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.