This review is part of the Literature World Tour.
When I was thinking about what book to read for this month's Literature World Tour, many names were suggested, including St. Lucia-born poet Derek Walcott. While I'm sure poetry means a lot to a lot of people, it means very, very little to me. And like magic, the solution practically fell into my lap. My colleague was divesting her desk of books, and she thought I might like to do something with The Havana Mob: How the Mob Owned Cuba - And Then Lost It to the Revolution.
This biography of the Mafia in Havana is absolutely fascinating. The book centres around the 'dream' of American Mob boss Meyer Lansky's dream to build a mobbed-up entertainment capital in Havana, providing a growing and stable laundered income for the underworld and setting the stage for later global expansion. Fidel Castro's revolution spoiled it all, and author T.J. English looks at how (and why) it happened.
The Havana Mob focuses on the Mob's Cuban heyday in the 1950s, but it also delves into the beginnings of early Mob involvement in the country's economy in the 1920s. Familiar names are dropped with frightening regularity - 'Lucky' Luciano (who missed most of it due to his 'legal troubles'), Jewish Mob boss Meyer Lansky (the undisputed Mob king in Havana at the time), Santo Trafficante, Fidel Castro (of course), 'Che' Guevara, President Fulgencio Batista, Frank Sinatra (unsurprising, even to someone as un-Mob-informed as me), and John F. Kennedy were just a handful of the famous names who have found themselves in the book, either by being directly involved with the Havana Mob or having tacitly accepted their importance to political and economic 'stability' of this American neighbour.
What I found most interesting (but unsurprising) was the cynicism of the CIA (you should definitely read the notes at the end of the book, they're worth it) - we learn fairly early on that they needed to stop German informants from leaking information about Navy movements during WWII, and the best way would be to recruit informants of their own on the docks. Who were these informants? Workers with Mob affiliations. Who was their boss? Luciano, who was serving jail time. Luciano got his men to squeal on the spies, Luciano got out of prison. There's more than one example of this sort of 'pragmatism' that made me wonder how they slept at night.
T.J. English has drawn from a wealth of archive material and conducted many in-person interviews to put together this well-researched, page-turning insight into the inner workings of the Mob when it was at its zenith. They were so powerful and influential that they made their way (frequently) into The Godfather films.
(And here's where I confess never having seen a single Godfather film - the Mob has never really held much interest for me, so the fact that I happily consumed this book in under a week really testifies to its quality and readability.)
If this book has piqued yoor interest, there is a Canongate book - Jungle Capitalists - that looks into the rise and fall of the United Fruit Company (President Batista and Fidel Castro's fathers both worked for the company). They go together quite well, but they'll make you take an extremely dim view of American power!
Next in South/Central America and the Caribbean: Jim Murdoch's review of Doctor Brodie's Report
Next stop on the Literature World Tour: Africa!
