Gangsterismo: The United States, Cuba and the Mafia, 1933 to 1966 by Jack Colhoun, and: Celia Sánchez Manduley: The Life and Legacy of a Cuban Revolutionary by Tiffany A. Sippial (review)

At first glance, books about the markedly different subjects of the gangster presence in Cuba in the 1950s and early 1960s and the life of Celia Sánchez Manduley seem highly improbable candidates for a combined review. Whereas the former book delves into the activities of Mafia godfathers Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante, Jr., in Cuba before and during the early years of Fidel Castro's regime, the latter explores the myth of the Cuban national godmother, Celia Sánchez. The journalist Jack Colhoun discusses the Mafia's efforts at the behest of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to overthrow Castro, and the academic historian Tiffany A. Sippial explores the media-shy Cuban revolutionary heroine. The books offer two notable recent examples of writing on Cuban history and stand out for their methodological thoroughness and innovativeness, taking 18 years for Colhoun to complete and 22 years for Sippial. Colhoun goes the extra mile in researching a sensitive and controversial subject while keeping a level-headed approach and objectivity. Sippial, on the other hand, provides a highly personal, intimate view of one of Cuba's most beloved female revolutionaries. Although the scholarly literature on Cold War–era Cuba has burgeoned in recent years, both of these books deserve a place on the specialist's bookshelf.

Colhoun significantly expands the vision of nocturnal Havana presented in T. J. English, Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba … and Then Lost It to the Revolution (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), p. xii, in which the connections among U.S. gangsters, U.S. corporations, and the Batista regime became a ubiquitous symbol of corruption. Colhoun takes a more ambitious approach and tells the story of gangsterismo in the context of the history of U.S. policy in Cuba and the Cold War in the tumultuous 1950s and 1960s. His account of U.S. policy in Cuba is also based on an impressive collection of declassified "executive branch reports, minutes of meetings, memorandums of conversation, and U.S. intelligence estimates on Cuba made available to researchers by the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson presidential libraries" (p. xi). The main narrative of Colhoun's account starts with the departure of President Gerardo Machado, which allowed Sergeant Fulgencio Batista to ascend to the highest positions of power in Cuba. Batista added to the combustive cocktail of corruption and violence a new kind of "neocolonial corruption" called gangsterismo. From Palacio Presidential he engaged with North American mafiosi, sharing the profits from their gambling empire on the island and thus further deepening the sociopolitical cleavages in the country.

The climate of pervasive political corruption engendered a new Cuban nationalist movement led by Castro in the 1950s. Castro clashed with Batista, drawing inspiration from the legacy of Cuban independence leader José Martí, and, as Colhoun notes, "the past would be prologue in neocolonial Cuba" (p. 3). The rebel army's entry into Havana in January 1959 dramatically changed yet again the political landscape of the country. As early as May 1959 the mafia accountant and Havana's gambling supremo, Meyer Lansky, with characteristic analytical acumen warned the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that "the entire [Cuban] government will soon be communistic," offering to furnish the FBI with additional intelligence about Communist activities in Cuba (p. 43). Simultaneously, in Washington, the hardened Cold War discourse increasingly reinforced the confrontation between the United States and Castro's regime, a confrontation that had its roots in Cuba's tumultuous history and the U.S. involvement on the island since the closing years of the nineteenth century (p. 61). Colhoun maintains that even though Castro was an avowed Marxist-Leninist, the Cold...