Chapter 11: Havana and the Mob-- Havana Before Castro

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# Havana Before Castro by Peter Moruzzi

### When Cuba Was a Tropical Playground

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- Previous Chapter: Cuba’s Incredible Music Scene
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- Next Chapters: Havana Riviera

#### Chapter 11

## Havana and the Mob

Since the late 1930s, American mobsters had been involved in Cuban gaming. In 1946, Lucky Luciano gathered America’s top gangsters – as well as honored guest Frank Sinatra – at Havana’s posh Hotel Nacional for his infamous Mafia Summit. Six years later, in 1952, famous gambler Meyer Lansky whose “carpet joints” in Saratoga, New York and southern Florida were considered the best managed and most sumptuous in the U.S., became Cuban dictator Batista’s official advisor of gambling reform. In that capacity Lansky controlled the majority of casino gambling on the island, along with Santo Trafficante, Jr. of Tampa, Florida. By 1958, Havana’s big new hotel-casinos – especially the Capri and Riviera – were the most conspicuous evidence of Batista’s embrace of the mob, and prime targets for popular rage following the revolution.