The Cuban Connection: Drug Trafficking, Smuggling, and Gambling in Cuba from the 1920s to the Revolution (review)

This is a frustrating book. At its most elemental, it seeks to bring pre-revolutionary Cuba into the historical literature on drug trafficking in Latin America—a useful and important endeavor—while adding to our knowledge of gambling and other vice on the island during the same period. At its most ambitious, it seeks to contribute to an economic geography of drug trafficking by proving, among other things, that geographic proximity to major markets does not in itself explain the emergence of trafficking networks in a country like Cuba; that drug trafficking relies more on the actions of the rich than of the poor; and that immigrants tend to be the most important players in drug trafficking networks. In the end, the book succeeds at inserting Cuba more fully into the drug literature, but fails in its more ambitious aims.

The literature on illicit drugs in Latin America has long suffered from a presentist and U.S.-centric bias that can be attributed in part to the large, obvious, and to some extent seminal role played by the United States in the hemisphere’s drug wars, particularly since Richard Nixon became the first U.S. President to publicly declare a “War on Drugs” in 1969. That bias might also be driven by the available sources, which are plentiful, well organized, and easily accessible in the United States, but much harder to come by in Latin America.

Sáenz Rovner seeks to redress this bias by studying a somewhat neglected period in Latin American drug history—from the early twentieth century to the 1960s—and by incorporating Cuban archival materials into his research, though U.S. archives remain the preponderant source of information for the book. The author successfully undermines facile, Manichaean interpretations of Cuban drug history presently supported by a number of scholars in that country that blame drug trafficking on foreigners who sought to poison the Cuban nation prior to the revolution. He also successfully shows that Cuban drug history fits certain models championed by theorists of the drug traffic, namely Francisco Thoumi. As Sáenz Rovner demonstrates, Cuba was a country with potential for successful involvement in the drug trade because it had long maintained major licit international commercial connections that provided ready-made channels for the illicit markets of the twentieth century. He also successfully shows that many people involved in the traffic during this period were elites rather than the poor, and that immigrants played a major role in the smuggling industry. From this evidence, the author generalizes that geographic proximity alone is not enough to determine which nations wind up playing an important role in drug trafficking. Unfortunately, these findings are never put into context and therefore are only suggestive. While the book shows that many immigrants were involved in the traffic, it is not clear if immigrants were disproportionately involved. Nor is it clear how much more, comparatively speaking, Cuba benefitted from existing international commercial channels and immigrants inclined to illicit smuggling than other nations. If existing international commercial circuits and large immigrant populations trump geographic proximity, were Brazil and Argentina also major trafficking nations during this period? How did they compare with Cuba? Without such comparisons, it remains unclear if these findings can be generalized to other nations or if they simply reflect a peculiar Cuban reality prior to the revolution.

The book will also disappoint anyone interested in learning about the development of Cuban drug legislation or the social and cultural history of drug use in that nation. While the book incorporates Cuban archival sources, it is still heavily based on U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) and State Department records and thus often reads more like a police blotter than a history. Most disappointingly, the book uses U.S. State Department documents without any...