T. J. English’s Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba . . . and Then Lost It to the Revolution has just been released in paperback by HarperCollins (June 2009). It was first published in the United Kingdom as The Havana Mob in 2007 (Mainstream Publishing). Here is an excerpt taken from Tom Miller’s excellent review, “Before the Revolution: An account of the mob’s attempt to turn Havana into a gambling paradise” (Washington Post, 13 July 2008):
The mob in Havana started out auspiciously enough on the top floors of the Hotel Nacional in late 1946, when more than 20 gangsters from the United States gathered at Lansky’s invitation to set up their forthcoming Havana gambling enterprises and to arrange the spoils. Cuba, beyond U.S. laws but easy to reach, had a malleable government that would tolerate high-stakes gaming. The Havana mob — peopled by familiar names such as Santo Trafficante, Thomas Lucchese and Lucky Luciano — dreamed that “Havana would be a party that never ended.”
Throughout the 1950s mobsters flew in and out of the Cuban capital establishing an empire that controlled casinos, hotels and nightclubs. They resolved their quarrels with threats, guns and hit men. Corruption was the norm and bulging offshore profits the reward. There was enough for everybody. Even the Kefauver Committee hearings, a series of Senate proceedings aimed at exposing organized crime, made them downshift only temporarily. Oh, it was a grand old time. Pan American airlines, which had controlling interest in the Nacional, Havana’s premier gambling hotel, charged $39 roundtrip from Miami, inexpensive even in those days. You could bring your car on a ferry boat and catch a show with “an international swirl of race, language, and social class.” The mob set up a croupier school for ambitious Cubans. In 1957 Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy came to town and was said to have been the only man in a four-person orgy arranged by Trafficante. Briskly paced and well-sourced, Havana Nocturne has the air of a thriller with the bonus of being true.
Lansky couldn’t have gotten as far as he did in Cuba without the help of dictator Fulgencio Batista, who seized power in 1952. Lansky provided unlimited funds for the dictator’s coffers; in return Batista extended protection to the mobster’s underworld empire [. . .]. But Batista’s coup, which derailed pending elections, had thwarted a young politician named Fidel Castro, who converted his electoral frustration into a revolution that grew in tandem with the obscene profits of the Havana mob. “The huge gulf between these two diametrically opposed forces could not be reconciled,” writes English. “They were one day bound to collide.”
English, a true crime writer whose previous books include Paddy Whacked and The Westies, provides a detailed account of the personalities and elements that made up Cuban life. His well-researched descriptions of how business, gambling, politics, revolution, music and religion all played off each other give Havana Nocturne a broad context and a knowledgeable edge.
For full reviews, see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2008/07/10/AR2008071002349.html and http://www.nypost.com/seven/06082008/postopinion/postopbooks/havana_nocturne_114473.htm
Book cover image from the author’s page, http://tj-english.com/
