A Thousand Thirsty Beaches: Smuggling Alcohol from Cuba to the South during Prohibition by Lisa Lindquist Dorr (review)

United States shorelines have long been an invitation to smuggling. They have brought in drugs, munitions, people, plants, animals, and contraband of an infinite variety. One of the most active thresholds has been the coast of the American South. After Thomas Jefferson imposed the Embargo Act of 1807, outlawed goods streamed in through the upper Gulf Coast and northeastern Florida, and with the abolition of the foreign slave trade the next year, the latter turned into a gateway for illegally imported enslaved Africans, perhaps as many as sixty thousand. Smuggled human chattel exacerbated the sectional divide, and after war broke out, the most contested waters were those around the South, where Union forces set up a federal blockade. Human trafficking, for agricultural labor and the sex trade, is a history still unfolding. So too is drug smuggling, by plane and boat. South American cocaine, some have said, revived a languishing economy in Miami in the 1980s.

Before narcotics, illegal alcohol was an economic stimulant for the South and vigilantly pursued by authorities. The years of Prohibition in the region evoke popular images of bootleg whiskey, hopped-up fast cars, and the birth of NASCAR. Equally active, even exciting, was what was happening on waters in the South—moonlit and day bright, storm tossed and becalmed—with boozeladen speedboats, sailboats, fishing boats, yachts, and cargo steamers all trying to slip past a government blockade, like no other since the Civil War. And they did; for every shipment intercepted, a dozen others made it to the beach. In fighting the war on spirits on southern waters, the government deployed four hundred vessels, some ten thousand enforcement personnel, and tens of millions of dollars.

The South was a ready and eager market for the liquid contraband. The region had a deep tradition in imbibing and an established retail network. It also had Florida, with its 1,350-mile shoreline, real-estate boom, population explosion, and thirsty residents and tourists, who included wintering bootleggers from the North. Florida had crooked and uncommitted officials too. Whenever his docket took him to Key West, one federal district judge would adjourn on Thursday afternoons to enjoy a long weekend and "grand time" with other court officers in Havana, where liquor was legally served (117). Florida had proximity.

Enforcing prohibition laws and stopping smugglers, as Lisa Lindquist Dorr points out in her superb study, was as much an international as a domestic matter. As slaves and Confederate-bound munitions had come from foreign shores, so too did alcohol. Canada, the Bahamas, Mexico, and Cuba were principal suppliers and smuggler paradises. In none of these places was the sale or export of alcohol illegal. Canada and the Bahamas answered to Great Britain, not to the United States, and refused to give in to the latter's demands to stop the trafficking at its borders and shores. But Cuba was living with the legacy of the USS Maine and San Juan Hill and with the United States treating it as a perpetual protectorate. A broadly interpreted amendment in the Cuban constitution permitted US intervention in Cuban affairs in the interest of national security, and the Cuban sugar industry, dominated by American businesses, depended heavily on the US market. In no position to do otherwise, the island nation consented to US authorities' boarding, inspecting, and seizing of Cuban-registered ships in international waters. The Americans expected Cuba to control a flow of liquid contraband they could not.

Cuba almost did, for nearly two years, with the aid of "Uncle Sam's Booze cops," a contingent of American undercover operators operating in Havana (95). Many were untrained amateurs yet effective. Still, success was fleeting. As with Prohibition across the country, bureaucracy, agency infighting, incompetence, lethargy, and the American desire to drink unstoppered the bottle.

The pouring forth continued, but not just with liquor. Spiriting booze across seas was a prelude...