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I've been reading the history of the pre-revolution days trying to get a handle on whether there really are still any antique slot machines in Cuba.
The answer is no there's not for a specific reason.
But that's not the point of this post. The point is that I have really gotten an education on what Cuba was like before the revolution.
It was basically four mobsters sucking all the money out of it. Those four were Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, Santo Trafficante (the godfather of Tampa) and Fulgencio Batista.
Yes Batista was in every way a mobster and was all tied in to all the rackets with the three American mobsters. And of course he gave away the Cuban store to American corporatists and got paid for that too. It was one of the most corrupt governments I've ever read about.
Similar to our propping up the Shah of Iran, we kept that "Shah" propped up too.
We help to create these morally bankrupt societies and then we scratch our heads in wonderment about why the people revolt against it.
Sideline to the slot machine story.
Leading up to the revolution, Castro had railed against the mobster conrolled gambling and became adamantly opposed to gambling per se.
On the day the thousands of rebels marched into Havana and conducted a siege on the place, the first places the mobs of people went was to the casinos. The way the story is told, they tore the roulette tables into "more pieces than the numbers on the wheel". And of course they beat the slot machines to death.
SO, since that's where so many were concentrated and they didn't survive, it's probably too much effort to track down the ones from the smaller operations.
p.s. epilogue to the story: About two years after Castro took over, he realized he couldn't finance the new government without the gambling revenues. So he reopened the casinos and gambling with all the proceeds going to his regime.
The most famous of all, the Hotel Nacionale (hotel and casino) was saved and restored by Castro and is now a destination for foreign tourists (hopefully me too soon). That's the hotel you'll remember from Godfather 2, and the scene of the infamous mob meeting on the rooftop where the three mafia families met to divide up the country.
The answer is no there's not for a specific reason.
But that's not the point of this post. The point is that I have really gotten an education on what Cuba was like before the revolution.
It was basically four mobsters sucking all the money out of it. Those four were Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, Santo Trafficante (the godfather of Tampa) and Fulgencio Batista.
Yes Batista was in every way a mobster and was all tied in to all the rackets with the three American mobsters. And of course he gave away the Cuban store to American corporatists and got paid for that too. It was one of the most corrupt governments I've ever read about.
Similar to our propping up the Shah of Iran, we kept that "Shah" propped up too.
We help to create these morally bankrupt societies and then we scratch our heads in wonderment about why the people revolt against it.
Sideline to the slot machine story.
Leading up to the revolution, Castro had railed against the mobster conrolled gambling and became adamantly opposed to gambling per se.
On the day the thousands of rebels marched into Havana and conducted a siege on the place, the first places the mobs of people went was to the casinos. The way the story is told, they tore the roulette tables into "more pieces than the numbers on the wheel". And of course they beat the slot machines to death.
SO, since that's where so many were concentrated and they didn't survive, it's probably too much effort to track down the ones from the smaller operations.
p.s. epilogue to the story: About two years after Castro took over, he realized he couldn't finance the new government without the gambling revenues. So he reopened the casinos and gambling with all the proceeds going to his regime.
The most famous of all, the Hotel Nacionale (hotel and casino) was saved and restored by Castro and is now a destination for foreign tourists (hopefully me too soon). That's the hotel you'll remember from Godfather 2, and the scene of the infamous mob meeting on the rooftop where the three mafia families met to divide up the country.