Contemporary transnational organizations’ recent success in circumventing or challenging nation-state hegemony has spurred scholars to look at alternative systems of economic and political power and to assess critically the relationship between formal and informal spheres of power. Forming part of this current, Eduardo Sáenz Rovner’s La conexión cubana examines drug smuggling, consumption, and gambling in Cuba from the 1920s through the first years of the revolution. The narrative history aims to present the forces integral to these activities and thereby show the historical antecedents of modern-day drug trafficking and related enterprises in the Americas. To do this, the author has turned to an array of published and unpublished sources from Cuba, the United States, and Britain, including U.S. Department of Justice and State Department files, criminal records, Cuban state papers on economics, policing, and diplomacy, Cuban and U.S. newspapers, and corporate records.
The author argues that in the early twentieth...
