CHAPTER 2:
SEEDS OF GANGSTERISMO
With a handshake and abrazo, Cuba’s strongman Fulgencio Batista closed a deal for the purchase of Cuban molasses with North American gangster Meyer Lansky in 1933. He also sealed the deal on gangsterismo in neocolonial Cuba.
Why molasses? President Franklin D. Roosevelt had just repealed the notorious Volstead Act, ending the era of Prohibition and prompting the Mafia to invest in the liquor industry. The Mafia needed a steady source of the thick, dark-colored syrup byproduct of sugar refining, for use as a sugar substitute in its liquor distilleries. Lansky was in Havana on behalf of the Molaska Corporation, a Mafia business front in Ohio.
As Batista and Lansky negotiated the molasses deal, they also took the measure of each other. They liked what they saw. Lansky shared with Batista his dream of creating a colony of casinos, hotels, and nightclubs in Cuba. He offered to make Batista a partner in the endeavor. Batista would get regular payments from the gamblers. In return, the Mafia would be allowed to operate their establishments without interference from the Cuban army or police.
Lansky’s boyhood friend Joseph “Doc” Stacher recalled, “Meyer was the first one to think about Cuba, way back in the early thirties.” Stacher continued, “We knew the island from our bootlegging business, and what with the great weather and good hotels and casinos we would build, rich people could easily be persuaded to fly over to an exotic ‘foreign country’ to enjoy themselves.” Stacher, Lansky’s liaison with Batista, delivered graft payments to the Cuban dictator.14
Lansky’s Cuban scheme was a strategic business plan for North American organized crime in the post-Prohibition era. At a meeting of top Mafia leaders in 1933, Lansky proposed to invest some of the capital accumulated by Mafia alcohol bootlegging operations in a new business model based on gambling. As Stacher explained: “Our biggest problem was always where to invest the money.” He added, “What Lansky suggested was that each of us put up $500,000 to start the Havana gambling operation. At the end of the meeting Charlie [Luciano] said he was in on the deal and ten others, including Bugsy Siegel, Moe Dalitz, Phil Kastel, and Chuck Polizzi, also chipped in a half million bucks. Lansky and I flew to Havana with the money in suitcases and spoke to Batista, who hadn’t quite believed we could raise that kind of money.”15
In 1936, Army Chief of Staff Batista legalized games of chance in select casinos and nightclubs. Batista shifted the responsibility for monitoring casinos from civilian authorities to the Cuban army. He also used Lansky as a consultant to reform the Cuban government-owned Gran Casino Nacional, where the management was siphoning off house revenues.16
By the mid-1930s, Lansky was operating three casinos in Cuba. One was in the new Hotel Nacional, perched on a limestone bluff overlooking the Malecón, Havana’s seaside boulevard, and the Straits of Florida. Lansky also managed a casino at Oriental Park, a horse racetrack in suburban Marianao, and another gaming room at the nearby Gran Casino Nacional. The profits from the Mafia’s casinos grew steadily. The North American Mafia, with the collaboration of the Cuban strongmen, would turn the island into a gangster state.
Perhaps Batista and Lansky worked well together because they had a lot in common. Both were self-made men from impoverished backgrounds, who came to wealth and power through extralegal means. Lansky, who was Jewish, fled the disputed region between Poland and Russia with his parents in 1911, at age nine. He grew up on the streets of Manhattan’s rough-and-tumble Lower East Side with Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Ben “Bugsy” Siegel, and others who were later to gain notoriety in American organized crime. But because he was not Italian he could never become a “made” member of the Mafia. Batista, a mulatto, was the son of a sugar worker born in 1901 in a United Fruit company town in Oriente province. He left school early to go to work as a cane-cutter and later as a railroad laborer. He enlisted in the Cuban army at age twenty-one.17
With the country in chaos in 1933, Fulgencio Batista rose to power suddenly with U.S. backing. Cuban sugar production dropped thirty percent between 1929 and 1933, causing the wages of urban workers to fall as much as fifty percent.18 Thanks to global economic depression, demand for Cuban sugar had declined precipitously in the United States, Cuba’s biggest trading partner. The United States added to the island’s economic distress by enacting the Hawley-Smoot Tariff in 1930, which imposed higher duties on imports of Cuban sugar.
President Gerardo Machado had responded to the collapse of the Cuban economy by protecting the rights of U.S. economic interests while doing little to ease the misery of Cubans.
Historian Luis E. Aguilar writes, “A man raised under the shadow of American omnipotence in Cuba, Machado always believed… while he could handle his Cuban opponents, he could not survive a break with the Americans.” Machado also boasted that social unrest would not be a problem on his watch; he didn’t think he had much to worry about. During a 1927 visit to the United States, Machado was fêted at a luncheon on Wall Street given by Thomas J. Lamont of J. P. Morgan and Company, the powerful investment bank. Lamont, according to the New York Times, expressed his “hope that the Cuban people will find some way to keep him in power indefinitely.”19
So when jobless Cubans took to the streets to call on President Machado to ease their plight, the retired Cuban army general responded with an unprecedented iron fist. He banned demonstrations, jailed political opponents without legal cause, and instructed the police to shoot demonstrating trade unionists, students, and opposition party members. He also used private gunmen called porristas (big sticks) against his political opponents. Labor leaders were assassinated.
Despite his ruthlessness, Machado was unable to restore political stability. Opposition groups, on the left and right, formed armed action groups to do battle with the Machado on the streets of Havana and other cities. By 1933, protests, bombings, and kidnappings took place on a daily basis, all over the island. President Franklin Roosevelt lost confidence in Machado. In May 1933, he dispatched U.S. Ambassador Sumner Welles to Cuba with a mandate to get Machado out. Under intense pressure, Machado resigned in August 1933.20
With the fall of Machado, vengeance was played out in the streets. The ABC, a conservative, armed anti-Machado action group, had a list of porristas and Machado supporters, who were hunted down and killed. Dead bodies were dragged through the streets. There were daily executions for more than a week. As many as 1,000 people died, and 300 homes were ransacked.21 Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, a figurehead leader, was powerless to quell the continuing chaos. In August and September 1933, Batista led the “Sergeants’ Revolt,” in which he and other noncommissioned officers took control of the Cuban army from an officer corps corrupted during Machado’s rule.
Batista joined forces with Ramón Grau San Martín, a popular University of Havana professor, who led a coalition of liberal reformers, leftists, students, and Cuban nationalists. Batista and the Grau coalition drove Céspedes from power in September 1933. Grau’s Provisional Revolutionary Government assumed power. Batista promoted himself to colonel and army chief of staff.22 Grau’s coalition undertook a series of long-overdue economic and political reforms, which impinged on the privileged status of U.S. interests in Cuba. Grau also touched a raw nerve in Washington when he abrogated the Platt Amendment—which gave the United States the right to intervene in Cuba. Ambassador Welles turned against Grau, calling his policies “confiscatory” and “frankly communistic.”
In a memorandum to Secretary of State Cordell Hull in September 1933, Welles wrote, “It is… within the bounds of possibility that the social revolution which is underway cannot be checked.” Welles stated, “American properties and interests are being gravely prejudiced and material damage to such properties will in all probability be very great.”
Welles appealed repeatedly for U.S. military intervention in Cuba. Each time, the Department of State turned him down. Instead, Welles undermined Grau by convincing Roosevelt to withhold diplomatic recognition of the Provisional Revolutionary Government. In October, Welles met with Batista and encouraged him to move against Grau.
In a memorandum to Secretary of State Hull, Welles reported on his meeting with Batista. He praised Batista for the army’s “determined and effective action” in Havana “against Communistic and extreme radical elements.” He told Batista that “commercial and financial interests” in Cuba had “rallied” to his support because they were “looking for protection.” He stressed that Batista was the only true “authority” capable of resolving the political crisis in Cuba.
U.S. warships were deployed to Cuban waters in August 1933 and remained there until the end of the year. The Department of the Navy, worried about the possible loss of its base at Guantánamo Bay, circulated contingency plans in Washington for military intervention. U.S. Navy officers based in Cuba reviewed operational details for possible intervention.23
In January 1934, Batista withdrew his support from Grau and installed Carlos Mendieta as a figurehead president. Batista used the Cuban army and police to crush the opposition and consolidate his hold on power between 1934 and 1936. Gun fights in the streets between the Cuban army and police and the backers of the Provisional Revolutionary Government were frequent. There were also occasional political assassinations.
Welles’s interpretation of Grau’s coalition as “communistic” was overwrought. Grau was not a man of the revolutionary left. He was frequently at odds with the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP) (Popular Socialist Party), as the Cuban communist party was called, during the short tenure of the Provisional Revolutionary Government.
Cuba’s predicament stemmed from its neocolonial status. The end of Cuba’s sugar boom in 1929 laid bare the need for reform, but it also highlighted the limits of Cuban sovereignty. Historian Louis A. Pérez, Jr. writes, “So thoroughly had the United States penetrated Cuba that it was hardly possible for any social or economic legislation to not affect U.S. capital adversely.” Pérez continues, “The defense of Cuban interests jeopardized U.S. interests.”24
Following the ouster of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, the Roosevelt Administration applied its Good Neighbor Policy of nonintervention in Latin America to Cuba. The administration rescinded the Platt Amendment and negotiated a new trade agreement with Cuba, which reduced the U.S. duty on Cuban sugar. It also increased Cuba’s share of the sugar market in the United States, although the island’s quota remained less than before the Depression.25
With political stability restored in Cuba by the late 1930s, Batista eased his dictatorial grip. He started to act like a traditional politician, reinstituting the minimum wage and the social security and pension systems. He made alliances with the left and the right as he positioned himself to run in the 1940 presidential election. He won the support of Mario Menocal, a right-wing caudillo (charismatic political strongman) with ties to foreign capital and sugar-mill owners.
Batista also reached out to the Partido Socialista Popular. He lifted the ban on the PSP, which he had declared illegal in 1934, and allowed the party to publish its newspaper, Hoy. He also permitted Cuban workers to organize a conference to found the Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC) (Confederation of Cuban Workers). He even brought two Cuban communists into his Cabinet, Juan Marinello and Carlos Rafael Rodríguez.
Historian Jules Benjamin writes, “Batista’s real leadership skills… were those of a non-charismatic caudillo. He rewarded his friends with government office, state preference, and outright graft. He lured his most vocal opponents with these same inducements. If they were unresponsive, he employed the legal and police power of the state against them.” Benjamin notes, “As a non-ideologue head of state, he did not wish to propel Cuban society in any particular direction. He wished merely to preside comfortably over it.”
Meanwhile, Batista, Grau’s Partido Revolucionario Cubano-Auténtico (PRC-A) (Cuban Revolutionary Party-Authentic), the PSP, and other political groups gathered together to draft a new Cuban constitution in 1940. It was a remarkably liberal charter, which provided suffrage for all Cubans, as well as mandating free, compulsory education for children. The Constitution included labor-friendly laws providing for an eight-hour day, a minimum wage, paid vacations, pregnancy leave, and the right to strike. It outlawed discrimination based on class, race, or gender. It also prohibited large-scale land-holding, promising that land owned by foreigners in the future would “be adjusted to the socioeconomic interests of the nation.”
With the election of Batista in 1940, however, Cuba’s constitution was put on hold. A CIA report later called the 1940 election “reasonably fair.” The report noted Batista liked to say he was “a democratic dictator,” adding Batista “maintained himself… by means of military dictatorship.”
Batista did not seek reelection in 1944. According to Lansky’s biographers Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan, and Eli Landau, Lansky convinced Batista not to run for president again after the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) contacted him. Lansky had served as a go-between for ONI and the Mafia in counterintelligence operations on the New York waterfront in World War II. Lansky recalled, “It was made quite clear to me that the American government wouldn’t let Batista go on running the island if there were any danger it might go Communist.” He added, “I explained this to my good friend Batista, who was very reluctant to get out of politics.” The Roosevelt Administration was unhappy about the inclusion of two Cuban communists in Batista’s Cabinet.
Batista moved to Daytona Beach, Florida, just north of Broward County, where Lansky operated a number of “carpet joints” or roadside gambling rooms. Batista backed his prime minister, Carlos Saladrigas, for president in 1944. Saladrigas campaigned in favor of the status quo, while his chief rival the PRC-A’s Ramón Grau San Martín promised reform in the spirit of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of 1933. When the ballots were counted, Grau was declared the victor by a margin of 1,041,822 to 839,220 votes. The PRC-A was popularly known as the Auténtico party.26
Before he was sworn in as president, Ramón Grau San Martín traveled to Washington, where he was received warmly. President Roosevelt quipped, “And to think that I did not recognize you eleven years ago,” referring to his decision to use Batista to drive Grau’s Provisional Revolutionary Government from power. Former U.S. Ambassador to Cuba Philip Bonsal (1960-1961) wrote, “A new era seemed to be dawning, one in which Cuban politics, freed from military domination, would achieve a new vitality.” Grau had campaigned on a promise to rid Cuba of the culture of corruption that characterized the Batista years.
Senator Eduardo Chibás, a spokesman for Grau who had been arrested three times in the anti-Machado struggle, was optimistic at the start of Grau’s presidency. But he became disillusioned with the administration’s rampant corruption and the Auténticos’ ties to Mafia gamblers and pistoleros. Charging that Grau had “betrayed the revolution,” Chibás quit the Auténtico party, and became a voice for reform.27 In passionate speeches on the floor of the Cuban Senate and on his popular weekly Sunday news and commentary program on CMQ radio in Havana, he campaigned relentlessly for the deportation of Mafia Don Charles “Lucky” Luciano from Cuba. Luciano, Chibás charged, had slipped into Cuba illegally to deal “in drugs, gambling, and prostitution.” His presence in Cuba was a symptom of the administration’s endemic corruption. Chibás alleged that Senator Francisco “Paco” Prío, whose brother Carlos Prío Socarrás was Grau’s prime minister, had business ties to Luciano. He charged that Paco Prío was working behind the scenes to block Luciano’s deportation.
In March 1947, a scuffle broke out in the Capitolio Nacional off the Senate floor between Paco Prío and Chibás, a short man who wore distinctive wire-rim glasses with lenses as thick as the bottom of an old-fashioned bottle of Coca-Cola. Chibás shouted, “This is from Lucky Luciano!” as he threw a punch at Prío, grazing him on the neck. A stunned Prío pulled back as several senators intervened to stop the fighting.
Seven days later, Chibás and Paco Prío confronted each other again in the Capitolio. This time they dueled with sabers. The duel was called off after each man cut the other. On July 13, Prime Minister Carlos Prío Socarrás challenged Chibás to another duel with sabers. Prío was offended by Chibás’s sharp-tongued criticism of him in a radio broadcast. Once again, the duel was suspended after each man drew the blood of the other. At Carlos Prío’s side was Senator Manuel Antonio Varona, a leading Auténtico politician.28 Despite the power of his opposition, Chibás continued to fight. And as it turned out, he was right.
Years later, a memorandum from Ray Olivera, a U.S. Bureau of Narcotics agent in Cuba, described “the active participation of the Prío Socarrás brothers not only in bringing Lucky Luciano to Cuba but in the Prío Socarrás’ participation in all of Lucky Luciano’s criminal activities… there were no other members in Cuban official circles more active in the attempt to release Luciano from the hands of the Cuban Immigration than the Prío Socarrás brothers themselves.” The FBI also reported that Grau’s Minister of Education, José Alemán, “had dealings with many American gangsters in the 1940s and 1950s in Cuba, such as Vito Genovese, Lucky Luciano, Sam Mannarino and numerous others.”29
Luciano moved to Cuba after he was deported from the United States to Italy. He had been serving a thirty-to-fifty-year prison sentence for running an illegal prostitution ring in New York. In January 1946, New York Governor Thomas Dewey granted him clemency in return for his cooperation with the Office of Naval Intelligence during World War II. Early in the war Luciano had provided information for anti-Nazi counterintelligence operations on the New York waterfront. Luciano also supplied ONI with intelligence for the Allies’ amphibious landing in Sicily in 1943. Lansky acted as the go-between for Luciano and U.S. intelligence.30
But Luciano grew restless in Italy. He instructed Lansky to make arrangements for him to live in Cuba. Lansky negotiated with Interior Minister Alfredo Pequeño for a visa for Luciano, which included a provision for automatic extensions.
In October 1946, Luciano took a roundabout route to Cuba, in a private plane. Luciano became fast friends with Indalecio Pertierra, who had a financial interest in the Jockey Club near Oriental Park, where Lansky operated casinos. He also won the support of Senator Eduardo Suárez Rivas and Benito Herrera, chief of Cuba’s Secret Police.31
Luciano wanted a piece of the Mafia’s gambling action in Cuba. Lansky arranged for him to buy an interest in the casino at the Hotel Nacional, where Luciano stayed when he first arrived in Havana. Luciano told Lansky to organize a conference in Havana of the North American Mafia’s “top guys” in December 1946. The conference took place under the cover of a performance by Frank Sinatra, then a rising star.32
Luciano told his biographer Martin Grosch, “If anyone had asked, there was an outward reason for such a gathering. It was to honor an Italian boy from New Jersey named Frank Sinatra, the crooner who had become an idol of the nation’s bobby-sox set.” Luciano added, “Frank was a good kid and we was all proud of him, the way he made it to the top… [H]e was just showin’ his appreciation by comin’ down to Havana to say hello to me.”33
Several of the upper floors of the Hotel Nacional were sealed off for the weeklong Mafia conclave. Luciano sat at the head of a long conference table with Lansky at his side. Joe Adonis, Albert Anastasia, Frank Costello, Joe Bonanno, Vito Genovese; Charlie, Joe, and Rocco Fischetti; Joseph “Doc” Stacher; Carlos Marcello; and Santo Trafficante sat around the table.34 Stacher recalled, “Everybody brought envelopes of cash for Lucky, and as an exile he was glad to take them. But more important, they came to pay allegiance to him.”
One of the topics discussed at the weeklong Mafia conclave was a plan to expand the Mafia gambling colony in Cuba. Another item on the agenda was Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. The boyhood pals—Lansky, Luciano, and Siegel—shared a common vision: building a spectacular casino and turning the dusty desert town into a gambling oasis. But the Flamingo’s construction costs had gone way overbudget. Lansky had evidence that Siegel’s girlfriend Virginia Hill was skimming money and putting it into Swiss bank accounts. Lansky said, “There’s only one thing to do with a thief who steals from his friends. Benny’s got to be hit.” Siegel was assassinated in Los Angeles in June 1947.35
But the big topic of discussion for the Mafia’s “top guys” was a plan to make Cuba the heroin-distribution hub of the Western Hemisphere. Harry Anslinger, head of the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), learned from his agents about the Mafia drug-trafficking plan. The BNDD gained access to telephone transcripts of Luciano’s long-distance telephone calls from Cuba to Chicago, Miami, New York, and elsewhere. Anslinger later wrote, “Luciano had developed a full-fledged plan which envisioned the Caribbean as his center of operations…. Cuba was to be made the center of all international narcotics operations.” Anslinger continued, “The report stated that Luciano had already become friendly with a number of high Cuban officials through the lavish use of expensive gifts.”36
Luciano’s network imported heroin into the United States with remarkable success, according to historian Alfred McCoy. “For more than a decade it moved morphine base from the Middle East to Europe, transformed it into heroin, and then exported it in substantial quantities to the United States—all without suffering a major arrest or seizure,” McCoy writes. “The organization’s comprehensive distribution network within the United States helped raise the number of addicts from an estimated 20,000 at the close of the war [in 1945] to 60,000 in 1952 to 150,000 in 1965.”
The Mafia gambling colony in Cuba was well suited to serve the needs of Luciano’s network, given Lansky’s expertise in money laundering. He would use the steady revenue stream from the Mafia’s casinos to conceal the ill-gotten profits from drug trafficking.37 According to Cuban writer Enrique Cirules, President Grau and the Auténticos were also connected to the Mafia’s heroin network in Cuba through Amleto Battisti, a Uruguayan of Italian descent. As a prominent businessman in Cuba, Battisti frequently appeared with Grau in public, and also worked closely with the North American gangsters.38
Ironically, Luciano’s active social life in Cuba led to his undoing. When stories about Luciano’s presence in Cuba appeared in newspapers in Havana and the United States—he had been spotted several times with Frank Sinatra at the Hotel Nacional, and seen often at the Oriental Park racetrack, nightclubs, and restaurants in Havana—Washington pressed President Grau to deport Luciano. Congressman Indalecio Pertierra organized Cuban lawmakers to lobby the U.S. Embassy in Havana in support of permitting Luciano to remain in Cuba.
Interior Minister Alfredo Pequeño and National Secret Police Chief Benito Herrera told the U.S. Embassy that there was no legal reason to deport Luciano. Pequeño conceded Luciano “is a dangerous character and a perjurer, to be sure. But his papers are in order.” Both Pequeño and Herrera were recipients of largesse from Mafia gamblers on Luciano’s behalf.39
When the Grau administration failed to deport Luciano, Anslinger took action. He had his BNDD agent in Cuba inform Cuban authorities: “As long as Luciano remains in Cuba, America will not send one more grain of morphine or any other narcotics for medicinal or any other needs. This goes into effect immediately.” Because the United States supplied Cuba with virtually all of its medicinal narcotics, Havana had little option but to capitulate.40
President Grau was outraged at the “injustice” of Washington’s threat. Cuban Ambassador Guillermo Belt expressed Havana’s “displeasure” to Secretary of State George C. Marshall about the U.S. “ultimatum” with regard to the deportation of Luciano.41
Once again Luciano summoned the Mafia’s top men to Havana. Luciano told his colleagues he would return to Italy. But he assured them his distribution network was capable of delivering a steady supply of heroin to the United States. He said Lansky would represent his interests in Cuba. On March 29, 1947, Paco Prío was on hand to bid Luciano farewell when the gangster departed Havana for Italy.
Interestingly, Representative Pertierra was also involved in a domestic cocaine-trafficking network in Cuba with Mafia gambler Santo Trafficante, Sr. The cocaine was flown into Cuba on a weekly flight from Colombia on Aerovías Q, a Cuban air service. Enrique Cirules writes, “From the time of its founding in 1945, Aerovías Q operated from military airports. It used gasoline, replacement parts and maintenance staff and pilots of the Cuban Air Force with the express authorization of President Grau San Martín.” Cocaine was easily purchased in paper packets in nightclubs in Havana.42
Meanwhile, Meyer Lansky was able to maintain his influence in the Palacio Presidencial when Carlos Prío Socarrás was elected president in 1948. Lansky’s connection was Paco Prío. When Lansky introduced Luciano to Paco Prío, he referred to Prío as “one of our best friends.” Lansky added, “He is the brother of… [Carlos Prío]; without doubt, one of the most important politicians.”43 In addition to the Auténticos’ ties to the Mafia gamblers, the Grau and Prío regimes were also characterized by pistolerismo (violence by political gunmen).
President Ramón Grau San Martín gave pistoleros jobs in his administration, saying he could not turn his back on his ‘trigger happy boys.’ The pistoleros were tied to the Organización Auténtico. Pistolerismo was played out in public places in Cuba from the mid-1940s through the early 1950s. The first targets were army and police officers from the Machado and Batista eras, notorious for their brutality. But it was not long before the pistoleros degenerated into armed thugs, who used strong-arm tactics to extort money from government agencies and businesses.44
Pistolerismo fit hand and glove with the corruption and nepotism in the Grau Administration. Although Grau was a bachelor, his brother’s widow Paulina Alsina de Grau served as his “First Lady,” exercising power over appointments to government jobs. Grau also gave other family members—cousins, nephews, and nieces—jobs in his administration. Minister of Education José Alemán also diverted education ministry funds to political patronage jobs and his private army. Alemán’s pistoleros intimidated his rivals and, most of all, protected his bureaucratic turf, the source of future graft. Thirteen truckloads of arms and equipment for Alemán’s pistoleros were hauled away from Alemán’s country estate in a police raid in September 1947.45
When the Cuban Senate summoned Alemán and Minister of Commerce Cesar Casas to testify about allegations of corruption in their ministries, they balked. Grau feigned outrage and officially blocked their appearance before the Senate. Casas complained the inquisitive senators had “terrorized” him. Alemán’s pistoleros shot up the Senate chamber.46 Alemán’s misuse of funds for rural education illustrates the corrosive effect of gangsterismo on the Auténticos’ professed “Spirit of 1933.” Public education had been one of the Provisional Revolutionary Government’s highest priorities. Although the Grau administration earmarked one-quarter of Cuba’s national budget for education in 1947, illiteracy remained shamefully high. The illiteracy rate in Cuba in 1953 was 23.6 percent for the island as a whole, but it soared to 41.7 percent in rural areas.
Meanwhile, Grau appointed pistoleros to posts in the police and security forces. The Auténticos also used pistoleros to accomplish party objectives when political persuasion didn’t work. As labor minister, Carlos Prío employed pistoleros to intimidate communists in the Cuban Workers Confederation and drive them out of trade unions.47 Drive-by assassinations were a common form of pistolerismo, just like in the Hollywood gangster movies popular in Cuba in the 1930s.
In September 1947, the New York Times reported, “Capt. Raúl Avila of the Health Ministry’s Police was shot and killed in the Vedado residential section… [H]e was walking along a street when several individuals in an automobile drove alongside and fired pistols. Fifteen bullets entered the body, killing the captain instantly.” There were sixty-four murders attributed to pistoleros from 1944 to 1948.48
The most spectacular incident of pistolerismo was a three-hour gun battle between rival pistolero factions in the Cuban police in September 1947. Gunmen led by Mario Salabarría of the National Police of Cuba, who belonged to the Movimiento Socialista Revolucionaria (MSR) (Revolutionary Socialist Movement), surrounded a house in the Havana suburb Marianao, where Major Emilio Tro, director of the National Police Academy, was staying. Tro, a leader of the Union Insurección Revolucionaria (UIR) (Revolutionary Insurrectional Union), was wanted for the murder of Captain Raúl Avila. Both factions were armed political action groups tied to the Auténticos.49 When Tro refused to surrender, the gunfire started. Six people were killed and eleven others were wounded.
Grau’s pistoleros remained loyal to him after he left the Palacio Presidencial. Grau’s “boys” came to his defense when he was indicted for embezzlement from the Cuban treasury. On July 4, 1950, six masked gunmen broke into a courtroom and absconded with court documents. Grau, Treasury Minister Isauro Valdés Moreno, and four other ministry officials had been charged with misappropriating more than $175 million.50
In 1948, Carlos Prío was elected president with thirty-six percent of the votes cast. Emilio Núñez Portuondo was second with twenty-four percent, and Eddy Chibás came in third with thirteen percent. Prío denounced the “plague of gangsterismo.” He created a new army unit of 300 specially trained men to identify and arrest pistoleros. “These people are sheltered by politicians, even senators,” he asserted. “Some are put in the police. I believe that the solution would be to take away their blue [police] uniforms.”51 But Prío not only failed to purge the pistoleros from his administration, he continued to use the UIR and pistolero factions to advance his political agenda. According to a CIA report, “UIR was eventually sponsored by Carlos Prío Socarrás and used by him to eliminate various left-wing threats to his presidency.” The report stated, “It should be noted that while the UIR is in other respects a most unsavory group, it has in the past been primarily anti-communist.”52
Carlos Prío was jailed several times during the anti-Machado struggle as a leader of the Directorio Estudiantil (Student Directorate) at the University of Havana. But as historian Jaime Suchlicki writes, Prío’s commitment to progressive reform waned as he “enrich[ed] himself on the spoils of corrupt friends and crime figures.”53 Prío also used pistoleros as assassins. Prío was closely tied to Orlando León Lemus and Policarpo Soler, two of Cuba’s most notorious pistoleros. Despite evidence linking Lemus and Soler to the killing of two Federación de Estudiantil de la Universidad (FEU) (University Student Federation) leaders at the University of Havana in 1949, the Prío administration did little to investigate the murders. Lemus, a MSR leader, fled into exile after the gun battle in Marianao.
Soler was eventually arrested and imprisoned. But he escaped from the Castillo del Príncipe prison in Havana in a dramatic, but improbable, jailbreak in broad daylight in November 1951. The obese Soler descended 100 feet down the side of the prison on a rope ladder, crossed a wide moat, and climbed over a tall exterior wall to the street, where Lemus was waiting for him in a getaway car.
An informant later told the FBI that Soler’s spectacular escape from prison in Havana was an inside job.54 Meanwhile, President Carlos Prío was blunt about his associations with the gangsters. Maria Soledad Vázquez, who was married to Ricardo Artigas, a member of President Prío’s inner circle, later told the FBI “Prío merely explained that it was necessary to have such people because they had experience in killing.” The Prío administration was also notoriously corrupt. According to the British ambassador in Cuba, Prío took an estimated $90 million from the Cuban treasury while he was president.55
Historian Hugh Thomas observes, Paco Prío lived the “good life” when his brother Carlos was president. “He was primarily concerned to amass a fortune out of the import of a large variety of drugs—a task lightened by the presence as chief of police of the Acción Revolucionaria Guiteras [(ARG) (Guiteras Revolutionary Action)] chieftain Eufemio Fernández, his brother Carlos’ old friend.” Fernández was chief of the Policía Secreta Nacional (National Secret Police). The ARG was an anti-Machado action group aligned with the Auténticos.
The FBI also tied Paco Prío to drug trafficking in Cuba. A July 1952 report from FBI informant T-7 (described as an official of “a federal agency engaged in investigative work”),56 said “José Alemán, former Minister of Education in Cuba and later a Cuban senator told T-7 that all three Prío brothers [Antonio, Carlos, and Paco] were narcotics addicts.” Needless to say, Meyer Lansky found the corrupt political culture of neocolonial Cuba an ideal environment in which to experiment with new concepts in gambling.
According to the FBI, Meyer Lansky was the father of gambling in Cuba. Lansky first tested the principles of modern gambling in Cuba in the 1930s, principles he would later put to use in Las Vegas. With his mathematical turn of mind and street smarts, Lansky had been developing these insights ever since his Lower East Side boyhood, where street-corner craps games taught him a basic lesson about games of chance. As he was fond of saying, “There’s no such thing as a lucky gambler. There are just the winners and the losers. The winners are those who control the game.”
In Cuba, Lansky perfected the practice of “skim.” Skim is the superprofit casino operators take off the top of the daily revenue from the roulette wheels, slot machines, and baccarat tables before the start of the official money count. Skim is delivered confidentially to large investors with hidden interests in casinos.
Lansky also understood how to use glamour to attract tourists to casinos, and entice them to place bets. Popular entertainers and musicians from the United States and Europe were headliners in Mafia casinos and nightclubs. Lansky biographer Robert Lacey writes, “Running a casino is an art form all its own: the ability to conjure up the glamour and escapism that will entice others to wager—the illusion that money is not really money—while retaining your own workaday, bedrock restraint, the ruthless sense of business to make sure that the cash ends up in your pocket.” Lacey notes, “Meyer Lansky had that sense of style, and he had the discipline.”57 Perhaps it was Lansky’s sense of style that led him to integrate Cuba’s rich musical heritage into the Mafia-owned casinos, hotels, and nightclubs.
In the early 20th century, European and North American tourists were attracted to carnival festivities in Cuba. Carnival had its origins in the Día de los Reyes (Kings’ Day) celebrations of African slaves in Spanish colonial Cuba on January 6.58 With the abolition of slavery in Cuba in 1886, comparsas (neighborhood bands) continued the tradition of Día de los Reyes’ celebrations. Long lines of dancers snaked their way through the streets of Havana and Santiago de Cuba to the rhythms of congas, or groups of drummers. Other comparsa instruments included bells, frying pans, tire rims, trumpets and a variety of other brass horns.
Comparsas introduced sacred and secular African rhythms and songs into Cuban popular culture. In the late 19th century, masked Afrocuban male dancers appeared in eye-catching costumes as diablitos and íremes (African spirits) in Kings’ Day celebrations. Diablitos and íremes were associated with the Abakuá, secret male societies whose ceremonies featured drumming and singing derived from West African tribal traditions.59
Spanish colonial authorities allowed enslaved Africans in Cuba to form cabildos de nación (ethnic associations). The cabildos preserved African cultures and religious practices. Traditional forms of dance and music were passed from generation to generation. Robin Moore, a historian of Cuban music, writes, “Africans and their descendants organized and directed these black societies, whose members came from different ethnic regions.” The first Africans were brought to Cuba as slaves in 1513. By the time slavery was abolished in 1886, 780,000 Africans had been brought to Cuba. From 1817 until 1841, slaves represented more than 40 percent of the island’s total population.60
According to Cuban ethnomusicologist Fernando Ortiz, Cuban music is the offspring of the “love affair” between melodias and stringed instruments from Spain and polyrhythms and drums from Africa. In the 1940s, a blind tres player, Arsenio Rodriguez, revolutionized Cuban music. Rodríguez, popularly known as el ciego maravilloso (marvelous blind man), was also a band leader and composer. The tres is a guitar-like instrument with three sets of double strings.
Rodriguez transformed Cuban music when he created the conjunto (ensemble) to give his musicians a greater range of expression. He expanded the Cuban musical format of the traditional seven-member son band by featuring three trumpets, instead of one, and adding a conga drum and a piano. Son is the basic format of Cuban music. Rodriguez created guaguancos and other popular AfroCuban styles by integrating elements of African music into son. As a boy in rural Cuba, Rodriguez grew up surrounded by African derived culture, from Palo Monte and Santeria religious rituals to Abakua drumming and dancing ceremonies. He learned about Africa culture from his maternal grandfather, who was brought from the Congo to Cuba as a slave in the late 19th century.
Rodriguez was a pioneer of the mambo, one of Cuba’s most distinctive rhythms. The mambo is a popular dance music characterized by contratiempo (off-beat accentuation or syncopation).61 Rodriguez’s mambo evolved out of his experiments with jazz-like improvisations in the montuno, or last movement of a son. Rodriguez would shout “Diablo” at the start of the mambo. The horns would play a catchy, intense repeating rhythmic pattern, interwoven with multiple melodic lines and cross rhythms, gathering in intensity until climaxing in musical paroxysm.
Rodriguez said, “The word mambo is Africa, or the Congo dialect.” The chants of Palo Monte priests are called mambos in Cuba. Ned Sublette, a historian of Cuban music, observes, “If there is such a thing as a magic word, the best example I can think of, is mambo.” North American tourists were drawn to Cuba, enchanted by the mambo. The mambo also sparked a dance craze in the United States.62 Beyond the enchantment of Havana’s nightlife, however, Cubans were growing dissatisfied with the corruption and violence of the island’s political life.
Eddy Chibás continued his hard-hitting commentary on President Carlos Prío and other Auténtico leaders for their corruption and flagging commitment to political reform in his radio commentaries and speeches in the Senate. Chibás had come in third in the 1948 presidential elections as the candidate of the newly formed Partido del Pueblo Cubano-Ortodoxo (Cuban People’s Party-Orthodox), known as the “Ortodoxos.” The Ortodoxos were committed to the politics of the revolution of 1933.
Chibás was considered likely to run for president in the 1952 elections as the “conscience” of Cuban politics. But he made a fateful misstep in 1951, when he accused Minister of Education Aureliano Sánchez Arango of misusing ministry funds. This time he did not have credible evidence to back up his charges.
On August 5, 1951, when Havana residents tuned into Chibás’s radio show on CMQ, Chibás implored his listeners to “take a broom, and sweep away the thieves in the government.” And then he pulled out a handgun and blurted out, “Forward! People of Cuba, good-bye. This is my last call.” He then shot himself in the stomach.
Fidel Castro, a young lawyer and founding member of the Ortodoxos, rushed to the CMQ studio. Castro drove the gravely wounded Chibás to the hospital, and remained by Chibás’s bedside until he died, eleven days later.
On August 16, a crowd of 200,000 to 300,000 people escorted Chibás’s body in a funeral procession to Havana’s Cemeterio de Cristóbal Colón for burial. A period of national mourning followed.63 The suicide of Eddy Chibás marked a low point in Cuban political life. What Cubans did not know was that Cuban politics was about to reach a new low with the return of Fulgencio Batista to power.