Havana Nocturne

by T. J. English

  Others had their doubts. Censorship and the manipulation of information had always been a key weapon in the arsenal of the regime. Aside from a spokesman for the army, no one was claiming to have actually seen Castro’s dead body. The fact that it had not yet been exhibited publicly—in the manner of victorious regimes the world over—led the rebel faithful to conclude that it was all a lie. To them, Fidel was alive, hiding in the mountains, waiting to fight another day.

  In truth, no one knew what to believe. Fidel was dead, or Fidel was alive. In Havana, it hardly seemed to matter. The blackjack and roulette tables spilled over with suckers and the showgirls worked their magic. Lansky, Trafficante, and the other mobsters were seemingly immune.

  THROUGHOUT THE MONTH of December, the island seethed like a bitch with a low-grade fever. Outside of Havana, the arrival of Castro had unleashed a frenzy of activity. It didn’t matter if he was dead or alive: the genie was out of the bottle. R. Hart Phillips of the New York Times captured the mood:

  Terrorism flared. Bombs exploded: trains were derailed; towns were blacked out by sabotage of power lines; incendiary fires were started by the young revolutionists. Molotov cocktails were hurled into trucks, government buildings, and warehouses, the exploding gas scattering fire in every direction.

  Most of this activity took place in Oriente, where Frank País’s aborted uprising had failed in its immediate goals but succeeded in destabilizing the populace. The resistance seemed to be scattered, unorganized, a spasm of rebellion that Castro had hoped to capitalize on with his invasion. Though far from coordinated, antigovernment activity on the island seemed designed to show the Batista regime that even if Castro had been captured or killed, it didn’t matter. The spirit of revolution had been ignited.

  In Havana, police and soldiers stood guard at public buildings and strategic points such as bridges, the harbor tunnel, and entrances to the city. Agents of SIM patrolled the streets day and night, and began a roundup of all revolutionary elements. Mostly the show of force was just that—a show. There were occasional bomb scares in Havana at movie theaters and in public squares, but it seemed more a game of cat and mouse than a coordinated guerrilla war.

  It was a tradition in Havana that at 9:00 P.M. a cannon was fired at Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabaña, a colonial fortress located across the canal from Old Havana. The firing of the cannon was so precise that all of Havana could set clocks and watches in accordance with the familiar boom. Now, the revolutionaries timed their various explosions around the city to go off either shortly before or after the ceremonial sounding of the cannon. The result was an unsettling concordance of booms and crashes that made it, among other things, impossible to set the correct time. It was designed to contribute to a mood of chaos.

  As New Year’s Eve approached, the city’s nightlife had never been more exciting. The bombs did not keep people away; in fact, there was something about explosions and rumors of revolution that made the music more heated, the dancing more sensual, and the sexual activity more urgent. The price for flights from Miami was lowered to thirty-six dollars, with regular advertisements in Diario de la Marina and U.S. newspapers proclaiming, “55 minutes of sheer pleasure, 5 swift flights daily.”

  At the Tropicana, the headline act during the Christmas season was Beny Moré, arguably the greatest Cuban entertainer of all time. Moré was as popular in Cuba as Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra were in the United States. An accomplished composer and bandleader who first achieved acclaim with the Pérez Prado orchestra, Moré was as comfortable with a torrid mambo as he was with a tender bolero. His best-known song—the lush bolero “Como Fue”—was known to have facilitated the romantic process in Cuban nightclubs, hotel rooms, and posadas from Havana to Santiago. Moré could also be an effervescent entertainer in the manner of jazz great Dizzy Gillespie. He often wore a straw guajiro’s hat and held a cane while dancing and mugging in front of the microphone.

  The arrival at the Tropicana of El Bárbaro del Ritmo—as Moré was sometimes called—was cause for celebration. For years, Beny had been unofficially banned from the club. The problem was his drinking (Moré loved sweet Santiago rum) and his perceived unreliability. Other cabarets were willing to overlook Moré’s tardiness because of his stature as the preeminent Afro-Cuban musician on the island. But at the Tropicana the standards were rigorous. The musical concept or theme of a show was the star, not any individual performer. Eventually, however, Moré convinced owner Martín Fox that he would be a good boy and he was hired for a two-week engagement.

  El Bárbaro del Ritmo delivered on his promise. Not only did he draw huge crowds to the club, but he also arrived on time for every performance and completed his entire set without any displays of onstage drunkenness. Afterward he stayed late, carousing at Bajo las Estrellas, the club’s bar, usually with a bevy of showgirls from his act.

  The celebratory atmosphere brought about by Moré’s long-awaited appearance at the Tropicana continued right up to New Year’s Eve. The final night of the year was traditionally the busiest at any club. All the hotels in the city were full and the clubs were maxed out, with crowds that spilled into the parking areas. At the Tropicana, those gathered observed the usual New Year’s Eve ritual: at midnight, twelve white doves were released into the sky above the stage. Everyone ate twelve green grapes for good luck. There were champagne toasts and kisses on the stroke of midnight. As the morning wore on, many gathered around the club’s Bajo las Estrellas bar for more champagne and good cheer.

  About an hour and a half into the New Year, the bar was rocked by an explosion that upended chairs and shattered glass. Pandemonium ensued. People grabbed their partners and began to run toward the car port and garden. Screams and shouts for help rang out in English and in Spanish. Fearing there might be another bomb somewhere on the premises, some fled the grounds entirely. The casino cleared out before the roulette wheel had stopped spinning. One young woman stumbled away from the bar with her arm severed near the shoulder.

  It was a shocking event: coming just two months after the assassination of Colonel Blanco Rico at the Montmartre, it was beginning to appear as if the nightclubs and casinos were not immune after all. The revolution was spreading like a fungus, leaving chaos in its wake.

  Martín Fox felt terrible about the bombing that took place at his club. The day after, he and his wife rushed to the hospital to visit the girl whose arm had been blown off. She was Megaly Martínez, a seventeen-year-old who was spending her first New Year’s Eve at the Tropicana. When the club owner and his wife arrived, the girl was under heavy sedation, surrounded by weeping relatives. Fox insisted that he would pay all the hospital bills, and told the girl’s family he would give her a yearly stipend for her education and also make sure she got the best prosthetic arm available in Cuba or the United States.

  Back at the club, the destruction was considerable. Under the circumstances, it was a miracle that there were not more casualties or serious injuries to patrons. Police investigators surmised that the bomb had gone off before it was securely placed. It was a small, homemade explosive device, the same kind that was planted all over the city that New Year’s Eve. The police had no specific clues as to who was responsible.

  There were no further bombings at the Tropicana. In the days and weeks that followed, security was beefed up and government informants were allowed to infiltrate the club. These undercover operatives were referred to as “thirty-three” because they were paid exactly thirty-three pesos and thirty-three centavos a month to spy for the regime.

  For a time, Martín Fox was obsessed with finding out who had planted the bomb. As the impresario of the most famous club in the city, he could not believe that anyone would want to attack him personally. He had no enemies. Why would anyone want to destroy his club? Only later did it occur to Fox that the bomber that night was most likely the very same girl who had lost her arm in the explosion. It made sense. Probably the bomb had gone off before the teenager was able to hide it in the club. She h
ad paid a heavy price for her revolutionary sympathies.

  Martín never seriously investigated his theory; he let it go. For a time, he continued to pay the girl’s bills and send money to her family. Eventually communication ended and he never heard from the girl again.

  THE YEAR HAD BEGUN with a bang. For a time it appeared as if the island would never be the same. Once again Batista unleashed his secret police. In Oriente, Rolando Masferrer’s gang, Los Tigres, began to make their presence felt. In Santiago, four youths who had been suspected of revolutionary activity were arrested and then allegedly turned over to Masferrer and his gangsters. On January 2, 1957, the four boys were found tortured and killed in an empty building. One of the victims, William Soler, was fourteen years old.

  The reaction was swift and poignant. Two days after the desecrated bodies were found, a massive gathering of five hundred women dressed in black moved through the streets of Santiago in a mostly silent procession. Some wore black veils while others held rosaries and prayed. Led by the mother of William Soler, they carried a banner that read “Cesen los asesinatos de nuestros hijos” (Stop the murder of our sons).

  It was getting more difficult for the mobsters to pretend that all was peachy in the land of Christopher Columbus. Discontent was on the rise, and it was marching straight toward Havana.

  chapter 9

  A BULLET FOR EL PRESIDENTE

  MEYER LANSKY WAS WORRIED. ON SOME MORNINGS, BEFORE the city awakened, he asked his driver to pull over and stop along the Malecón. Lansky got out of the car near the large stone monument erected in honor of the sinking of the USS Maine. The sinking of the Maine, a U.S. battleship stationed in Havana harbor in 1898, was the event that had drawn the U.S. military into a war with Spain. That war took place on Cuban soil, and it led to the U.S. government’s installing itself as the island’s overlord. Lansky was not at war with Spain, but he was an American operating in Cuba, a stranger in a strange land. He never felt more isolated than on these early mornings when he stood facing the ocean, the waves lapping against the sea wall, and contemplated his future in a universe that was becoming increasingly complicated.

  Lansky’s driver waited in the car. The man’s name was Armando Jaime Casielles and he had only recently been recruited by the boss of the Havana Mob as his valet and chauffeur. Until recently, Jaime had been living in Las Vegas, working as a croupier at the Flamingo hotel and casino. It was there that the young Cuban first met Lansky, who was in town on a business trip. Lansky had told Jaime, “You look like someone who can take care of himself. You should come work for me.”

  Jaime was born and raised in Havana’s La Ceiba district, near Marianao. He was a smart kid, good in school, but he was also familiar with the more dangerous world of the streets. At the age of eighteen, Jaime got into a dispute with a hoodlum in the notorious Jesús María slum in Havana. He shot the man and was forced to flee the country. He did so by hiding in the trunk of a car aboard a ferry that made regular trips between Havana and Key West. In the United States, Jaime lived for a time with relatives and in 1949 enrolled at Northwestern University in suburban Chicago. Later, an acquaintance landed him the job in Las Vegas, first as a worker at the dealer training school at the Flamingo and eventually as a croupier in the casino. Jaime liked his job in Vegas; he harbored no immediate plans to return to Cuba. But then Lansky came along.

  The Lansky name was legendary in Las Vegas, where Meyer was considered something of a founding father. The name was even more significant at the Flamingo, which had survived its shaky beginnings under the guidance of the late Bugsy Siegel to become one of the more prosperous enterprises on the Vegas Strip. Even though Lansky was famous in Vegas, Jaime did not recognize him when he first laid eyes on the short, unassuming Mob boss. It was another dealer at the Flamingo who said to him, “That’s Meyer Lansky, financier of the Mafia.”

  Later, Jaime had an opportunity to speak with Lansky at the casino and also at a dinner party they both attended. It was at the dinner party that Lansky approached the young dealer with a proposition. “Look,” he said, “I am an old friend of Fulgencio Batista. I do business with him in Havana. I have no need of recruiting nobody as a bodyguard because when I need one I just ask Batista and he sends me one. But I’m asking you to be my valet, my bodyguard, my driver.”

  From the moment they met, Jaime admired Lansky. To the young Cuban, the Jewish mobster was a physically unattractive man, but he had a kind of elegance that was borne of supreme confidence. When Meyer Lansky spoke to you, he looked you in the eyes, as if he were assessing your true nature. Jaime had a feeling that—although he never talked about his past problems in Havana, with Lansky or anyone else—somehow Lansky knew or at least suspected that he had shot a man. This was most likely the reason why Lansky had chosen him as his chauffeur and bodyguard.

  “Okay,” Jaime told Meyer. “I would be honored to be your valet.”

  When the young Cuban arrived to work for Lansky in February 1957, Lansky was still living at the Hotel Nacional. Initially, Jaime was put up in a suite adjacent to Lansky’s. The first time he entered Meyer’s suite, the Mob boss began taking off his clothes. “Let’s celebrate,” he said. “Go down to the bar and get a bottle of Pernod.”

  “Pernod? What is that?” said Jaime.

  “It’s an exquisite drink. You’ve never tried it?”

  “No,” Jaime said.

  He headed downstairs to the bar, picked up a bottle of Pernod, and returned to the room. When he got there, the Mob boss was in his underwear. “Go ahead and serve the Pernod,” said Meyer. “There’s ice and glasses over there. Pour one for me and one for yourself. You’ll see how tasty it is and how good you’ll feel afterward.”

  Lansky disappeared into the bathroom. “Could this guy be gay?” Jaime asked himself. He was walking around in his underwear, which was strange to Jaime. It made him think back to Lansky’s initial overture, when he had told Jaime that he didn’t need a bodyguard but wanted Jaime to drive him around anyway. Was the famous mobster coming on to him?

  Lansky returned to the front room wearing a bathrobe. The two men sat and drank their Pernod. As they chatted amiably, Jaime’s suspicions about Lansky’s sexuality seemed more and more absurd. Years later, he remembered, “We talked about many things, then he [Lansky] went to the bathroom, took a shower, dressed himself, and that was all. Nothing unusual happened. But it made a big impression on me, Lansky walking around in his underwear like that.”

  Jaime was assigned various cars, including a 1957 Chevrolet Impala, a convertible, and a black Mercedes, which was used for special occasions. As Lansky’s chauffeur, he drove the boss of the Havana Mob on his daily rounds, which mostly involved trips to the site of the Hotel Riviera, then under construction.

  At first Jaime detected nothing amiss with Lansky, who was almost always gentlemanly and even-tempered. The only time Lansky chastised his valet was when he drove too fast along the Malecón. “Despacio, Jaime, despacio”—slow down—he would say in his remedial Spanish. It was only later that Jaime began to suspect that Lansky was distracted or worried about something. The pensive, early-morning stops along the Malecón were only part of it; Jaime noticed that Lansky was not finishing his meals at La Zaragozana, his favorite restaurant in Old Havana. And he was drinking—never in public, but sometimes in the privacy of his hotel suite he would down a half bottle of wine or a few stiff glasses of Pernod.

  Jaime assumed it had something to do with the Revolution. Although the Batista regime stuck to its contention that Fidel Castro and his insurgents had been squashed like bugs in Oriente Province, rumors of Castro’s survival persisted. Throughout the early weeks of 1957, bombings and acts of sabotage against the government continued, and there seemed to be an ominous shifting of public support, especially outside of Havana. Batista’s repressive actions in response—which involved almost daily killings and disappearances of perceived enemies of the regime—only made matters worse.

  Lansky had legitimate caus
e to be concerned about the political situation on the island. But as Jaime spent more time with his new boss, he began to realize that Lansky’s worries had little to do with Castro and everything to do with the Mob back in the United States.

  Among Jaime’s duties was to drive Lansky to his weekly mobster summit meetings in Havana. These meetings took place on Thursday or Friday at the Miramar home of Joe Stassi, the gravelly-voiced mafioso from New Jersey.

  “Hoboken Joe” Stassi and Lansky went way back. Born in 1906 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Stassi had known Lansky since the halcyon days of Prohibition. Stassi at the time was an underling of Longy Zwillman, the top bootlegger in New Jersey, who was also part of the Lansky-Luciano group. In his early twenties Stassi had been a feared hit man; he’d even played a role in organizing one of the most famous Mob hits ever—the murder of Dutch Schultz in Newark in 1936. Since then, Stassi had drifted toward the business side of organized crime, as advocated by Lansky. Both he and Lansky had been schooled by the Big Bankroll, Arnold Rothstein, and were now attempting to adapt Rothstein’s philosophy—gangsters, showbiz types, and crooked politicians all together in one big stew—to the steamy realities of life in Havana.

  Stassi’s home was located on a winding, well-hidden road that ran parallel to the Almendares River, not far from the site of Lansky’s highly anticipated Hotel Riviera. The house had a gate in front and a half-moon-shaped driveway. Lush tropical vegetation surrounded the house.