Latin America in Translation/en Traducción/em Tradução

Drug Trafficking, Smuggling, and Gambling in Cuba from the 1920s to the Revolution

Eduardo Sáenz Rovner, Eduardo S?enz Rovner, Russ Davidson, Russ Davidson

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780807888582
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

A comprehensive history of crime and corruption in Cuba, The Cuban Connection challenges the common view that widespread poverty and geographic proximity to the United States were the prime reasons for soaring rates of drug trafficking, smuggling, gambling, and prostitution in the tumultuous decades preceding the Cuban revolution. Eduardo Saenz Rovner argues that Cuba's historically well-established integration into international migration, commerce, and transportation networks combined with political instability and rampant official corruption to help lay the foundation for the development of organized crime structures powerful enough to affect Cuba's domestic and foreign politics and its very identity as a nation. Saenz traces the routes taken around the world by traffickers and smugglers. After Cuba, the most important player in this story is the United States. The involvement of gangsters and corrupt U.S. officials and businessmen enabled prohibited substances to reach a strong market in the United States, from rum running during Prohibition to increased demand for narcotics during the Cold War. Originally published in Colombia in 2005, this first English-language edition has been revised and updated by the author.

Chapter 1

U.S. Prohibition and Smuggling from Cuba

In 1914, the U.S. Congress received a flood of petitions, signed by 6 million people, urging it to ban alcoholic beverages.¹ Six years later, a constitutional amendment prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages across the United States went into effect. With these actions, the era of Prohibition had arrived in the United States; it lasted for nearly a decade and a half.

Yet civic and religious campaigns against alcohol consumption were hardly new to the country. They had flared sporadically since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Protestant ministers began to preach against the practice of imbibing liquor. The first national group to take up the call was the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.² Workers and labor leaders alike also condemned the consumption of alcohol when it was carried to the extreme. ³ On the state level, Michigan approved an amendment to its constitution in November 1916 that prohibited the sale of liquor, an action that half of the state’s counties had already taken some five years earlier. Prohibition’s early success in Michigan resulted from well-orchestrated campaigns carried out by civic and religious leaders, supported by the region’s major business figures—most notably, Henry Ford. Ford supported Prohibition in the interest of efficiency and profits (alcohol consumption lowered workers’ productivity), and his company featured a department responsible for overseeing workers’ family lives and controlling their drinking habits.⁴ Ford’s crusade against alcohol spread to other groups of business leaders.⁵

The idea of regulating the lives of human beings both at work and at home to create an abstemious, more productive workforce thus gained strength among U.S. business owners during the first decades of the twentieth century. ⁶ As a consequence of the country’s entrance into the First World War, the federal government accrued greater powers, and the nation developed an outlook that emphasized austerity and unleashed feelings against whatever sounded German, including most of the country’s large breweries.⁷ A further source of support for Prohibition came from Big Tobacco. Cigarette manufacturers with well-known brands and national markets found that Prohibition worked to their advantage, since the sale of tobacco and cigarettes manufactured on a local scale by small companies generally took place in bars and saloons.⁸

Michigan’s implementation of Prohibition immediately fueled a very lucrative trade in contraband alcohol from neighboring Ohio.⁹ When Prohibition subsequently went into effect across the United States in January 1920, however, Canada became the principal source of contraband liquor in the United States, and the city of Detroit, strategically located on the border between Michigan and Canada, emerged as the focal point for the illicit trade. The business of smuggling liquor attracted a wide range of participants—entire families; secretaries who crossed the Detroit River between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, every day on their way to work; elements of organized crime, often operating with official complicity. Boats and ferries of every type crossed the river with contraband aboard, and during the winter, when the river froze over, caravans of automobiles made their way across. To transport the contraband liquor, cables were even extended from one bank of the river to the other. Indeed, contraband alcohol and its distribution (including the thousands of illegal distilleries and home stills that sprang up to help serve the trade) trailed only the automobile industry in importance among businesses in Detroit and its environs.¹⁰

Similarly, other entrepreneurs set up plants in the Mexican border cities of Piedras Negras and Ciudad Jua

rez to manufacture whiskey for shipment to the United States. The owners of the Ciudad Jua

rez distillery were in fact natives of Colorado. An island near the Yucata

n Peninsula and the port of Ensenada in Baja California functioned as transit points for shipping liquor to Florida and to the U.S. West Coast, respectively.¹¹ Alcohol was also funneled into the United States through the Bahamas, where it was legally imported from Great Britain.¹²

Although the United States and Canada signed an agreement to clamp down on contraband liquor, the document had little practical effect. U.S. officials wanted a total embargo on the export of alcohol from Canada, but Canadian leaders were not inclined to shut down all distilleries and breweries, particularly in Ottawa, where the industry had become a major pillar of the local economy. Moreover, as the Canadians hastened to point out, Americans comprised the great majority of smugglers.¹³ A group of gangsters of Jewish origin known as the Purple Gang controlled much of the business of importing and distributing Canadian whiskey through Detroit. The gang’s most notorious clients included Al Capone’s crime syndicate in Chicago.¹⁴ Other bands of smugglers, generally of immigrant origin, also operated out of Canada, exporting both liquor that was legally produced and liquor that came out of home stills to buyers and markets in New York and Chicago.¹⁵ In time, the violation of the law of Prohibition reached such proportions in the United States that journalist and social critic H. L. Mencken commented, “The business of evading [Prohibition] and making a mock of it has ceased to wear any aspects of crime, and has become a kind of national sport.”¹⁶

Prohibition also meant that bartenders and other workers in U.S. saloons and taverns abruptly found themselves unemployed, and many consequently sought work in Havana, where the number of bars was growing prodigiously. Furthermore, several North American liquor manufacturers responded to the ban by shifting operations and opening plants—completely legal—in Cuba.¹⁷ Entrepreneurs in other fields also seized opportunities to open businesses on the island. For example, John Bowman, a leading New York-based hotelier, purchased Havana’s Hotel Sevilla just a few months after Prohibition went into force.¹⁸

Thus aided by Prohibition and its ripple effects, Cuba evolved into a country in which North Americans could act freely and openly, liberated from the moral pieties of their own society.¹⁹ As historian Louis A. Pérez has observed, “It was not merely the availability of alcoholic beverages. . . . The opportunity to drink carried a subtext of individual freedom and indulgence.” Moreover, “Cuba was constructed intrinsically as a place to flaunt conventions, to indulge unabashedly . . . in bars and brothels, at the racetrack and the roulette table, to experiment with forbidden alcohol, drugs, and sex.”²⁰ Two other authors have made a similar point: by the 1920s, “Cuba had become a haven for revelers who escaped U.S. prohibitions against alcohol, horseracing, boxing, gambling and other indulgences. Cuba was freedom personified, close enough for easy access, yet beyond the reach of North American authority.”²¹ When their teams traveled to Cuba during the winter, American Major League baseball players frequently had difficulty playing because they had overindulged in alcoholic beverages the night before.²²

Yet Havana was not the world’s only city where the norms and restrictions imposed by Western bourgeois society were routinely violated. Since the early years of the twentieth century, London’s West End had enjoyed a similar status. With its mixture of theaters, nightclubs, and other attractions, the district lured a variety of types—top-hatted aristocrats, tricksters and petty criminals, professional artists of both sexes, all of them unhampered by either the strict schedules of the working world or the constraints of Victorian morality and thus free in their own way to experiment with every type of enticement, including drugs.²³ Buenos Aires, too, featured a West End-like district whose racy offerings included, in the words of one visitor, “cinematographic shows ... which for indecency cannot be outdone either in Port Said or Havana.”²⁴ Buenos Aires’s brothels and nightclubs also offered their patrons drugs: indeed, the consumption of illegal drugs in Argentina during the first decades of the twentieth century was reflected in the dialogue of stage plays and in the lyrics of the tango Tiempos viejos (“Do you recall, brother, what times those were? . . . Nothing was known of cocaine or morphine”).²⁵

Cuban writer Fernando Ortiz described early-twentieth-century Havana as a “port—then the busiest and best-known in the New World—where Spain’s fleets and navy were docked for months at a time, giving rise to the corrupt and criminal environment that typifies all of the world’s great ports, through which parade a robust and steady collection of cosmopolites and adventure seekers.”²⁶ Building on this heritage, Prohibition helped to solidify Havana as one of the brightest stars in the world’s firmament of vice, at least in the eyes of visiting Americans.

North American visitors to the island learned to sample the delights not only of Cuban rum but also of a wide variety of European liqueurs and spirits that were advertised in a series of English-language publications produced for the North American tourist trade.²⁷ Not surprisingly, many tourists jumped at the opportunity to acquire all kinds of liquor, intending to smuggle it back into the United States. U.S. customs agents, fully aware of this practice, searched all passengers returning from cruises for contraband. Those caught not only lost the illicit liquor but were slapped with fines.²⁸ The advent of air travel opened another channel for transporting contraband. In the 1920s, Areomarine West Indies Airways began to fly passengers from New York to Havana, with stops in New Jersey, South Carolina, Miami, and Key West; the return trip became known as the Hi-Ball Express, since many passengers brought bootleg liquor.²⁹

Pan American Airways began operations in October 1927 with a flight that carried mail between Key West and Havana.³⁰ A year later, the airline initiated its Miami-Havana passenger flights, and for a number of years, Havana remained the most popular foreign destination for U.S. passengers.³¹ In 1928, Pan American inaugurated a flight between Havana and Puerto Rico, with stopovers in the Cuban cities of Camagüey and Santiago. The 1920s also saw impressive growth in the amount of maritime traffic between the United States and Cuba. A score of passenger ships plied weekly between U.S. ports and Havana, while a considerable number of automobile travelers took ferries between Key West and Havana. During the winter months, five trains made daily runs from Chicago to New Orleans, where travelers embarked on ships for Havana; another rail route connected Chicago and St. Louis with Key West.³²

Throughout the twentieth century, Cuban officials of varying ideological orientations actively promoted tourism, which they saw as potentially the country’s second-most-lucrative source of revenue after sugar. During the early part of the century, Havana was spruced up and modernized not only to make life more comfortable for its residents but also to increase its appeal for the North American tourist trade. The government spent significant sums of money between 1907 and 1919 to improve and upgrade highways, bridges, ports, city streets, and sewer systems throughout Cuba, and the end of the First World War helped ignite a construction boom in Havana.³³ This program built on efforts begun just after the Spanish-American War, when the American occupation force, as much to further North American interests as to help Cubans, expanded the network of paved roads and improved the telephone and public health services.³⁴ In short, Havana’s evolution into a prime tourist spot resulted from the interplay of several factors: geographic proximity to the U.S. mainland, the alternative that it provided to a society constrained by Prohibition, and the city’s rapid modernization and beautification, which took place within the broader framework of solid islandwide economic growth.

IN MID-DECEMBER 1924, the U.S. consul general in Havana reported that the city “has become the main base for smuggling operations. . . . Cuba is the base not only for contraband alcohol but for drug trafficking and the mo...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• CONNECTION
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - U.S. Prohibition and Smuggling from Cuba
• Chapterr 2 - Drug Trafficking and Political Anarchy during the 1930s
• Chapter 3 - The Chinese and Opium Consumption in Cuba
• Chapter 4 - Corruption and Drug Trafficking in Cuba during the Second World War ...
• Chapter 5 - Lucky Luciano in Cuba
• Chapter 6 - The Prío Socarrás Government and Drug Trafficking
• Chapter 7 - Gambling in Cuba
• Chapter 8 - The Andean Connection
• Chapter 9 - Contacts in France
• Chapter 10 - The Batista Dictatorship and Drug Trafficking
• Chapter 11 - Revolution
• Chapter 12 - The Diplomacy of Drug Trafficking at the Beginning of the Revolution
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography