‘A Luscious Island Throbbing With Sensuality’

I read a WSJ review of a new book about the early days of Fidel Castro and Fulgencio Batista called “Havana Nocturne.” this morning on our sunny deck. The book depicts a wild era of ‘rum, roulette and revolution,’ spiced up by orgies involving future presidents and famous American mobsters.

The book carefully researches and speculates about what would have happened with little twists that might have dramatically changed the outcomes. For example, what if promising pitcher Castro had made the team when he tried out for the Washington Senators?

Mobster Meyer Lansky loved the island and wanted to make it magnificent. To this end, he built the Riviera Hotel, and opened a school to train Cubans as croupiers. “He attracted a better class of gamblers than his rivals. In 1958, TV host Steve Allen broadcasted from the Riviera , praising Lansky by name, and applauding the first central air conditioning on the island.”

Later when Castro began killing his adversaries, Lansky refused to flee. The mobster says in the book that he remembers when he left Russia with a revolution going on when he was 12. “I know a communist revolution when I see one, and this is one.” Finally in 1959 he left, but much of his vast unaccounted for millions is still in Cuba at the Riviera, now ‘a sagging masterpiece.’

The orgies were part of a ‘luscious island throbbing with sensuality, conga drums beating like so many passionate hearts.’ The book describes Frank Sinatra joining in on an orgy at the Nacional Hotel, and in the midst of it, a contingent of Cuban Girl Scouts burst into his suite. While the call girls rushed to the back room, the singer was presented with an award. The book claims that young Jack Kennedy came in 1957 for his own orgy, this coming from reports from Lansky’s valet and casino directors.