CHAPTER 19:
CUBA COOLS AS COLD WAR HOT SPOT
Chairman Nikita Khrushchev loved his villa at Cape Pitsunda on the Black Sea. The retreat in the foothills of the Caucasian Mountains was one of the few places where the hyperactive Khrushchev could relax. He enjoyed strolling along paths through a pine forest to the sea, and back again, losing himself in the natural beauty of his surroundings while his thoughts worked through complex problems of state.
On October 12, 1964, Khrushchev was at Cape Pitsunda, walking with Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan, when his special high-frequency telephone rang, piercing the evening tranquility. Leonid Brezhnev, whom Khrushchev had just appointed deputy leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), was on the line from Moscow. Brezhnev told Khrushchev that he was needed in Moscow to attend to urgent business. The Presidium of the Council of Ministers of the CPSU would meet the next day to discuss agricultural policy. An annoyed Khrushchev replied that the meeting could wait; he was on vacation.
Brezhnev insisted that Khrushchev return to Moscow. The next morning Khrushchev flew back to the capital. Chairman Khrushchev called a special session of the Presidium to order on October 13. Khrushchev, seated at the end of a long conference table, asked what was on the agenda. He was taken aback when Brezhnev shot back that he, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, was the only item on the agenda: “Your behavior is incomprehensible.” Brezhnev asserted that Khrushchev made decisions “unilaterally, ignoring the Presidium.”
Gennedy Voronov, the Presidium’s expert on agriculture stated, “You have no friends here.” Voronov added, “It’s time to send Comrade Khrushchev into retirement.” Khrushchev’s controversial agricultural policies had, in fact, failed. Former KGB Chief Aleksandr Shelepin joined the chorus, charging that Khrushchev’s foreign policy had been “hasty, erratic and inclined to intrigues.” He criticized Khrushchev’s handling of the dangerous clashes with the United States over Berlin, and said that he had “juggled the fate of the world” during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962.
Mikoyan was also critical of Khrushchev’s leadership, citing his “explosiveness” and “irritability.” But Mikoyan, who had opposed deploying Soviet missiles to Cuba, noted that the Presidium had approved Khrushchev’s Cuba missile plan without dissent. Neither the KGB nor the Soviet military had pointed out the likelihood that U.S. intelligence would detect the missiles before they were operational.
Mikoyan proposed a more limited move, removing Khrushchev from one of his several leadership posts, first secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU. But he said Khrushchev should be allowed to continue as chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Presidium. By the end of the meeting, Presidium member Pyotr Shelest recalled that Khrushchev looked “crushed, isolated, powerless.” Khrushchev biographer William Taubman writes, “With few exceptions, all present were Khrushchev’s protégés, promoted by him to high office, and veterans of past battles in which they had backed him against his enemies. Yet, none of them, except for Mikoyan, was about to say a word in his defense.”
That night Khrushchev telephoned Mikoyan. “I’m old and tired,” said Khrushchev, who had recently turned seventy. “Let them cope by themselves. I’ve done the main thing. Could anyone have dreamed of telling Stalin that he didn’t suit us anymore and suggested he retire. Not even a wet spot would have remained where we had been standing. The fear is gone, and we can talk as equals. That’s my contribution. I won’t put up a fight.”
The next day the Presidium voted unanimously for Khrushchev’s resignation. Khrushchev complied. Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev as party leader, Aleksei Kosygin took over as premier, and Nikolai Podgorny became the new chairman of the Presidium’s council of ministers. In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, the Kremlin wanted to lower the temperature of its Cold War dispute with the United States. The Kremlin believed that Brezhnev would be a less confrontational leader than Khrushchev.752
Dmitri Polyanski spoke about the demoralizing effect of the Cuban missile crisis on the Soviet Union. “Not having any other way out, we had to accept every demand and condition dictated by the U.S., giving so far as permitting U.S. airplanes to inspect our ships,” Polyanski asserted. “This incident damaged the international prestige of our government, our party, our armed forces, while at the same time helping to raise the authority of the United States.”753
In the words of Fedor Burlatsky, the missile crisis was a “flash of lightning,” which illuminated the unfavorable nuclear balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union. Dobrynin assessed the Cold War’s strategic balance of power by comparing the number of warheads in the atomic arsenals of each superpower. In October 1962 Dobrynin wrote, “The Soviet Union had 300 nuclear warheads against the Americans’ 5,000.”
Former CIA and Department of State analyst Raymond Garthoff used a different metric to compare the relative intercontinental missile strength of the Cold War superpowers: “[B]y October 31st we had 172 operational ICBMs on alert—on station—and 144 Polaris missiles at sea on station.” The United States also had 1,450 intercontinental bombers on alert status in late October 1962. The Soviet Union had a total of forty-four operational ICBM launchers.754
In the wake of the missile crisis, the Kremlin launched a crash program to build up the USSR’s strategic nuclear forces, according to an Office of the Secretary of Defense history of the nuclear arms race by scholars Ernest May, John Steinbrunner, and Thomas Wolfe. “[A] ‘never again’ mood seems to have translated into a resolve to catch up to the United States in strategic power by one means or another.” By the time the Cold War superpowers signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) in 1972, the Soviet Union had more ICBMs and submarine-launched ballistic missiles than the United States—1,967 strategic missiles compared to a total of 1,710 missiles in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.755
Nuclear weapons were a paradox of the Cold War. They were the cornerstone of the U.S. and Soviet military strategies in the Cold War: A strategic nuclear capacity was considered the guarantor of national security and measure of power in international affairs. However, according to the CIA’s Office of National Estimates (ONE), nuclear weapons became less valuable as instruments of military power able to achieve specific foreign policy objectives as the size and destructiveness of the two superpowers’ arsenals grew. Strategists in Washington and Moscow eventually concluded that nuclear war would be an irrational act of mutual national suicide.756
Three decades later, Dobrynin identified the Cuban missile crisis as a turning point in the Cold War. “I cannot over emphasize the vast significance of the Cuban crisis for subsequent development of Soviet-American relations,” he wrote in his memoir. “Those days revealed the mortal danger of direct armed confrontation of the two great powers, a confrontation headed off on the brink of war thanks to both sides’ timely and agonizing realization of the disastrous consequences.”757
According to McGeorge Bundy, U.S. policymakers learned a valuable strategic lesson from the missile crisis, and took a “more cautious” approach to Cold War crises afterwards.758 Moreover, with the exits of Kennedy and Khrushchev from the world stage, Cuba’s importance as a Cold War hotspot was diminished. Neither President Lyndon Johnson nor Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had the same personal stake in Cuba as Kennedy and Khrushchev did. Neither were willing to risk another Cold War crisis over Cuba.759
The CIA’s Special Affairs Staff (SAS) made good on the commitment it made to Rolando Cubela (AMLASH) in Paris in November 1963. The special weapons Cubela requested were covertly delivered to the north coast of Pinar del Rio, Cuba in January and March 1964, and included, according to CIA Inspector General J.S. Earman, “among other things, two each FAL automatic rifles with five magazines per weapon.”760 The CIA continued to support Cubela by using Manuel Artime as a go-between, according to Cubela’s CIA case officer Nestor Sánchez. The CIA nudged Artime and Cubela to join forces. “Artime needed a man inside and Cubela wanted a silenced weapon, which CIA was unwilling to furnish to him directly,” wrote Earman. “By putting the two together, Artime might get his man inside Cuba and Cubela might get his silenced weapon.”
Artime and Cubela met twice in December 1964 and again in February 1965 in Madrid. According to the CIA, Artime had three packages of “special items,” including a pistol with a silencer and an FAL rifle, “made up by his technical people and delivered them in Madrid. Cubela seemed satisfied.” According to the CIA plan, Cubela would assassinate Castro. Cubela claimed to have the support of his Directorio Revolucionario comrades in the Cuban government and July 26th Movement dissidents led by Comandante Efigenio Ameijeiras. In the chaos following the assassination of Castro, Artime’s Movimiento de Recuperación Revolucionario (MRR) (Movement for the Recovery of the Revolution) would invade Cuba to drive the revolution from power, a January 1965 CIA memorandum stated.
From the start, however, Cubela distrusted Artime.761 In June 1965, CIA headquarters abruptly terminated the joint Artime-Cubela operation. According to Richard Helms biographer Thomas Powers, Cubela had been compromised. “That June the CIA learned (from listening devices, among other sources) that Cubela had been talking freely about his plans to kill Castro during one of his frequent trips to Europe,” Powers writes.
The FBI had already picked up information about the CIA’s contacts with Cubela. A Church Committee report stated, “In October 1963 the FBI had received a report that the CIA was meeting with AMLASH. That report contained information which indicates that the FBI informant knew the date and location of one of those meetings.” The panel added, “In July 1964, the informant gave the FBI additional details about the AMLASH operation, including the fact that the operation had involved assassination plotting.”762
In the meantime, Cuban State Security arrested Cubela and Comandante Ramón Guin Díaz in Havana on March 1, 1966. Cubela was charged with plotting with Manuel Artime to assassinate Fidel Castro and Guin, a former member of the Directorio Revolucionario, with spying for the CIA and having knowledge of the plotting to assassinate Castro. Five other DR members were also arrested.
Juan Felaifel was the chief prosecution witness. Felaifel, a Cuban counterintelligence agent, was under cover in the Cuban exile movement in Miami, where he learned about Artime’s conspiracy with Cubela. Felaifel testified that an informant told him a top Artime lieutenant had obtained and tested a FAL rifle with a telescopic sight for delivery to Cubela. His source was the MRR chief of intelligence.763
According to Operation AMTRUNK records, the CIA recruited Guin as an “internal asset” in August 1963. JMWAVE Chief of Station Theodore Shackley wrote in a July 1964 memorandum, “Subject’s [Guin’s] primary task is to recruit high-level personnel in the rebel Army for the purpose of organizing a conspiracy against the Castro government… Subject works primarily within a close-knit, select group of friends most of whom are well-placed in the government and military.”
The Cuban prosecutor requested the death sentence for Cubela, Guin, and their collaborators Alberto Blanco, and José González Gallareta. Cubela’s plotting with the CIA to assassinate Castro was not mentioned during the trial. At the last minute, Castro wrote a letter to the prosecutor. “In this case, despite its extreme gravity, it is not necessary to ask for the most severe sanctions,” Castro said. On March 14, Cubela and Guin were sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. Blanco and Gallareta were given twenty-year prison terms.764
As investigators in Havana uncovered the Artime-Cubela conspiracy, a CIA investigator puzzled over the meaning of the links he found between Cubela and Trafficante.
CIA Inspector General J. S. Earman was puzzled by his discovery of “name links” between Rolando Cubela and Santo Trafficante. One of the name links was Juan Orta. “An asset of the Miami Station reported that Rolando Cubela and Juan Orta wanted to defect and needed help in escaping.” CIA headquarters “expressed interest” in helping Cubela and Orta get out of Cuba in 1961. A CIA plan to exfiltrate Cubela and Orta was developed but never implemented.
Another name link was Rafael Garcia Bongo, a Havana attorney, who contacted the CIA Station in Madrid on March 15, 1965. “[Bongo] claimed to be in contact with a group of Cuban military leaders who were planning to eliminate Castro and take over the government,” a CIA report stated. “It quickly became clear that he was referring to Cubela.”
Bongo also played up his associations with the Mafia gamblers. He told the CIA that his legal clients included the Capri Hotel and Casino and Santo Trafficante, whom he had represented when the gangster was detained at Triscornia in 1959. When he moved to Miami seven years later, he developed a “father-son relationship” with Trafficante, according to an unnamed U.S. law-enforcement officer. Trafficante later told the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) that he was “sure” that Cubela knew Bongo.
Cubela’s ties to Orta and Bongo caused Earman to question whether Cubela was an “asset” of the Mafia gamblers. “If Cubela was in fact one of the gangster’s assets inside Cuba, that fact was unknown to either the CIA officers running the gangster episodes or to those handling Cubela.” In January 1959, the FBI had reported an incident in Havana involving Cubela and Trafficante, but did not understand what was going on. The Legal Attache at the U.S. Embassy wrote, “A few days after the overthrow of the Batista government, Trafficante had been picked up by the Directorio Revolucionario… held for a couple of hours and then released.” Trafficante later explained the incident to the HSCA. The DR did not take him into custody. Trafficante said that he “met” with Cubela for a discussion. “I never believed he was a communist,” he stated. “I always believed sooner or later he would react against Castro.” In a nutshell, Cubela and Trafficante not only knew each other, but Trafficante considered Cubela a potential ally.765
The CIA’s evaluations of Cubela were less than glowing. A September 1963 cable asserted, “AMLASH [Cubela] cocky totally spoiled brat who will always be a control problem.” Another CIA memorandum stated, “He appears capable of rash, thoughtless, violent action under the stress of provocation, tense situations, or frustration.”766
But the CIA had run out of realistic options to assassinate Castro. SAS Chief Desmond FitzGerald conceded as much to his assistant Sam Halpern in fall 1963, when he said, “Cubela is the only guy who has access [to Castro] and is willing to try—these guys don’t come often.” Halpern recalled, “Des felt it was a long shot, but it might work. We were desperate.” FitzGerald told Halpern that he was under relentless pressure from the Kennedy brothers to overthrow the Cuban revolution.767
In the mid-1960s, the Johnson Administration wound down the covert U. S. war against Cuba. Johnson terminated CIA-controlled covert operations in April 1964, and by the mid-1960s, Antonio Varona was no longer playing a major role in the Cuban exile movement. A 1965 FBI report stated, “Varona occasionally visits the office of Rescate, the anti-Castro organization he heads in New York. However, for all practical purposes, he has all but abandoned political activity…” Varona took a part-time job as “an automobile salesman” at Carey Chevrolet in Union City, New Jersey in 1964. A memorandum in his CIA security file reports that he used his son-in-law to help Juan Orta, who was living in Mexico City, return to Miami. Orta was the North American gamblers’ “inside man” in the first phase of the CIA-Mafia conspiracy to poison Castro.768
U.S. financial support for the autonomous operations of Manuel Artime and Manuel Ray was cut off in 1964–1965. Instead, Johnson pursued what the CIA called a policy of “low risk and low return.” JMWAVE Chief Theodore Shackley noted the changed attitude toward Cuba. “There was less enthusiasm after Johnson became president,” Shackley recalled. The CIA still supported a few Cuban exile action groups, but on a much smaller scale than before. “We were still putting out plans but not getting agreement for paramilitary activity. As a result, we were having trouble keeping the troops motivated. We never got any specific orders to shut down. We started cutting back….”769
Wealthy Cuban exiles and Mafia gamblers continued to fund Cuban commando operations against Cuba. But the Cuban counterrevolution in exile suffered major defeats in the mid-1960s when Eloy Menoyo Gutiérrez and Antonio Cuesta, two of its most daring commando commanders, were captured leading raids against Cuba. On December 28, 1964, Menoyo and his three-man Second National Front of Escambray (SNFE) team landed in Cuba on a reconnaissance mission, while the rest of his twenty-member guerrilla force remained in the Dominican Republic. Menoyo had received intelligence that the population around Baracoa, on the north coast of Oriente, was ready to rise up in arms against the revolution. Menoyo’s intelligence turned out to be wrong. He was captured on January 23, 1965.
“I found the peasants totally hostile,” Menoyo told Cuban Department of State Security interrogators. “I had to go to many houses… and as soon as we left, they reported that we were in the area to the [Cuban] armed forces, and the armed forces pursued us without let up, keeping us constantly in a state of flight avoiding clashes, until we were surrounded and captured…” Menoyo’s capture and interrogation, broadcast on Cuban radio and television, was a demoralizing setback for the Cuban counterrevolution, according to National Security Council (NSC) staff officer Gordon Chase.
“John Crimmins commented that this is a bad thing. It will be a blow to anti-Castro morale in Cuba,” Chase wrote in a January 1965 memorandum to National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. “Also it shows how efficient the Cuban government is. Menoyo is an old experienced guerrilla fighter who in the past has impressed Crimmins with his intelligence, security and carefulness.” Crimmins was Deputy Director of the Office of Caribbean and Mexican Affairs in the Department of State.
A CIA cable stated that Carlos Prío and the Dominican Republic supported Menoyo’s operations. Prío was making payments of $1,000 a month to the SNFE, who trained at a military camp in the Dominican Republic with the blessing of President Donald Reid Cabral. Colonel Juan Folch, Dominican air force liaison with the SNFE, provided Menoyo with 4,000 hand grenades and 15,000 rounds of ammunition. Dominican Army General Atila Luna gave Menoyo an automatic rifle with a telescopic sight. The CIA noted that Prío also provided $1,000-a-month subsidies to Alpha 66 and Comandos L. “Prío believes that these [three] action groups are the only ones who will be able to do anything effective against Castro,” the CIA Information Report stated. “He feels that the money will be spent to its best advantage by these groups.”770
On May 29, 1966, Cuban exiles suffered another demoralizing setback. An operation led by Comandos L’s Tony Cuesta turned into a disaster off the coast of Miramar. The exile commandos fired rockets at the Comodoro Hotel and the Yacht Club of Miramar. The attack was designed to divert Cuban security forces from the infiltration of two assassins in a rubber raft to nearby Havana.
The exile commandos were overwhelmed by Cuban coastal patrol boats in a fierce fire fight. Herminio Díaz García and three other exiles were killed in the fighting. Cuesta tried unsuccessfully to kill himself rather than be taken prisoner. He set off a grenade, badly injuring his hand and lower arm, and blinding himself. Two other crew members were reported missing and presumably drowned.
Comandos L ‘s Ramón Font described the operation to the FBI: “The purpose of the mission was to infiltrate Herminio Díaz García and Armando Romero into Cuba for an assassination attempt against Fidel Castro Ruíz,” an FBI report stated. The mission was a joint project of Comandos L, the Movimiento Revolucionario 30 de Noviembre (November 30th Revolutionary Movement), and the Representación Cubana en el Exilio (RECE) (Cuban Representation in Exile).
The FBI reported, “The mission was financed 80% by RECE and 20% by the 30th of November Revolutionary Movement, which furnished certain military equipment and explosives.” According to a 1966 CIA memorandum, José “Pepin” Bosch, the head of Bacardi Rum was a major financial supporter of RECE. Bosch, who went into exile in 1960 when the Cuban revolution nationalized Bacardi, became a prominent member of the Cuban exile community in Florida. The CIA also provided RECE with an undisclosed amount of “financial support.”
When Herminio Díaz García entered the United States in 1963, he told his CIA debriefing officer “he wanted to assassinate Castro.” Three years later, the CIA learned that Díaz was “involved in a plan by a Cuban émigré group to infiltrate Cuba for the purpose of assassinating Castro.” He worked with the November 30th Revolutionary Movement in 1962, a group that, as we have seen, the CIA had an “interest” in and was supported by Roberto “Chiri” Mendoza. From 1959 until 1963, Díaz was chief of security at the Hotel Riviera in Havana. Before that, he was a member of the pro-Batista trade union Sindicato Gastronómico. In Cuba, Díaz was a pistolero in the Revolutionary Insurrectional Union (UIR), which then Labor Minister Carlos Prío used to drive leftists out of Cuban trade unions in the 1940s. He was reputed to have assassinated a man from a rival Cuban action group in Mexico in 1948.771
Meanwhile, Alpha 66 leader Antonio Veciana pulled back from the front lines of the fight to overthrow the revolution. A CIA cable stated: “Veciana reptd resigned from alliance 6/1/65.” By the mid-1960s, the Cuban revolution had overcome the existential threat to its survival, according to Thomas L. Hughes, director of the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). “The survival of Castro’s revolution over the foreseeable future seems assured,” Hughes wrote in an August 1965 memorandum to Secretary of State Dean Rusk. “Economic collapse is no longer a threat, and continuing Soviet economic support seems likely. Internal revolts aided by exile groups are highly improbable.”772
In June 1968, Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) 85-68 came to a similar conclusion about the staying power of the Cuban revolution. “His regime offered the poorer people a sense of personal dignity and a chance to participate in the making of a new revolutionary society…” the SNIE stated. “Though drastic changes in the distribution of personal income deprived the upper and middle classes of their luxuries as well as privileged status, the poorer classes benefitted from such things as improved housing and diet, and a significant expansion of education and medical care.”
Castro himself remained personally popular. “Castro has displayed impressive political instincts in keeping a firm hold on power. He has regularly briefed the Cuban people on the objectives of the Revolution, and on its failures as well as successes,” SNIE 85-68 reported. “So far he has succeeded in focusing discontent with internal progress on external causes, and institutionalizing the belief that Cubans are a beleaguered people fighting against malevolent forces.”
Fidel Castro unified the island in defense of the revolution in 1959 by appealing to Cuban nationalism. He defined the revolution as the fulfillment of José Martí’s dream of “Cuba libre,” while dismissing its opponents as instruments of the United States. His explanations resonated politically, given the external character of the counterrevolution and the U.S. obsession with the return to the status quo ante in Cuba. In effect, the Cuban counterrevolution migrated into exile. According to SNIE 85-68, by the mid-1960s, 400,000 Cubans, or five to six percent of the population of Cuba, had left for the United States.
On the island, Castro isolated opponents of the revolution. Cuban security forces “discouraged” the growth of the counterrevolution inside Cuba, as the SNIE put it, by “jailing perhaps 10,000 to 20,000” Cuban dissidents. Still, opposition to the Cuban revolution did not disappear. Sabotage raids by Cuban exile action groups continued and, so too, did attempts to assassinate Castro in the coming years and decades. But the survival of the revolution would not be threatened as it was in the first few years after January 1, 1959.773 By the mid-1960s, the Cuban counterrevolution had reached a dead end in Cuba, but gangsterismo had taken root in the United States.
When he returned to the United States from Cuba in 1959, Santo Trafficante became the best-connected Mafioso in Florida, playing a bigger role in the Trafficante family’s underworld operations in his hometown Tampa than he did during his years in Cuba. But he also spent an increasing amount of time, three or four days a week, in Miami, where he had a home not far from Biscayne Bay. According to a Dade County Organized Crime Bureau report, “He uses public telephone booths to make telephone calls. Usually he has important meetings in the lobbies of the major hotels in Miami and Miami Beach.”
In Miami, Trafficante worked closely with his Cuban gangster associates Evarista García Vidal and Raúl González Jerez in bolita operations and heroin trafficking. A Dade Country Organized Crime Bureau memorandum stated, “Santo Trafficante… is alleged to control the lottery and narcotics rackets in most of Florida, especially within the Latin American element.” Trafficante also maintained close relationships with major Mafia families in the United States. A Dade County Organized Crime Bureau “information sheet” reported, “Intelligence sources confirm Trafficante’s continuing association with the family heads and leading members of all Cosa Nostra families.”
Among Trafficante’s closest associates in Miami were veterans of gangsterismo in Cuba: Norman Rothman, Dino Cellini, Charles Tourine, Rafael “Macho” Gener, and Santiago Rey.774 Gangsterismo was in full flower in the 1960s. Frank Sinatra, whose rise to stardom was assisted by the Mafia, performed annually at the Fontainebleau Hotel, which had become a symbol of post–World War II affluence and luxury. Sam Giancana, Johnny Rosselli, Santo Trafficante, and Joe Fischetti were often in the audience.
One evening in mid-March 1961, Sinatra joined his gangster pals at the Fontainebleau’s Boom Boom Room bar for a drink. Ostensibly Giancana, Rosselli, and Trafficante were in Miami Beach for Sinatra’s opening and the Floyd Patterson–Ingemar Johansson heavyweight boxing championship fight. Sinatra did not know that they would also meet with CIA case officer Jim O’Connell to take the next step in the CIA-Mafia plan to assassinate Fidel Castro. At the Fontainebleau, O’Connell gave Rosselli the botulinum capsules formulated by the CIA to poison Castro.
The FBI monitored Sinatra’s activities in Miami. He was often observed dining with Joe Fischetti and Trafficante. The FBI also reported, “[T]here was to be an important meeting of hoodlums in the Miami area sometime between 2/17/67 and 2/24/67, apparently coinciding with a scheduled appearance of Sinatra at the Fontainebleau Hotel.” In March 1967, Sinatra was spotted with Trafficante at the Vizcaya Restaurant in Miami Beach. An FBI report stated, “Sinatra was wearing a dark hat and dark glasses so he would not be recognized.” Two days later, Trafficante and Sinatra attended a private party at the home of Joe Fischetti on Keystone Point. “Trafficante made at least two visits to the Fontainebleau Hotel… during the Sinatra performances.”
Joe Fischetti, and his brothers Charlie and Rocco, had introduced Sinatra to the Mafia gambling colony in Cuba in December 1946, inviting him to accompany them to a Mafia conference in Havana at the Hotel Nacional, where Sinatra sang for Godfather Charles “Lucky” Luciano. The Fischettis were first cousins of the notorious gangster Al Capone with gambling interests in Chicago and Miami. Meyer Lansky’s associate Joseph “Doc” Stacher also recalled Sinatra’s appearance at the Hotel Nacional. “Frankie flew into Havana with the Fischettis, with whom he was quite friendly…” Stacher stated. “The Italians among us were very proud of Frank. They always told me they had spent a lot of money helping him in his career, ever since he was with Tommy Dorsey’s band. Lucky Luciano was very fond of Sinatra’s singing.”775
Two decades later, gangsterismo was flourishing in exile. Corrupt Cuban politicians collaborated with the Mafia gamblers in Miami as they had in Havana from the 1930s through the 1950s. Carlos Prío and his brother Francisco were a case in point. In the mid-1940s in Havana, the reputation of Carlos Prío as a political reformer was badly tarnished by Senator Eddy Chibás’s exposure of Prío and his brother Francisco’s ties to the Mafia gamblers. Senator Francisco “Paco” Prío gained notoriety as a public supporter of Lucky Luciano and a cocaine trafficker.
In Miami in the early 1960s, Johnny Rosselli chose close associates of Carlos Prío—Antonio Varona, Juan Orta, and Rafael “Macho” Gener—for important roles in the CIA-Mafia plots to assassinate Castro. Carlos also provided funds to Cuban exile action groups for sabotage operations in Cuba from 1959 until the mid-1960s. Paco was more committed to the good life than to politics. But he still hobnobbed with his North American gangster friends, as his brief encounter with Trafficante in the lobby of a Miami bank illustrates.
An August 1964 FBI report described a surreptitious exchange of money between Trafficante and Paco Prío in the First National Bank of Miami. As Trafficante’s Cuban gangster associate Evaristo García watched, Trafficante handed Prío $51,000 in cash. “Trafficante carried the cash in his pocket and that … the money was counted in the presence of all three.”776
From neocolonial Cuba to the Cuban counterrevolution in exile, gangsterismo was ingrained in Cuban politics. The deal struck by Meyer Lansky and Antonio Varona in August 1960 was a defining moment. When the Cuban revolution shut down the Mafia’s gambling colony, the gangsters regrouped with their Autentico and Batistiano allies in the United States. They made themselves invaluable to the Cuban exile movement, sponsoring sabotage operations in Cuba and offering arms and financial services to Cuban exile commando groups. And they squared the circle of gangsterismo in the United States by plotting with the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro. The Mafia was always up-front about what it wanted from its allies in return: support for the gangsters’ return to Cuba, to reopen their casinos, hotels, and nightclubs in post-Castro Cuba.
A question lingers at the end of the narrative arc of gangsterismo. What if the Bay of Pigs operation had been successful? If the CIA-Mafia assassins had killed Castro, and the Brigade 2506 landing at the Bay of Pigs sparked an uprising that toppled the Cuban revolution? Would gangsterismo have returned to post-Castro Cuba? There is no fact-based answer for a counterfactual question. But what we know from CIA and FBI reports is troubling. Both the CIA and the Mafia groomed Antonio Varona, a grizzled veteran of gangsterismo, for leadership in post-Castro Cuba.
Classic Detroit-built cars, like this old Chevy, crowded the streets of Havana in the 1940s and 1950s, as they do today. Photograph by Jack Colhoun, 2001.