensationalistic to be true.
This book also leaves a giant gap in accounting for the relationship between Lansky and Batista. The exact nature and depth of their relationship is not disclosed. Nor is Batista’s relations with American corporate businessmen, American intelligence agencies, and the American government. The details of why the Americans persuaded Batista to abandon his dictatorship are murky by all accounts, especially considering they had supported him for so long. Also murky are details about Fidel Castro’s relations with the USA; he went on fundraising campaigns up north, but details of who actually gave him money for the Revolution haven’t been examined in any books I’ve read.
Havana Nocturne isn’t great, but it’s interesting. There is a lot of filler, but at least the filler is informative even though the bulk of it isn’t directly related to the story. It is good for filling in some details about organized crime in Cuba before the Revolution. While books on that particular turning point of the Cold War in the Caribbean always mention the Mob presence in Cuba, the actual story of what they were up to hasn’t been thoroughly examined in any book I know. It’s also a good read for Cubanophiles and those who want to understand how a small group of underworld criminals had a major impact on world affairs. But is there a moral to this story? Yes. The next time you are at a live sex show, be aware that commies might be coming to chop off your head. Be careful and don’t be a Fredo.
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