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a t the end of December 1956, two Colombian brothers, Rafael and Tomás Herrán Olózaga, were apprehended in Havana while holding a shipment of heroin valued at sixteen thousand dollars. The brothers, a chemist and pilot, respectively, were twins who hailed from elite families in Bogotá and Medellín. Their paternal great-great-grandfather, Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, and great-grandfather, Pedro Alcántara Herr án, had served as presidents of Colombia during the nineteenth century. On their mother’s side, they were closely related to the Echavarría Olózaga family, which formed part of Medellín’s leading industrial clan.1 The brothers had arrived in Havana on 1 November 1956, from Colombia , passing first through Jamaica. Arrested with them were two Colombian women, one of whom had helped bring the drugs into Cuba. The other, Tomás’s wife, functioned as a courier, smuggling the drugs into the United States using her status as a university student in Philadelphia. A Cuban was also arrested along with the four Colombians. The Herrán Olózaga brothers confessed that they had brought drugs into Cuba before. After their arrest, all of the parties except Tomás were released on bail and traveled to Mérida, Mexico. Tomás, evidently the gang’s leader, remained imprisoned in Cuba for a year. After gaining his freedom, he returned to Medellín. In February 1957, however, agents of the Colombian Intelligence Service, backed by an official of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics, raided the brothers’ laboratory in a Medellín suburb, where they had been processing cocaine since at least 1952. In the wake of this action, officials learned that the brothers had previously trafficked in Ecuadorian opium. As early as 1939, in fact, both the Colombian and German police had suspected that Rafael was a drug trafficker, suspicions created when they learned of his attempt to get a German drug manufacturer to sell cocaine and morphine in amounts greater than one kilogram to the Union Pharmacy he operated in Medellín.2 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 :: Introduction The case of the Herrán Olózaga brothers demonstrates that cross-border drug trafficking in Latin America was anything but an enterprise of the poor.3 On the contrary, it demanded a certain know-how as well as financial capital and international connections. In view of such requirements, it is little wonder that a considerable number of drug traffickers who operated in the region during these years were of immigrant origin. Furthermore, the incident involving the Herrán Olózaga brothers assumes added significance precisely because it did not represent an isolated event in mid-twentieth-century Cuba. All through the era of Prohibition in the United States, from 1920 until the mid-1930s, the island served as a source of contraband alcohol for its northern neighbor, and illegal drugs were sent from Cuba to be processed in European laboratories. Furthermore, in addition to serving as a transmission zone for drugs, Cuba became a country in which a variety of prohibited substances were consumed, from the opium used by members of the immigrant Chinese community (the largest such community in Latin America), to the marijuana used by those of more humble origin, to cocaine, the drug of choice among members of the country’s elite. Over the first decades of the twentieth century, Cuba’s economy became closely tied both to international commerce and to successive waves of migration . Already possessing one of the richest economies in the Americas during the colonial period, Cuba experienced a growth boom led by sugar beginning in the early years of the nineteenth century. Moreover, by 1900, Cuba ranked as the second-most-urbanized country in Latin America, after Uruguay and a little ahead of Argentina.4 Cuba’s development during these decades was highlighted by the continued growth of the sugar sector, which reached its zenith in 1925 and persisted at high levels until 1930, when the Great Depression dealt a severe blow to demand. By the outset of the 1920s, Cuba commanded 65 percent of the U.S. market for sugar; the island, in turn, became the principal market for boxcars and the second-biggest market (after Japan) for train tracks produced in North America. Cuba also served as a major outlet for other machinery and durable goods manufactured in the United States and, along with Canada and Mexico, constituted one of the three largest markets for North American investment in...

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