Chapter . . . . .4 ........................................ Corruption and Drug Trafficking in Cuba during the Second World War and the Early Postwar Years
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t the end of 1942, as the United States marked the first anniversary of its entrance into the Second World War, agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) found a quantity of morphine and cocaine from Cuba in Kansas City. The drugs had been siphoned from legally imported quo tas and then brought back clandestinely into the United States.1 Based on this case, the FBN decided that it would no longer grant permits for the export of legal shipments of drugs from the United States to Cuba. Such a policy presumably would prevent the drugs from being diverted to illegal channels.2 The case, however, did not stop there, as the U.S. embassy in Cuba requested that an FBN agent be designated to assist the Cuban ministry of health in reconstructing how the drugs had been diverted. Bureau officials chose a lead agent, Claude Follmer, who had been in charge of the initial investigation in Kansas City.3 In turn, the Cuban Department of State authorized Eduardo Palacios Planas, commissioner of drugs in the health ministry, to exchange information about his country’s narcotics situation with U.S. officials.4 Perhaps the least surprising element of the case was that the drugs had turned up in Kansas City, at the time a hotbed of corruption and organized crime: “If Chicago was the most corrupt city in the country, Kansas City was a close second, with its municipal police department run by a former Capone gangster.”5 In his lengthy report, Follmer blamed the episode squarely on Cuba’s police force: “As the result of inefficiency and corruption, past and present, in the national police, all of the vices known to modern civilization have prospered for many years in Cuba. At present, just as in the recent past, the major criminal conduct in Cuba revolves around assassination, gambling, prostitution, and an extensive traffic in marijuana and narcotic drugs.”6 Follmer drew at-
