La conexión cubana: Narcotráfico, contrabando y juego en Cuba entre los años 20 y comienzos de la Revolución

Abstract

Contemporary transnational organizations’ recent success in circumventing or challenging nation-state hegemony has spurred scholars to look at alternative systems of economic and political power and to assess critically the relationship between formal and informal spheres of power. Forming part of this current, Eduardo Sáenz Rovner’s La conexión cubana examines drug smuggling, consumption, and gambling in Cuba from the 1920s through the first years of the revolution. The narrative history aims to present the forces integral to these activities and thereby show the historical antecedents of modern-day drug trafficking and related enterprises in the Americas. To do this, the author has turned to an array of published and unpublished sources from Cuba, the United States, and Britain, including U.S. Department of Justice and State Department files, criminal records, Cuban state papers on economics, policing, and diplomacy, Cuban and U.S. newspapers, and corporate records.The author argues that in the early twentieth century, various forces combined to make Cuba, and especially Havana, a vital node in the international drug trade. These included a booming sugar economy, rapid urbanization, migration to the island, and Cuba’s increasingly intimate cultural, economic, and political ties to the United States. These elements, along with Cuba’s political development, form the basis of Sáenz Rovner’s discussion. La conexión cubana is for the most part organized chronologically and by political regime. The study opens with the 1920s and the impact Prohibition had on Cuba’s economy and its relationship with the United States. It ends with the first years of the revolution, when the long collaboration between Cuban and U.S. officials abruptly ceased and cold-war strategy and rhetoric subsumed concern over drug trafficking. Interspersed are thematically organized chapters on Chinese immigrants and opium consumption in Cuba, gambling on the island, the French and Andean involvement in Cuban criminal enterprises, and Lucky Luciano.There is much to commend in La conexión cubana. Sáenz Rovner successfully demonstrates Cuba’s advantages as a center in transnational criminal enterprises. The author has meticulously tracked the participation of key individuals and groups involved in drug running, including players from the United States, the Andean nations, Spain, France, and Cuba. Furthermore, the study shows that many of the dynamics of contemporary narcotics trafficking replicate, albeit on a larger scale, those of an earlier age. The same applies to strategies used to counter it. For example, the U.S. effort to impose its drug policy on other nations comes across clearly, as do the lengthy collaborations between the Cuban and United States governments.The book’s structure does not do justice to its empirical advances. The data is impressive, but its presentation often makes it hard to discern how specific discussions contribute to the author’s larger points. Introductory information and framing arguments are buried under the flow of empirical data, some of it tangential. At times the chapters read more like a collection of essays and less like pieces in an argumentative or narrative whole. In particular, the chapters on the Chinese immigrants, the Prío Soc-carás government, and Lucky Luciano are disjointed and unfocused.Sáenz Rovner has consulted an abundance of previously unexamined documents, yet considerable portions of the study rely heavily and uncritically on a limited body of materials, especially U.S. government papers. This is troublesome, for too often the author lets these sources dictate the shape and trajectory of discussions. Money laundering, for example, receives scant attention in the official sources reviewed. As a consequence, this integral piece in the extralegal puzzle does not receive the attention it deserves. The chapter on gambling opportunely places casinos in a larger Cuban cultural context and indicates the factors that made Havana a hemispheric gambling center. But the discussion does not fully convey the critical role casinos played in the U.S. mafia’s financial strategies for their far-flung commercial enterprises. The source problem is made clear by the final chapter on the revolution, which does examine these records skeptically and critically. The result is a concise, cogent chapter, although one that is less about gambling, drugs, and smuggling in Cuba and more about U.S. efforts to portray these activities as part of international socialism’s campaign to undermine the United States. Finally, while this last chapter does discuss the revolutionary regime’s closing of the casinos, the study leaves open important questions: how did the environment once so attractive to extralegal enterprise change under the new regime, and what adjustments did the networks that once thrived on the island make after they lost their Havana base?Experts in the fields of contemporary Cuban history, drug trafficking in the Ameri-cas, and transnational crime should profit from Sáenz Rovner’s careful and copious documentation. Students of Latin American history less familiar with these subjects should also appreciate the study’s detail but may find it challenging to navigate.