| Mafia in Havana | 
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (based on 7 reviews)
Sales Rank: 620728
Category: Book
Author: Enrique Cirules
Publisher: Ocean Press
Studio: Ocean Press
Manufacturer: Ocean Press
Label: Ocean Press
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 200
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.6
ISBN: 1876175427
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.1060972912309045
EAN: 9781876175429
ASIN: 1876175427
Publication Date: September 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
A vibrant picture of the Mafia?s Caribbean empire when Havana was the playground of the rich and infamous. With a novelistic eye for detail and drama, prize-winning author Enrique Cirules presents a shockingly glamorous and seedy picture of Sinatra and the showgirls, mambo and marijuana, "Lucky" Luciano and Meyer Lansky. The Mafia in Havana won the 1993 Casa de las Americas Prize for Latin American literature and the Critics? Prize in 1994. Includes a stunning selection of photos of personalities of the times. "We invented Havana, and we can goddamn well move it someplace else if [Batista] can?t control it."?Meyer Lansky in Sydney Pollack?s film Havana
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 Meyer Lansky the Mafia financier and my favorite mobster April 21, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Although all the information in this book is against the United States and the capitalism system, I find it very amusing. The book tells all about the corruption (no different from other countries) in the good old days in free Cuba. The author Mr. Cirules does not mention any thing about his own background (something unusual in a book!), but takes great pain in demoralizing the old democratic government of Gen. Batista and his administration. Making them look evil and corrupt. If what Mr. Cirules writes in this book is true, then Cuba was better during the old government, allegedly run by the Mafia.
Mayer Lansky, Charles ( Lucky) Luciano, and the remaining Mafia families, they were an excellent boost to the economy of Cuba making it one of the most prosperous tourist attraction country in the world at that time. It is a shame that it had to end the way it did. Buy this book and learn the power of the most organized crime network in the world.
 Propaganda yes, but some good history too February 14, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
As others have noted, Cirules' book contains abundant pro-Castro propaganda. However, much of that is easy to spot and just as easy to ignore.
When he's not applauding the communist revolution, Cirules provides some valuable history. If he fails in convincing the reader of decades of outright collusion between U.S. Intelligence and organized crime, he at least succeeds in establishing the shared motivations of the two groups and in documenting their cooperative effort to remove Fidel Castro from power.
Cirules uses Cuban government archives, U.S. documentation and interviews with Cubans who were personally acquainted with American and European mobsters on the island. He is generally able to use those different sources as checks and balances on each other.
Charlie Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Santo Trafficante, Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese and many other big-name gangsters are featured.
Moving through the book is sometimes difficult. Passages often seem repetitive and some idiomatic expressions are jumbled. It isn't clear if these were problems with Cirules' writing style or if they were introduced in the translation to English, but it appears that the translation was done somewhat clumsily.
The value of this book to researchers is limited by its lack of an index and by its repeated use of questionable quotes attributed to Charlie Luciano. Fortunately, "The Mafia in Havana" includes endnotes enabling us to separate the wheat from the chaff.
 Don't buy it unless... January 20, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Don't buy it unless you can wade through pages and pages of unsubstantiated accusation and anti-american propaganda. The author has to be on the payroll of the Castro government. The bias is most transparent and quite unconvincing. He leaves a great many of his arguments unproven. Didn't like it.
Maladriot propaganda profusely illustrated by factoids November 30, 2007
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
Cirules, Enrique (Author), Douglas E. LaPrade (translator) 2003 Mafia in Havana Ocean Press. Melbourne and New York ISBN-10: 1876175427 ISBN-13: 978-1876175429
In search of material for a work in progress I was prepared to read this book as a Cuban government point of view on the Mafia in Cuba. I search desperately for data I could use for this purpose, and found none that were reliable.
Now, after reading it, I cannot even rely on the very "juicy" data on Ava Gardner....
All this book does is maladroitly present Cuban government propaganda. Instead facts the author presents a mass of factoids clipped of any favorable view of the Cuban circumstance prior to Castro. For instance one could mention that: the collusion of the Machado and the Batista regimes with the Cuban communist party is completely omitted, Rolando Masferrer is not mentioned as a former rising star of the this party, Fidel Castro's own participation in the gangster killings in Havana is never alluded to... etc. etc.
Surely there are some in Cuba who could do better in a more scholarly way.
Larry Daley 11-30-07
The Mafia in Havana August 26, 2006
9 out of 16 found this review helpful
As I began to read the book Mafia in Havana I became aware of its disjuncted testimonials and picked up on its subtle anti-semitism ("Many of the gansters in Cuba before the revolution that expelled them were Jewish", according to Cirules). I researched the author, Enrique Cirules. Through a simple google search I found that Cirules lives in Camaguey,Cuba. This led me to further research the publisher, Ocean Press, and was immediately surprised by their anti-semitic publicity and their publications that sustain that Israel has perpetrated a sistematic crime on the Palestinians, followed by a series of anti-Busch articles and a denial that there is a terrorist threat. Readers beware: Enrique Cirules is the featured author of the current city of Camaguey's Cuban government controlled web site. Also beware that official Cuban writers,as Cirules is, are paid and employed by the Cuban government and thus are agents of Castro's propaganda. Since Sept. 11 Castro has made decided moves to court Arab extremists and Iran. His trips to Iran are public record. Thus, beware of the books from this publisher, Ocean Press. I wish I could get my money back, for I fear I may have contributed to something that is at least un-American, anti-semitic and decidedly Castro's distortion of the truth.
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