According to this slide-show history of the great and mysterious old gangster Meyer Lansky in today's NY Times, Lansky had an apartment in the same building as one of my close college friends AND in Cuba he built a huge resort hotel and casino and shared the gambling profits with Fulgencio Batista, the dictator that Castro overthrew.
Incidentally, I worked at LIFE magazine in the mid sixties in the department that integrated advertisements and articles into the magazine. In those days, there were what seemed an incredible number of regional editions: six. These six editions were characterized by inserts of a number of pages with regional advertising. Anyway, I was in charge of maintaining the "dummies" of all the magazines -- the national as well as the regional -- as they proceeded through all the steps to publication. This meant I spent my time cutting and pasting, cutting and pasting as articles changed, and new ads came in and so forth. Literally, in those ancient days, I would get copy printed haphazardly on big pieces of newsprints, cut it more or less down to size, slap tape on the back and then slap rubber cement on the tape so that I could easily pull it up from one page of the "dummy" and paste it down on another as the editors changed their minds from one day (minute) to the next about where it should go. Articles weren't supposed to reflect negatively on advertising (a plane crash on the same page as an airlines ad, for instance), colors weren't supposed to clash, ads weren't to reflect negatively on stories ("the family that prays together stays together," which was a public service ad, for instance, next to a story about the Pope as a possible Nazi sympathizer.)
So back to Cuba. There was in my office at LIFE a Cuban refugee, a very dapper man from a family that was prosperous in Cuba before they had to make a run for it. I remember him as being pretty nice and not overtly political, but when the subject of Castro and the Revolution came up, he would shake his head and wonder why the campesinos had wanted a revolution: at his father's place, they always had enough to eat and shoes to wear and Sundays off for church.
Incidentally, I worked at LIFE magazine in the mid sixties in the department that integrated advertisements and articles into the magazine. In those days, there were what seemed an incredible number of regional editions: six. These six editions were characterized by inserts of a number of pages with regional advertising. Anyway, I was in charge of maintaining the "dummies" of all the magazines -- the national as well as the regional -- as they proceeded through all the steps to publication. This meant I spent my time cutting and pasting, cutting and pasting as articles changed, and new ads came in and so forth. Literally, in those ancient days, I would get copy printed haphazardly on big pieces of newsprints, cut it more or less down to size, slap tape on the back and then slap rubber cement on the tape so that I could easily pull it up from one page of the "dummy" and paste it down on another as the editors changed their minds from one day (minute) to the next about where it should go. Articles weren't supposed to reflect negatively on advertising (a plane crash on the same page as an airlines ad, for instance), colors weren't supposed to clash, ads weren't to reflect negatively on stories ("the family that prays together stays together," which was a public service ad, for instance, next to a story about the Pope as a possible Nazi sympathizer.)
So back to Cuba. There was in my office at LIFE a Cuban refugee, a very dapper man from a family that was prosperous in Cuba before they had to make a run for it. I remember him as being pretty nice and not overtly political, but when the subject of Castro and the Revolution came up, he would shake his head and wonder why the campesinos had wanted a revolution: at his father's place, they always had enough to eat and shoes to wear and Sundays off for church.