Subject: gángster gangster / mobster
Culture: Cuban
Setting: organized crime, Cuba / Florida 1940s-1970s
Event Photos
* English 2007 pxii
"Havana had always been a place of great music, but in the era of the Havana Mob a generation of musicians found their voice. In the late 1940s, arranger Dámaso Pérez Prado and his band, along with other renowned orchestras, created a craze called 'the mambo.' The mambo was both a type of music and a dance, a sensual transaction between two people engaged in mutual seduction. The mambo was the unofficial dance of the Havana Mob, and the sultry Latin rhythms that inspired the phenomenon were to underscore the entire area."
* Estrada 2007 p211
"The image of Havana in the 1950s as a sleazy, Mafia-infested cesspool of vice is so pervasive that it has entered popular culture. After the Revolution, it was gleefully embellished by leftist historians, and Hollywood followed suit in films such as Francis Ford Coppolla's Godfather II. An otherwise perspicacious historian described Havana as:
a place of license and loose morality, of prostitutes, pimps, and pornography, of bars and brothels, casinos and cabarets, gambling and drugs, gangsters, mobsters and racketeers, politicians on the take and policemen on the make. Daily life had developed into a relentless degradation."
* Chepesiuk 2010 p80-81
"La Cosa Nostra was not the only criminal element to flee Cuba and Castro's communist revolution. Cuban gangsters who worked for the Mafia joined thousands of other Cuban refugees who fled for Miami and South Florida. By 1962 Miami's population swelled with at least 100,000 poor Cuban emigrés. Essentially a resort town with little heavy industry, Miami seemed like possibly the worst city to receive refugees. Yet despite the big influx, the city did not explode with crime and violence. In an article for the Reader's Digest December 1962 issue, Miami police chief Charles W. Healey noted that, in the three years since the refugees started coming to South Florida, the city had not experienced any real problems. 'The Cubans haven't even given us what you'd consider their fair share of serious crime," Healey said, noting that crime had actually dropped 16 percent the previous year."
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Field Notes
