Book of the week: Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba … And Then Lost It to the Revolution by T.J. English

Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba … And Then Lost It to the Revolution

by T.J. English

(Morrow, $27.95)

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For six brief years in the middle of the 20th century, Meyer Lansky was living the gangster’s dream. The Jewish kid from Manhattan’s Lower East Side had grown into a gambling kingpin who oversaw a Caribbean fiefdom where the music was hot, the showgirls hotter, and American law enforcement powerless. Lansky and his associates owned Cuba: They had been sending secret payments to Cuban President Fulgencio Batista since the Depression. But what the American mobsters didn’t realize, says author T.J. English, was that Batista represented the defective part in their machine. A revolution was burgeoning in Cuba, and when Fidel Castro’s Fidelistas swept into Havana in the first week of 1959, Lansky didn’t even have time to pull the cash out of all his casinos.

While pre-revolution Havana often has been romanticized in movies, said Tom Miller in The Washington Post, English’s “briskly paced and well-sourced” new history “aims to set the record straight.” Lansky and Batista may have created an adult amusement park that was appreciated by American celebrities, airline executives, and hotel magnates, said Tom Robbins in The Village Voice. But the Batista regime “specialized in cheating and torturing its own citizens,” and it’s to English’s credit that he “makes you glad that Batista and his gangster pals ultimately got what they deserved.” It turns out you can revile the corruption of old Cuba even if you “regret never having gotten the chance to soak up a few mojitos while watching the floor show at the old Tropicana.”

In a book teeming with “dirty rats,” said Todd G. Buchholz in The Wall Street Journal, Lansky radiates a certain nobility. While another Mafia big boasted of having arranged an orgy for visiting Sen. John F. Kennedy, Lansky was busy building a school to train young Cubans as croupiers. But Lansky’s instinct for legit entrepreneurialism backfired in the end, and after the revolution he waited in vain for Castro to reopen the casinos. When Lansky died, in 1983, his shocked family discovered that the gangster’s personal fortune stood at a mere $57,000. The rest had gone into the marble and silver in Havana’s still magnificent Riviera Hotel.