Product Description
Featuring hundreds of vintage photographs, postcards, brochures, and other materials evocative of time and place, Havana Before Castro: When Cuba Was a Tropical Playground documents how the city of Havana evolved from Prohibition haven and rich man’s playground to a heady blend of glittering nightclubs, outrageous cabarets, all-night bars, and backstreet brothels. Here, captured in one amazing book, is the drama, passion, intrigue, and opulence of a legendary city during its heyday-before the Castro dictatorship re-imagined the country and Americans were banned from travel to this tropical paradise.
An architectural historian by profession, Peter Moruzzi is an acknowledged expert on mid-century Modern a… More >>
Havana Before Castro: When Cuba was a Tropical Playground
“Havana Before Castro” is the typical un-balanced poorly written account of Cuba before Castro. Without doubt, this book is a hit with the Miami Cuban Mafia.
The real Cuba before Castro, was an island built by the rich and corrupt for the enjoyment of the rich and corrupt. Drugs, alcohol, and even child prostitution/trafficking prospered while the average citizen (the you’s and me’s of society) lived in poverty under a system that kept them as ignorant cogs in the wheel of greed.
Cubans have a misplaced tendency to think that Cuba before Castro was a wonderland; a land of plenty! It was, a land of plenty poverty and plenty crime. A land where education, health care, clothing, and even your next meal was out of reach. A land where people lived as peasants in shacks; not because of an embargo but because of government sponsored poverty. Need we all remember that the Cuban Revolution was supported by the people because the people were fed up by those who came before Castro.
This book should be retitled to “Cuba Before Morals”. It is a wonderful collection of pictures and nothing more. Rating: 2 / 5
The author’s passion truly shines through in this book. And he doesn’t cover just one or two aspects of Havana before Castro, but every facet that I think he could possibly fit in!
I simply love this book. Though I have to admit that I look through it and wonder to myself, “Where did American glamor go?” We used to be all about the little black dress and 3-piece suits, and now I can’t get professionals that want to wear slacks to the office…
Oh well, FANTASTIC book! I’m donating a copy to my Lodge’s cigar bar!
KUDOS to you, Mr. Moruzzi!! Rating: 5 / 5
As someone who was born in Cuba in early 1940s and lived under Castro until 1964 I’m thoroughly enjoying this book – learning things I either had forgotten or never knew – it’s bringing back very fond memories of the Cuba I grew up in. Rating: 5 / 5
Thank you for a wonderful trip down memory lane. Greatly enjoyed the many, many photos, some of places I was too young to have visited as a child, before I left Cuba. Rating: 5 / 5
Color and vintage black and white photos abound in HAVANA BEFORE CASTRO: WHEN CUBA WAS A TROPICAL PLAYGROUND. It re-creates an era when the city was a popular destination for Americans between World War I and Castro’s revolution, packing over 500 color and black and white images into a ‘then and now’ recreation contrasting past and present. Any library strong in Cuban history and culture must have this. Rating: 5 / 5