Havana Nocturne

by T. J. English

  Ever since Lucky Luciano’s time in Havana in 1946–47, the U.S. Narcotics Bureau had been obsessed with Cuba as a potential conduit for heroin and cocaine smuggling financed by the Mafia. From the time Trafficante arrived in Cuba, the Bureau had designated him as “a person of interest.” Their focusing on the Tampa Mob boss was not without foundation. He was, after all, the son of Santo Trafficante Sr., who was believed to have used Cuba as a narcotics route as far back as the 1930s. One of Trafficante Sr.’s associates had been George “Saturday” Zarate, who at the time of Santo Jr.’s arrival in Cuba was still alive and kicking, and living in Havana.

  Zarate was a classic Cuban-American gangster from the old school. He’d been born in Cuba in 1898 but moved in his teen years to Tampa, where he soon became both a user and trafficker of morphine. Zarate was one of the pioneers in establishing links between the Cuban and U.S. underworlds of the early and mid-twentieth century. In 1928 he was convicted in Florida on drug charges and served thirty-three months in prison. Upon his release, he returned to the Tampa underworld and staked his claim in the city’s lucrative bolita racket. He was twice the victim of near-miss attempts on his life, one a shooting outside the El Dorado gambling club in Ybor City that left him with a shoulder and arm filled with buckshot. In 1941 he was tried in criminal court for running a bolita ring that the Tampa Tribune described as being financed by “the Cuban syndicate.” He beat the rap, but the heat on Zarate was now so severe that he moved to New York City.

  In New York, Zarate made many enemies. He opened a restaurant named La Fiesta on West 46th Street in the theater district and attempted to bully his way into local gambling rackets. He also became involved in narcotics trafficking. Zarate and a gang of Cubans smuggled shipments of Peruvian cocaine into the United States, via Cuba. On December 14, 1948, narcotics and customs agents raided Zarate’s restaurant and uncovered $750,000 worth of pure Peruvian flake stashed on the premises. Zarate was arrested and charged as the principal defendant in a multicount narcotics-smuggling indictment. Rather than face trial, he skipped bond and fled to Havana.

  By most accounts, Zarate lived in semiretirement in Cuba, but the U.S. Narcotics Bureau was interested to know if he maintained contact with old friends in Tampa. He was put under surveillance, and on October 8, 1953, according to a Narcotics Bureau report, he was “observed in the company of Santo Trafficante at the President Hotel [in Havana]. It was reported to us that Zarate was still engaged in narcotics traffic, acting as an intermediary between Peruvian sources of supply for illicit cocaine and American gangster customers such as Santo Trafficante.”

  The Bureau kept an open file on Santo. George Zarate, on the other hand, left their radar—and life on earth—when he suffered a fatal heart attack in Havana on August 22, 1955. He was buried at the massive Necrópolis de Colón, the city’s famous cemetery and resting place for both rich and poor.

  Most official commentary on Trafficante’s time in Havana cites as a given his involvement in illicit narcotics trafficking, yet there is no hard evidence to substantiate the claim in law enforcement files, court documents, or among the few Trafficante family associates who talked to investigators or journalists over the years. Frank Ragano, who was Trafficante’s attorney during the Havana years and for most of his adult life, wrote in his memoir:

  Although rumors abounded in Cuba that Santo was a drug kingpin, I never saw him use or sell drugs. He told me that the Cubans thought he was involved with drugs because his family name meant “trafficker” in Spanish. He made a joke out of it, dismissing the Cubans as gullible.

  Ragano visited his client numerous times in Havana. He was not hesitant to divulge many of Trafficante’s worst crimes in his book (which was published seven years after the Mafia don’s death in 1987), but he reiterated many times, “I never saw any evidence that Santo was involved in narcotics.”

  On the other hand, there were drugs in Cuba, as noted by Santo himself and others. One night at the Sans Souci, Trafficante led Ragano through the nightclub’s men’s room to a back door, which he unlocked. He ushered Ragano into the room: in the rear was a wall filled with safety-deposit boxes. Inside the boxes, the rich Cubans kept their private stashes of cocaine. The Mob boss explained to his attorney that the Cuban elite used cocaine as a way to sustain their prodigious nightlife.

  It was also known that Amletto Battisti, owner of the Sevilla Biltmore Hotel, imported cocaine through a Peruvian source, as did Senator Eduardo Suarez Rivas and other members of the Batista cabinet. These examples involved Cubans smuggling narcotics into Cuba for local consumption, with no known involvement by U.S.-born mobsters. In his book La conexión cubana, Colombian author Eduardo Saenz Rovner details numerous cocaine and heroin cases in Cuba from the 1950s, including one involving a group of Colombian nationals who were caught smuggling narcotics through Cuba into the United States in 1956. None of these cases involved members of the Havana Mob or their associates.

  The obvious question is: why? If cocaine was indeed prevalent in Havana, and Cuba was being used as a transshipment point by others, why would the Havana Mob not want their piece of the action?

  The answer most likely lies somewhere in the psyche of Meyer Lansky. The Jewish Mob boss was well known for his aversion to narcotics trafficking, even before he set up shop in Havana. The argument against getting involved with drugs was compelling: in Cuba, especially, the risks outweighed the benefits. Through their connections to the Batista government, the Havana Mob had been given a virtual license to print money via casino gambling and related investments. U.S. law enforcement could not touch them. Why jeopardize what was shaping up to be the most lucrative epoch the Mob had experienced since Prohibition by getting involved with narcotics? This “no dope” edict was most likely passed down by Lansky to everyone connected with the Havana Mob, under threat of banishment or even death.

  Trafficante did not need to smuggle drugs to make a living. He was doing quite well through his casinos, hotels, and other investments. Not only that, but Havana had become a showcase for Santo. With the city’s hotel capacity doubling, even tripling, by the year, Havana was now a popular locale for business conventions and political junkets. High-stakes gamblers, businessmen, and American politicians who passed through town were given a taste of the Havana Mob’s hospitality, with Trafficante serving as host and unofficial dispenser of comp rooms, free casino chips for gambling, tickets to floor shows and nightclubs, and other fringe benefits from the smorgasbord of entertainment that the city provided.

  One American politician who passed through Havana in 1957 was Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy. Kennedy’s star was on the rise that year. He’d won a Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling book, Profiles in Courage, and he was already being discussed as a possible candidate in the next presidential election. At forty years of age, he was young and attractive, with a reckless penchant for womanizing that had brought him to the attention of—among others—the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Late that year, Kennedy visited Cuba for the first of what would be numerous trips to the island over the next eighteen months. His companion on this trip was Florida senator George Smathers, whom Kennedy had befriended in the Senate. Ostensibly, the trip was to visit the recently appointed U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Earl E. T. Smith. Smith was a millionaire stockbroker who, like other recent ambassadors to Cuba, was an ardent Batista supporter. Kennedy was a good friend of Smith’s wife, Florence, whom he had known since her days as Florence Pritchett, a blond model and photographer popular on the New York social scene. He’d been famously photographed with Pritchett in 1944 at the Stork Club in Manhattan and had over the years rendezvoused with the socialite in various far-flung locales around the world. They were believed to be carrying on a sporadic affair.

  In Cuba, JFK was shown around Havana by Senator Smathers. “He [Kennedy] wasn’t a great casino man,” Smathers remembered years later, “but the Tropicana nightclub had a floor show you wouldn’t believe.” The senator from Flor
ida was friendly with Trafficante and Lansky, who both later claimed to have met Kennedy in Havana. In fact, according to both men, they did more than just meet Kennedy. Trafficante told Frank Ragano that upon meeting the senator from Massachusetts “his instinct told him Kennedy had a yen for the ladies, and he and [Evaristo] Garcia offered to arrange a private sex party for him, a favor Santo thought might put the prominent Kennedy in his debt.”

  The orgy was set up in a special suite at Trafficante’s Hotel Comodoro, a beachside hideaway in the upscale neighborhood of Miramar. The mobster arranged for Kennedy to spend an afternoon with “three gorgeous prostitutes.” Unbeknownst to Kennedy, the suite was outfitted with a two-way mirror that allowed Trafficante and Garcia to watch Kennedy’s tryst from another room.

  For months afterward, the Kennedy orgy was a topic of conversation among members of the Havana Mob. Trafficante and Garcia were still amused by the incident when they told Ragano about it months after it happened. Both Santo and Lansky would later express disgust to friends and associates that a U.S. senator who preached law, order, and decency would accept sexual favors arranged by known mobsters like them.

  Later, Trafficante kicked himself for not having secretly filmed Kennedy’s dalliance at the Comodoro. It would have made terrific blackmail material.

  THE DISTINGUISHED SENATOR FROM MASSACHUSETTS was neither the first nor the last person to fall under the spell of Eros in Havana. Sex had been a commodity on the island almost since the time of Columbus. The Cuban mulata, lionized in verse and song as a skilled and compliant temptress, had been a centerpiece of the local tourist trade since at least the 1920s, when Havana was first marketed as a wild tropical playground catering to North American tastes. As for prostitution, it was an institution in Cuba as old as the earliest Spanish settlements.

  The era of the Havana Mob brought about a stratification of sex that was a culmination of everything that had come before. At the top of the pyramid were the showgirls from the most prestigious clubs, such as the Sans Souci or Tropicana. Magazines like Cabaret and Show presented the showgirls on their covers and in special features as Diosas de Carne, or Goddesses of Flesh. Although they were noted for their sequin-clad sexual attributes, some were also world-class dancers, choreographers, and singers. Show, a Spanish-language magazine published in Havana, featured dancers and models in a recurring section entitled Ensalada de pollo—chicken salad. Photos of pollos electrizantes (electrifying chicks) posing in bikinis, shorts, and garter belts were accompanied by titillating captions: “Monica Castell—with that anatomy one can never lose a battle”; “The sculptural Mitsuko Miguel—a splendid invitation to life”; “The sweet and spectacular Sarah Carona—few women in the world can offer the characteristic of a twenty-nine-inch waist and thirty-nine-inch hips…upon her graceful gait one can hear unanimous murmurs of exaltation among the public.”

  Most of these women were off-limits to the average Joe. A legendary showgirl like Olga Chaviano—a dazzling, raven-haired beauty—would make herself available to the likes of Norman Rothman, but weekend tourists need not apply. Showgirl lore at the Montmartre, Sans Souci, and Tropicana was filled with stories of dancers being swept off their feet by Parisian lords, Italian millionaires, and American mobsters. A number of these tales were most likely apocryphal. At some casinos, showgirls were asked to fichar, or sit at the gaming tables and pretend to gamble with chips provided by the house as a way to lure male customers to the table. Most of the women were smart enough to distinguish a high roller from a weekend tourist and adjust their availability accordingly.

  A lower level of club existed, however, where an average guy’s chances improved somewhat. For every high-end cabaret, there were five or six smaller nightclubs scattered in pockets around the city. The success of the cabarets created a spillover effect. The El Dorado was a popular club on the Prado, a good boulevard for people-watching. The Southland Club and the Sierra Club were also nearby in Central Havana. Across town in Vedado there were Club 21, Club 23, Mocambo, Johnny 88, Pigalle, Pico Blanco (Roof Garden) at the St. John’s Hotel, and many others. In Miramar, there were Le Martinique, Mes Amis, Le Rêve, and Johnny’s Dream, an after-hours club that stayed open until dawn. It was on the outskirts of the city that many of the most notorious venues were located, including Bambú (on Rancho Boyeros highway), the Ali Bar (Beny Moré’s favorite club), the Night and Day, Club 66, the Palette Club, the Topeka, the Alloy, and Las Vegas.

  None of these clubs had a casino, but many had slot machines. Nearly all had a conjunto band that was a smaller version of the huge orchestras that played at the Tropicana and Sans Souci. Most of the clubs, even the smaller ones, had showgirls, or at least two or three shapely dancers who were hired to perform in front of the band. It was in these more intimate venues that the mambo, the cha-cha-chá, and Afro-Cuban jazz gave birth to a sweaty dance scene unlike anything ever seen before—in Havana or anywhere else. Prostitutes worked these clubs, but it was also possible that a man or woman might engage in a physical transaction that began on the dance floor, carried over to a hotel room, and wound up resembling something like true affection, love, or—at the very least—sweaty tropical lust, free of charge. In Havana, anything was possible.

  A consumer’s sexual options were highly varied. For instance, burlesque was a popular pastime in the 1950s, and Havana was a regular stop on the circuit, showcasing both Cuban- and U.S.-born talent. Betty Howard, who had been named among the world’s top-ten erotic performers by none other than famed burlesque impresario Harold Minsky, appeared at the Campoamor and Martí theaters. Cabaret Quarterly noted that her “bumps to the bongo packed Havana theaters.” Elvira Padovano was another erotic performer described in one men’s magazine as “exciting and unpredictable as a tropical storm…A classic ballerina in her teens, she recently switched to a more torrid tempo and pirouetted into the [Havana] nightclub spotlight.” Pageant magazine touted the talents of Tybee Afra as an “Afro-Cuban rhythm dancer…In Brazil they named a flower for her; in Havana her picture is shown even on matchboxes.”

  And who could forget the appearance in Havana of Bubbles Darlene?

  An exotic dancer from Minnesota, Darlene (real name Virginia Lachinia) was in town to perform at the casino cabaret in the Sevilla Biltmore Hotel. One afternoon she decided to stroll along the tree-lined Prado wearing nothing but black panties and a transparent raincoat, carrying a parasol. Cars screeched to a halt and heads turned. Blond and topless, Bubbles Darlene sauntered with one hand on her hip and a sly smile on her face. She had wisely tipped off a photographer from Cabaret magazine to capture the moment on film. Supposedly, the entire stunt was inspired by a Cuban song, “La Engañadora”—The Deceiver—which tells the story of a woman who fools her boyfriend by wearing falsies.

  Police arrived on the scene. An officer took the naked woman by the arm and asked, “What’s wrong with you? Where are you from?”

  “I do not want to deceive anyone,” replied Bubbles. Then she tried to recite—in Spanish—the lyrics from “La Engañadora.”

  At the station, a cop asked her again, “Where are you from?”

  “From everywhere,” she answered. “Art has no boundaries.”

  Eventually she told the police that she was an exotic dancer who specialized in a striptease version of the mambo. Her explanation for walking the streets was reprinted in Cabaret Yearbook:

  It was hot and I decided to get out of my hotel room for a walk. I was listening to the radio playing “The Deceiver.” I knew that the lyrics of the song dealt with a girl who wore falsies in order to have a better figure. Well, I thought, I don’t need falsies and I’m going to show the world the song is not true about all girls. So I went into the street like this. I did not think the Cubans would mind.

  Bubbles was fined fifty dollars for indecent exposure and let go. Forever after, she billed herself as “The Dancer that Shocked Havana, Cuba!” Her walk through the streets without clothes was affectionately remembered as a symbol of the ent
ire ribald era. In a time of fraudulent governments, secret police, clandestine political activity, and mobsters, Bubbles Darlene, at least, was no deceiver.

  SEX IN HAVANA was for show, but it was also for commerce. With fabulous showgirls and burlesque dancers overheating the male populace, there were a lot of horny men stumbling around in the sultry neon night. Prostitution thrived, as it did in most Caribbean countries where European and North American men came looking for a type of sexual gratification they could not get back home. Legendary pianist Bebo Valdés told author Rosa Lowinger that he was frequently approached by American tourists at the Tropicana looking for prostitutes. For a five-peso tip, he sometimes led them to the notorious whorehouses in the barrio of Colón. “The Americans from the South wanted only black girls,” remembered Valdés, who is of African ancestry.

  Like everything else in the city’s sexual underworld, the whorehouses were geared toward varied tastes and pocketbooks. Most of the upper-tier establishments belonged to a franchise owned and operated by a Spanish woman known as Doña Marina. Her chain of brothels serviced the city’s luxury hotels. Casa Marina was a three-story house in Old Havana with special rooms, round beds, and antique artefacts. There was also El Templo de Marina next to the Sevilla Biltmore Hotel, on the corner of the Prado. Doña Marina had another brothel in a building on San Jose Street, and a chain of lingerie shops on the Prado.

  Her establishments were so well known that she even made the pages of Stag, a U.S. men’s magazine. Under the headline “Sin—With a Rumba Beat,” Casa Marina was described as “one of the most luxurious houses of ill-fame in the Western hemisphere…Plush draperies and period furniture adorn her parlors. Refreshments are served to visitors by white-coated servants who graciously decline tips or payment. Marina’s crowning service is rarely offered in Cuba or anywhere: two trained nurses stand by from dawn to dawn in a spotlessly clean ‘clinic’ to guard the health of customers and employee alike.”