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Corruption and Drug Trafficking in Cuba during the Second World War and the Early Postwar Years a t the end of 1942, as the United States marked the first anniversary of its entrance into the Second World War, agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) found a quantity of morphine and cocaine from Cuba in Kansas City. The drugs had been siphoned from legally imported quotas and then brought back clandestinely into the United States.1 Based on this case, the FBN decided that it would no longer grant permits for the export of legal shipments of drugs from the United States to Cuba. Such a policy presumably would prevent the drugs from being diverted to illegal channels.2 The case, however, did not stop there, as the U.S. embassy in Cuba requested that an FBN agent be designated to assist the Cuban ministry of health in reconstructing how the drugs had been diverted. Bureau officials chose a lead agent, Claude Follmer, who had been in charge of the initial investigation in Kansas City.3 In turn, the Cuban Department of State authorized Eduardo Palacios Planas, commissioner of drugs in the health ministry, to exchange information about his country’s narcotics situation with U.S. officials .4 Perhaps the least surprising element of the case was that the drugs had turned up in Kansas City, at the time a hotbed of corruption and organized crime: “If Chicago was the most corrupt city in the country, Kansas City was a close second, with its municipal police department run by a former Capone gangster.”5 In his lengthy report, Follmer blamed the episode squarely on Cuba’s police force: “As the result of inefficiency and corruption, past and present, in the national police, all of the vices known to modern civilization have prospered for many years in Cuba. At present, just as in the recent past, the major criminal conduct in Cuba revolves around assassination, gambling, prostitution, and an extensive traffic in marijuana and narcotic drugs.”6 Follmer drew atChapter 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 :: Corruption and Drug Trafficking tention to a new channel through which narcotics were smuggled into Cuba. With the outbreak of the Second World War, drugs previously imported from Europe had been replaced by Peruvian cocaine, brought to the island on Chilean ships. In 1943, he noted, “the Republic of Cuba is literally inundated with Peruvian cocaine, which in the case of Havana is sold to several thousand of the city’s cocaine addicts.” Follmer concluded that the Cuban authorities would not take any important countermeasures and that illegal drugs would continue openly to be sold.7 British diplomats believed that Cuban corruption and its entanglements with gambling and the drug trade originated within the highest circles of government and the military. Army commander Colonel José A. Pedraza was “a big gambler and spender,” and both Pedraza and Colonel Angel González had personal stakes in the gambling business; moreover, the head of the Cuban navy had enriched himself through smuggling.8 In early 1941, Pedraza and González plotted unsuccessfully to overthrow Fulgencio Batista, resulting in the arrest and exile of the two men.9 At the end of 1942, British diplomats in Washington, D.C., strengthened their criticisms of Cuban corruption: Both the State Department and the American ambassador are very worried about the corruption existing in the Cuban government, a corruption which, though endemic, apparently now exceeds anything which had gone on previously. . . . Before President Batista’s arrival [in Washington], it had been discussed in the State Department whether the subject of the venal atmosphere of his government should be broached to him. However, it was decided that little could be done about it at the moment and the nearest approach was a suggestion by President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt that American experts be sent to Cuba to assist in reforming the Civil Service. This suggestion was completely ignored by Batista.10 The British chancery, undoubtedly influenced by the reports from its diplomatic mission in Havana, strongly criticized Batista’s first administration (1940–44): “His regime, has been remarkable, even in Cuba, for its corruption and inefficiency. . . . Cuban participation in the war is a farce. Its chief consequence is that it has afforded the president an excuse for imposing additional taxes, the proceeds of which have gone into the pockets of himself and his friends.”11 The U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Spruille Braden, expressed similar sentiments : “Illicit dealings and corruption in all its forms are fully...

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