Havana Nocturne

by T. J. English

  Presiding over it all like a guajiro Wizard of Oz was El Presidente Batista. For the poor mestizo cane cutter from Banes, it must have seemed like the culmination of an impossible dream. Batista, who had once been turned down for membership at the Havana Yacht Club because of his race, was now the overseer of a fabulous mixed-race social scene. The president did not appear in the casinos and clubs very often, unless it was for a charity such as La liga contra el cáncer. But it was understood that he was the instigator and primary benefactor of the city’s resurgence and, in time, the Tropicana, Club Parisién, Sans Souci, and other fabulous clubs of the era would come to be seen as the flowering of Batistaismo.

  Things were going well in Havana—so well that some began to wonder if the island’s political resistance, which had ebbed and flowed in the years since Batista’s golpe, had finally been squelched. There was still the occasional pipe bomb, or other acts of sabotage against government facilities, but for the most part it appeared as though dissent had been drowned out by the inexorable flow of conga lines and popping of champagne corks. The common perception was that Cuba was now safe from rabble-rousers and revolutionaries. Batista himself had come to this conclusion earlier in the year when, in an unusual display of generosity, he issued a proclamation declaring that there would be a onetime amnesty for political prisoners. On the afternoon of May 15, twenty prisoners walked out of the Isle of Pines prison. Among them were twenty-nine-year-old Fidel Castro and his younger brother, Raúl.

  Newsreel footage was shown in Havana movie theaters of Castro, in a gray suit, walking down the front steps of the prison, his arm raised defiantly in the air. Later, he issued a statement to the press: “As we leave the prison…we proclaim that we shall struggle for [our] ideas even at the price of our existence…Our freedom shall not be feast or rest, but battle and duty for a nation without despotism and misery.” Contrary to the popular appearance of political acquiescence throughout the land, Fidel added, “There is a new faith, a new awakening in the national conscience. To try to drown it will provoke an unprecedented catastrophe…Despots vanish, peoples remain…”

  The amnesty had been brewing for some time. President Batista was initially against the idea, feeling that to release Castro and his cohorts would make his administration appear weak. Public opinion was in favor of amnesty, however, especially after a group of Cuban mothers formed a group called the Relatives’ Amnesty Committee for Political Prisoners. The mothers issued a manifesto entitled “Cuba, Freedom for Your Sons.” Batista was also lobbied hard by the family of Castro’s wife, which had connections high up in his administration.

  The public message behind Batista’s amnesty was simple. With the island’s capital city booming economically and the Havana Mob coalescing as a behind-the-scenes force in Cuban affairs, El Presidente was dealing from a position of strength. Powerful financial institutions, casinos, cabarets, hotels, and a host of ancillary rackets were taking shape. Batista’s grip on the populace appeared to be stronger than ever. Why not appease those who claimed to be enemies of the state by showing that he was not afraid of anyone or anything? What better way was there to demonstrate that the regime was above petty squabbles and was attuned to the demands of the people? Where others might seek to crush their enemies, by allowing Fidel Castro and his compatriots to walk out of prison Batista intended to show the world that he truly was a benevolent dictator after all.

  It was a daring move by a man with a flair for the dramatic. It would prove to be the biggest mistake of his life.

  Part Two

  LA ENGAÑADORA (THE DECEIVER)

  chapter 8

  ARRIVEDERCI, ROMA

  FIDEL CASTRO DID NOT DANCE THE MAMBO. IN FACT, HE did not dance at all.

  Although he had been a physically active person all his life, the young revolutionary viewed dancing and partying in general as a kind of useless frivolity. He associated the nightclubs and cabarets in Havana with the upper classes, which would lead him to denounce the sort of high life taking place in the country’s capital city as the last refuge of the bourgeoisie. In a letter to a compañero on January 1, 1955, Castro found it hard to hide his contempt for the Cuban nightlife that was then attracting tourists from around the globe. “What do our homeland’s pain and people’s mourning matter to the rich and fatuous who fill the dance halls?” he wrote. “For them, we are unthinking young people, disturbers of the existing social paradise. There will be no lack of idiots who think we envy them and aspire to the same miserable idle and reptilian existence they enjoy today.”

  Out of prison, Castro immediately resumed his role as the country’s preeminent political firebrand. While throngs danced the mambo and cha-cha-chá at the Tropicana and elsewhere, Fidel called for a unified resistance against the “fraudulent regime of the dictator.” He soon found out that Cuba—and Havana in particular—had other ideas.

  For one thing, in the nearly two years since Castro had launched his attack on the Moncada army barracks, the resistance movement had become factionalized. The most active group was the Directorio Revolucionario, commonly known as the Directorio, a radical student group founded by José Antonio Echevarría. There was also the Ortodoxo Party, with which Castro had been affiliated since he ran for congress years earlier. The official Communist Party was also an active underground organization, even though it had been outlawed by Batista. These groups were all interested in co-opting the regime but disagreed on strategy and tactics. Some were not yet ready to support Castro’s call for removal of the Batista government through an armed insurgency.

  On the radio and in left-leaning publications such as La Calle and Bohemia, Fidel denounced the regime. The government responded by banning his voice from the airwaves and forbidding La Calle from printing his articles. He was, in effect, silenced politically. Also, SIM and various groups within the secret police stepped up their periodic campaign of terror against opposition groups, with arrests, disappearances, and assassinations.

  Somebody wanted Fidel dead. From the day he walked out of jail, agents of the secret police followed Castro everywhere he went and rumors of assassination plots abounded. The rebel leader moved from house to house, never sleeping anywhere for more than two nights in a row. Fidel and his followers came to believe that the amnesty had been a hoax. In prison, the government could not kill Fidel Castro without making it obvious that they had done the deed or allowed it to happen. Out on the street, he could be murdered and no one would be able to prove who was responsible.

  It was in this atmosphere of repression and paranoia that Castro came to the conclusion that he could not function as an opposition leader in Cuba. In a message to his followers, he wrote:

  I am leaving Cuba…Six weeks after leaving prison I am convinced more than ever of the dictatorship’s intention to remain in power for twenty years masked in different ways, ruling as now by the use of terror and crime…As a follower of Martí, I believe the hour has come to take rights and not beg for them, to fight instead of pleading for them. I will reside somewhere in the Caribbean. From trips such as this, one does not return or else one returns with the tyranny beheaded at one’s feet.

  Much has been written about Castro’s time in Mexico City, where he moved with his brother Raúl and a handful of other supporters who would eventually form the command structure of his 26th of July Movement, so named after the date of the Moncada attack. In Mexico, Castro divorced his wife of six years and entered into a protracted custody battle for his young son, Fidelito. He also met Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine doctor and intellectual with whom he would devise a strategy for dramatically returning to Cuba to wage war against Batista. After many late-night discussions with Guevara in Mexico City, Fidel began to evolve politically. He became a Marxist, though he realized that if he were to garner support and raise money for his cause it might be best to soft-peddle his more radical notions for the time being.

  One of the most intriguing aspects of this period in Castro’s life was his seven-we
ek trip to the United States to raise money in support of his movement. Among the cities where Castro gave speeches, solicited funds, and sought to establish 26th of July Clubs were New York, Tampa, and Miami. In going to these three localities, Castro was following in the footsteps of his hero, Martí, who had lived for a time in New York and organized supporters in Tampa and Miami during Cuba’s War of Independence. By traveling to these cities, Castro was also tapping into three capillaries that fed the main vein of the Havana Mob.

  It is not clear how much Castro knew of the Mob’s involvement in Havana at this point in history, but some facts were common knowledge. The Mob conference at the Hotel Nacional back in December 1946 had been a big enough event to become part of Havana folklore, not only in the halls of power but also in the street. Mafia involvement in Cuban political affairs was part of the public consciousness as far back as the 1920s, though few were privy to the details. With Batista’s return to power, Meyer Lansky’s hiring as a “tourism consultant” was certainly known and sometimes referred to in the press. In fact, early in his tenure with Batista, Lansky bought the services of a particularly influential Cuban columnist and radio personality who went by the name of Tendelera (his real name was Diego González). Tendelera was paid a retainer of sixty dollars a month to deliver only favorable stories about Lansky and his associates. Paying this kind of bribe to journalists was standard practice for the Mob going back to the days of Prohibition in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere.

  Other mobsters in Havana had become well known: the duo of Amletto Battisti and Amadeo Barletta was notorious; they were the type of men Castro might have had in mind when he referred to “the accomplices and parasitic hangers-on that constitute the political retinue of the dictator.” It was also part of the public discourse that a whole host of men associated with U.S. mobsters were being brought in to oversee management of the various hotels, casinos, and cabarets. Discerning habaneros would have known that these people were tied in with the Cuban government.

  One manifestation of the mobster-Batista alliance that was self-evident was the link to Roberto Fernández Miranda, the president’s brother-in-law. It was common knowledge that Fernández Miranda had been bequeathed control of the highly lucrative slot machine business in the city. The traganíqueles, as the one-armed bandits were called, were visible all over town. Not only were they in the casinos but also in the smaller cabarets, and in bars and corner bodegas. The machines were purchased in Chicago and imported into Havana, where Fernández Miranda rented them out; he and his partners were the only ones allowed to empty the machines. It was estimated that the traganíqueles generated profits of close to a million dollars a month, with Batista’s brother-in-law guaranteed 50 percent of the take, courtesy of the Havana Mob.

  Castro knew that U.S. gangsters were in bed with the Batista family, but he trod lightly in his direct linking of the regime to the mobsters. Lansky, Trafficante, and the others were investors not only in Batista but also in Cuba’s future. Castro may have believed that he could appeal to these men as investors, use their money to finance his revolution, and then deal with them later. He revealed as much in a letter to a friend, when he wrote: “Martí once said, ‘The great secret of success is knowing how to wait.’ We must follow this same tactic…There will be plenty of time to crush all the cockroaches.”

  That October, Castro gave a rousing speech at Palm Garden Hall in Manhattan, where he announced for the first time, “I can inform you with complete reliability that in 1956 we will be free or we will be martyrs!” He later gave a similar speech in Miami on Flagler Street, just a few blocks from where Lansky had once headquartered his National Cuba Hotel, Inc. The following month, Castro was in Tampa, home of the Trafficantes.

  He spoke at the Italian Club in Ybor City to an audience of college students and Cuban immigrants. At the end of this and other speeches in Tampa, he always passed around a jipijapa, an oversized Cuban farmer’s hat, for sympathizers to give cash donations.

  In general, Castro was well received in the United States. To the average American, the young firebrand was an unknown quantity; they would have had no strong opinion one way or the other. For obvious reasons, most Cuban Americans were sympathetic. They had been forced off the island or fled because of repression and turmoil. Anyone who presented himself as an alternative to the present regime and had a significant following would have been given a fair hearing by the exiles in America.

  Fidel returned to Mexico City and continued to formulate his plans for revolution. The money raised in New York, Miami, and Tampa was used to purchase weapons. The 26th of July Movement recruited members and, through contacts all over Cuba, organized revolutionary cells on the island. In Mexico, Castro, Guevara, and a small army of insurgents engaged in intensive rebel training. Fidel continued to build toward his promise of a major revolutionary act in Cuba sometime in 1956, but events on the island proceeded according to their own timetable.

  On October 28, 1956, an incident occurred that struck at the heart of the Havana Mob. Around 4:00 A.M. on a Sunday morning, Colonel Manuel Blanco Rico, chief of SIM, was leaving Lansky’s Montmartre nightclub and casino with a group of associates. Onstage, the Italian opera singer and budding movie star Mario Lanza was singing an encore of his signature song, “Arrivederci, Roma.” Blanco Rico and his people were in the foyer waiting for an elevator.

  Two men entered the club and whipped out weapons—one a pistol, the other a submachine gun. They opened fire, sending the colonel, his entourage, and everyone else in the vicinity running for cover. Bullets sprayed the foyer of the club. Two of Blanco Rico’s people, including the wife of an army colonel, accidentally ran headlong into a glass mirror. By the time the gunmen ran out of the club, the chief of military intelligence was dead and a dozen others injured amid shattered glass, screams for help, and much bloodshed.

  It was a daring political assassination conducted in the lair of the Havana Mob. The shooters were clandestine members of the Directorio Revolucionario. They had come to kill Santiago Rey, Batista’s minister of the interior, but when it was discovered that he was not there they settled on Blanco Rico as a target.

  The killing touched off a wave of revenge violence on the part of the Batista regime. The very next day, a military squad stormed the Haitian embassy in Havana, where a number of Cubans had previously sought asylum. A violent gun battle took place. Ten people were killed, among them the head of the invading SWAT team, General Rafael Salas Cañizares, who died in the hospital from a gunshot wound. Although Batista was at the general’s bedside when he passed on, according to those who knew him, the president did not view the death as a great tragedy, since it enabled him to get his hands on the general’s gambling protection income—reputedly $730,000 a month.

  The Mob hit back hard, via Batista. A series of government-sponsored killings followed, along with a renewed crackdown on subversive activity. Through Cuba’s underground press, Fidel Castro issued a statement criticizing the government repression, but he also condemned the assassination at the Montmartre Club. “I do not know who carried out the assault on Blanco Rico,” said Fidel in a newspaper interview, “but I believe that, from a political and revolutionary standpoint, the assassination was not justified, because Blanco Rico was not an executioner.”

  His condemnation of the killing surprised some, but it was in keeping with Castro’s revolutionary philosophy, which eschewed indiscriminate acts of terrorism. Besides, he had his own ideas about how to topple the Batista government and its mobster acolytes. In fact, Castro’s biggest concern with the assassination and violence that followed was how it might interfere with his own plans, which involved a dramatic invasion of the island that was supposed to take place before the end of the year.

  THE BLOODY ASSASSINATION at the Montmartre startled the Havana Mob. Revolutionaries opening fire with machine guns inside a nightclub or casino was a realization of their worst fears. Finding and killing the perpetrators was Batista’s job. Lansky had other co
ncerns.

  Not long after the shooting, the Montmartre closed down, a decision that was most likely made by Lansky and Batista together. The closure was announced as temporary, but in fact the club never reopened fulltime. The Montmartre Club would be the first casualty in the impending showdown between the Mob and the Revolution.

  Lansky needed to make a big statement, both to show that the rampant development of Havana would proceed regardless of the political climate and to reassert his identity as the main cog in the machine. Though he was not a man normally driven by ego, Lansky’s entire reputation was riding on developments in Havana. It was through his relationship with Batista that all things flowed; he was the one who had laid the groundwork for the new era of hotels, cabarets, and casinos. It was high time that Lansky initiated a project that he could call his own, one that would stand as a monument to his position as the designer and overseer of the Havana Mob.

  In November 1956, Meyer founded a new company entitled La Compañía Hotelera Riviera de Cuba (the Riviera Hotel Company of Cuba). The purpose of this company was to preside over the financing, design, and construction of a new hotel-casino to be built near Calle Paseo, alongside the Malecón. The hotel would be called the Riviera and it would be the most lavish facility of its kind, with 21 floors, 440 rooms, 2 dining rooms, a casino, cabaret, swimming pool, cabaña club, park, gardens, and 2,600 square meters of arcade space for commercial use. The budget for this hotel was set at eleven million dollars, though it would eventually increase to fourteen million. Primary financing would be supplied by the Riviera Hotel Company, with all investments guaranteed by BANDES.