May 29 2007
Death of a Cuban music promoter with a Mafia background goes unnoticed
(The Associated Press) HAVANA: The man who was the gangster Meyer Lansky’s driver and bodyguard during the Mafia’s heyday before the Cuban Revolution died here in February, but only a few people noticed. His passing was a curious footnote in a Communist country whose brief history as a gambling magnet for vacationing Americans is all but forgotten.
There was no article in the Communist Party daily, Granma, about the Feb. 12 death of Armando Jaime Casielles, at age 75, from lung cancer. There was no mention on state television either, despite the decades he spent promoting Afro-Cuban dance and music in his post-Mafia years.
Casielles’s close friend, Enrique Cirules, got the news through word of mouth. “He liked his cigars, he liked his whiskey, never stopped working,” Cirules said. “He was a very respected man.”
A stout, reserved man with eyeglasses, a goatee and a pinky ring, Casielles was one of the last people alive with firsthand knowledge of Mafia operations in the colorful, decadent Havana that thrived before a young rebel named Fidel Castro seized power.
Stoic and discreet, Casielles was there with Lansky during numerous meetings with the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista, who protected gambling interests on the island, and accompanied him when the mobster traveled around the Caribbean to talk with such underworld figures as Santos Trafficante Sr.
Casielles helped Lansky hide in the Cuban capital in late 1957 after the Sicilian Mafia families of New York tried to grab control of his Havana operations and violence erupted in Manhattan.
And he was behind the wheel of Lansky’s silver-gray 1957 Chevrolet Impala convertible on New Year’s Eve in 1958. As word spread that Batista had fled the island and Castro’s bearded rebels were close to victory, he helped the gangster scoop up millions of dollars in profits from his Havana casinos.
The next day, Cuban mobs, euphoric over the revolutionary triumph, ransacked the gambling dens, exposing their deep resentment of Mafia control of the island. Bonfires of smashed slot machines and roulette tables raged in Havana’s streets.
Soon thereafter, the revolutionary government outlawed gambling, prostitution and nonprescription drugs and the mobsters retreated.
“The gigantic projects of gaming, drugs and sex; channels of heroin to the United States; and cocaine powder for the consumption of thousands of American tourists who visited the wildest spots in Havana” were condemned to disappear, Cirules wrote in a book titled, “The Secret Life of Meyer Lansky in Havana.”
The book also revealed the life Casielles led before undergoing what he described as a moral conversion, repudiating his Mafia past to become the public relations director of the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional dance troupe for more than three decades.
Born in Havana in 1931, Casielles left the island in 1948 to study public relations at Northwestern University in Chicago, perfecting his English. He was a card dealer in a Las Vegas casino when Lansky persuaded him to be his assistant in Cuba.
As Cirules researched his book, the two men spent countless afternoons visiting Lansky’s haunts: the former military base where Lansky and Batista met, the Marina Hemingway where Lansky took his mistress Carmen, the hotels where raucous Americans arriving on 80 daily flights from the United States once crowded around roulette wheels and blackjack tables.
The Capri, the Riviera, the Deauville and the Nacional hotels still stand today, destinations for beach-bound Europeans.
Casielles described how Lansky left Cuba for good with a fake passport in April 1959. Carmen accompanied him to the United States, where he died in 1983, 12 years after he was indicted for allegedly skimming millions of dollars from the Flamingo hotel-casino in Las Vegas. The charges were dismissed because of his poor health.
Long after those millions of dollars they collected that New Year’s Eve had been spirited out of Cuba, Casielles underwent a “spiritual, ethical and moral crisis” about the harm organized crime had caused his homeland, Cirules said.
“This was the reality of many Cubans at that time,” agreed a longtime friend, Gregorio Hernández, a musician and dancer. “Jaime became a super revolutionary, an admirer of Fidel Castro and his work.”
Casielles later became interested in Cuba’s African-influenced music, helping the dance troupe begin projects such as Havana’s popular Sábados de la Rumba, which brings families together to enjoy traditional music each weekend.
Casielles did not hide his past, but “his life after that was so different,” Hernández said. “He left behind a life of wealth and shared all these difficult years with us.”
The Associated Press Tuesday, May 29, 2007 http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/29/news/cuba.php
