The Cuban Connection: Drug Trafficking, Smuggling, and Gambling in Cuba From the 1920s to the Revolution

“A comprehensive history of crime and corruption in Cuba, The Cuban Connection challenges the common view that widespread poverty and geographic proximity to the United States were the prime reasons for soaring rates of drug trafficking, smuggling, gambling, and prostitution in the tumultuous decades preceding the Cuban revolution. Eduardo Sáenz Rovner argues that Cuba’s historically well-established integration into international migration, commerce, and transportation networks combined with political instability and rampant official corruption to help lay the foundation for the development of organized crime structures powerful enough to affect Cuba’s domestic and foreign politics and its very identity as a nation.”

Eduardo Saenz Rovner is Professor of History at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogata. The Cuban Connection: Drug Trafficking, Smuggling, and Gambling in Cuba from the 1920s to the Revolution is published in October, and in soft cover next January, from University of North Carolina Press.