However, thinking back over the events of his life, he concluded that his marginal background and a certain racial disconnect from teachers at his art preparatory school were largely to blame. Just as the Post-Soviet generation was coming of age the Communist bloc collapsed. By Soviet trade and subsidies had ceased. Food was scarce. Buses and cars all but vanished, factories closed, tractors rusted in the fields.
In the US government tightened its blockade of Cuba. Fidel called the crisis the Special Period of wartime austerity in a time of peace. In Post-Soviet Cuba, while most people are engaged in illegal side-lines in order to survive, the crisis provided lucrative opportunities for a few.
Mario recounts that in the depth of the Special Period he warded off hunger by poaching cabbages and potatoes from state farms. When he needed shoes, he covertly sold sandwiches in school. Juan got by raising chickens and piglets which he sold to his neighbors. Laments about the loss of equality permeate these accounts of the Special Period. The narrators describe the agonies, and a few of the ecstasies, of inequality. Pavel, an opponent of the Castro government, a dissident, reminisced about going to primary school in a glorious mansion that had belonged to a sugar magnate before the revolutionary government converted it to a school.
Mario, a member of the Communist Party, protested that although everyone once enjoyed equal health care, lately a few dollars could buy you better treatment via bribes. According to historian Rosalie Schwartz, in response to the threat that these games posed to the Havana casinos, Lansky opened a school to train and screen casino employees.
Only trained and trustworthy individuals were to gain access to the world of blackjack dealers, croupiers, and roulette stickmen.
Eliminating the petty chiselers from his casinos, Lansky ran an efficient operation that attracted big-time professional players to his crap tables, and gamblers who could trust the fairness of the games.
The big crooks were not going to let the small crooks discredit and ruin their business. There were undoubtedly strong links between the Mafia and the Batista regime, but some observers have greatly magnified and distorted the nature of those links. Journalist T. Cirules, who later accused English of plagiarism, argued that the power of the Mafia, in a permanent alliance with the US intelligence services, had taken over every level of power in Cuba.
However, the Mafia in Cuba was only one, albeit highly corrupt, interest group. The Mafia had no interest whatsoever in running Cuba; it just wanted a place to pursue their interests, primarily in gambling, and also in the drug trade, unmolested by the US or the Cuban government. Rather than trying to control the government and the political and economic life of the island, these mobsters focused their efforts on preventing other criminals from invading their turf.
It is estimated that by the end of the fifties Havana had brothels and 11, women earned their living as sex workers. Compared with New York City in , where 40, female sex workers were reportedly working, the ratio of sex workers in s Havana, with a population of 1 million people, was approximately double the amount of the one in New York City, with 8 million people.
The salient role that sex work played in the tourist industry, as well as the flamboyance of some of its venues, contributed in a major way to its visibility and notoriety. Despite the high number of Cuban women engaged, and exploited, in the industry, there were many more Cuban women in other highly exploited sectors. Poor and unemployed young rural women, a major recruitment zone for the Havana bordellos, were far more likely to end up working as maids in a middle- or upper-class urban household than as prostitutes.
The moral economy of the Cuban peasant and agricultural proletariat, which included notions of dignity, strong parental authority, and folk religion, were powerful forces against sex work. According to the Cuban national census — the last census held before the revolutionary victory in — 87, women were working as domestic servants, 77, women were working for a relative without pay, and 21, women were totally without employment and looking for work. Moreover, an estimated 83 percent of all employed women worked less than ten weeks a year, and only 14 percent worked year-round.
These were the far more shocking realities of the uneven economic development induced by the US empire and Cuban capital on the island. If many Americans, including sections of the American liberal and radical left, saw casino gambling, the Mafia, and prostitution as defining characteristics of what was wrong with the Cuba of the s, the Cuban opposition on the island had bigger fish to fry — dictatorship, widespread corruption of public officials, the evils of the one-crop economy and extreme rural poverty, high unemployment particularly among young people, in both urban and rural Cuba , and in the case of the Communist opposition to Batista, US imperialism.
Fidel Castro made no public mention of imperialism until after the revolutionary victory. He promised also that his revolutionary government would nationalize the electricity and telephone monopolies and confiscate the wealth of those who had misappropriated public funds. Subsequent pronouncements made by Castro during the last two years of the struggle against the dictatorship were socially more moderate, as he successfully rallied a broad social and political coalition in support of the guerrilla and urban struggles of the 26th of July Movement.
But even when the casinos and the Mafia became more important in the late s, neither Castro, nor any other opposition leader, mentioned the Mafia, gambling, or prostitution in their political pronouncements. The game is On January 1, , following a New England Patriots touchdown against the Miami Dolphins, Doug Flutie enters the game for what initially appears to be a two-point conversion play.
On January 1, , one of the largest and most significant trade pacts in world history comes into effect. In 45 B. Soon after becoming Roman dictator, Julius Caesar decided that the traditional Roman calendar was in dire need of reform. Introduced around the seventh century In , a slave revolt erupted on the French colony, and Toussaint Louverture, a formerly Attempting to stitch together a nation mired in a bloody civil war, Abraham Lincoln made a last-ditch, but carefully calculated, decision regarding the institution of slavery in America.
By the end of , Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. A farmer named Daniel Freeman submits the first claim under the new Homestead Act for a property near Beatrice, Nebraska. Signed into law in by President Abraham Lincoln, the Homestead Act essentially legalized the long-standing American practice of squatting on the vast But the prison with which Johnny Cash was most closely Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is published.
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