6 The Prío Socarrás Government and Drug Trafficking

Chapter 6. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Prío Socarrás Government and Drug Trafficking

Under the government of President Carlos Prío Socarrás (1948–52), Cuba’s reports to the United Nations continued to maintain that the country’s drug problem involved primarily marijuana and a very limited amount of morphine and that the problem primarily affected lower-class elements of society.1 Thus, for example, one report asserted that “the drug that addicts use most heavily is marijuana . . . out of Mexico, which, because it costs the least is used the most.” The report continued that such findings were hardly surprising, “given that the majority of those using it are from the country’s lower class.” The same report indicated that during 1948, the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare had destroyed 222 marijuana cigarettes, 15 pounds of loose marijuana, and just 10 grams of cocaine. The document acknowledged, however, that the retail price of heroin was high “due to its scarcity.”2 The figures for 1949 did not differ significantly: 125 marijuana cigarettes, 5 pounds of loose marijuana, 399 vials of morphine, and 27 grams of cocaine were destroyed, and 63 drug cases came before the courts.3 A report submitted the same year by a U.S. antidrug agent noted that because of excess supplies in New York, cocaine prices in Cuba were three times higher than in the United States.4

In 1950, however, Cuba’s report to the United Nations showed that although Cuban authorities destroyed only 96 marijuana cigarettes and 8 pounds of loose marijuana, 1,117 grams of cocaine had been confiscated and the courts had heard 125 drug cases.5 For 1951, the last full year of the Prío presidency, the Cuban government reported to the United Nations that the courts had heard 75 drug cases and that a much greater amount of drugs had been confiscated: 146 marijuana cigarettes, 1,360 grams of loose marijuana, 87 vials of morphine, 595 grams of opium, 592 grams of morphine powder, 1.5 grams of cocaine, and 350 grams of coca paste. Both drug dealing and drug use were

generally the province of young men; of the 43 court cases in which the offenders’ gender was specified, 42 involved men and only 1 involved a woman. Those accused ranged between twenty-four and thirty-six years of age.6

Claiming that the volume of drug trafficking taking place on merchant ships had increased noticeably since the Second World War, the U.S. government introduced a December 1950 United Nations resolution calling on member states to compile “a list of those crew on merchant ships who have been convicted, inclusive of the years 1946 to 1950, of crimes connected to drug smuggling.” The measure also asked that “sailors’ papers and officers’ licenses be revoked when held by such people.”7 The Cuban government expressed its support for such an initiative to the Office of the Secretary-General.8

At the beginning of 1950, Prío offered to support Eduardo Chibás in the 1952 presidential campaign; according to Chibás, he rejected the offer because “we do not conclude agreements with bandits. . . . The Orthodox movement can’t line up in any way with those who steal from the public treasury, be they members of the government or of the opposition. For that reason, the three soul mates, Prío Socarrás, Grau, [and] Batista, are all equally rejected.”9 On another occasion, Chibás accused the president and his brother, Antonio, “of having embezzled millions of pesos.”10 Chibás also claimed to have documents suggesting that President Prío and Genovevo Pérez Dámera, head of the army, were prepared to accept a section of land in the province of Pinar del Río in return for helping an estate owner expel some squatters.11

Yet Chibás, the mercurial public face of anticorruption in Cuba, was tormented by private demons. Days before he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the stomach, an act committed at the end of one of his weekly radio broadcasts, Chibás repeated his accusations against “the government of Carlos Prío for being the most corrupt of all those which the Republic has had up to the present.”12 Chibás also accused the president of having tolerated drug trafficking and contended that highly placed Prío Socarrás administration officials had profited from the business.13 In January 1952, Fidel Castro, then a young firebrand in the political party founded by Chibás, also leveled corruption charges against Prío.14

Foreign governments echoed Chibás’s, Castro’s, and other Cuban reformers’ views regarding Prío. One U.S. State Department internal report, for example, called attention to “the prevalence of graft and corruption . . . as a traditional feature of Cuban administrations.”15 The British embassy in Cuba

noted that “it is difficult to regard [Prío] as an honest man.”16 Eighteen months later, British officials accused Prío of having arranged for the disappearance of a file dealing with the embezzlement of funds during the Grau administration, a scheme in which he was personally implicated.17 Prío not only amassed personal wealth but also tried to pacify and buy off gunmen operating under the cover of political groups by using state funds to give them jobs and sinecures.18

Prío’s government also supported democratic movements in the Caribbean basin. After the 1948 coup in Venezuela against Rómulo Gallegos, both Gallegos and Rómulo Betancourt received political asylum in Havana.19 Prío also supported the efforts of the Caribbean Legion, a multicountry alliance of democratic political leaders across Latin America, to overthrow Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship in the Dominican Republic and offered protection to Dominicans exiled in Cuba.20 The Prío government’s “sympathy with democratic principles” led it to organize the Inter-American Conference for Democracy and Freedom, which took place in Havana in May 1950 and was attended by both Latin American and North American delegates.21

At the beginning of 1952, journalist Mario Kuchilán made public rumors of an impending coup d’état against Prío, referring to “a conversation in which a conspiracy on the part of military men dressed in civilian clothing was taken to be a sure thing.”22 State security forces had in fact been monitoring Fulgencio Batista’s activities and his connections with military retirees and those on active service. Batista had concluded that he lacked sufficient strength in the country at large to win the presidential election and that he could obtain power only via a campaign to discredit the Prío government whose logical end point would be a coup d’état.23 The military officers who supported Batista knew that a third consecutive victory for a politician from civilian ranks would indefinitely exclude them from power.24

The coup took place on 10 March 1952 and was a relatively peaceful affair. At dawn, tanks pulled out of the Camp Columbia military barracks, heading toward the presidential palace. The police and the few soldiers guarding the palace fired a few shots, but rather than resisting, Prío and most of the members of his government fled to Miami. Several provincial military garrisons remained loyal to Prío, but they capitulated after learning that Batista followers controlled the Matanza and Camagüey detachments.25 Some elements of the population protested the coup, and the students and workers who would eventually become the seedbed of opposition to Batista called a general strike.26

Edward G. Miller, then serving as the U.S. assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, received the news as a “complete surprise” and deplored “the manner in which the coup occurred.” Although Miller acknowledged that Batista’s government would be “basically friendly” toward the United States, Washington extended de facto recognition to the new Cuban government only after it had promised to fulfill its international obligations and to adopt a favorable posture toward private capital. Furthermore, Batista agreed that both he and the provisional government would do whatever could be done “under the law to eliminate the freedom and privileges which the communists were now enjoying in Cuba,” an important change from his alliance with the communists during his first administration.27 Not until two and a half weeks after the coup, under pressure from American lobbyists partial to Batista, did the United States recognize his government, long after the military dictatorships in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic had done so.28 According to one of the ministers in Prío’s government, the U.S. embassy “had nothing to do with the coup d’état”; rather, Batista’s takeover arose from “his authority among the officer class.”29

During the first months of Batista’s government, the U.S. ambassador, Willard Beaulac, maintained a clear distance from the Cuban president. Almost three months after the coup, Beaulac wrote that although he had met Batista informally on two or three occasions, “I have consciously refrained from rushing in to see him.” Beaulac entertained doubts about the stability of the new regime, noting, “This is not a happy situation down here. In fact, I get sick at heart when I think of the unfortunate developments that may possibly occur.”30 Miller concurred: “The Cubans seem to be headed for a terrific mess both politically and economically. . . . Our ability to limit these developments is almost non-existent.”31

After the coup, Prío and his brothers faced a wide variety of charges of drug trafficking and cocaine use. Batista claimed that cocaine had been found in the presidential palace.32 Although the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) assigned an agent to watch one of the brothers, Francisco, in Miami, the agent found no evidence to implicate Prío in drug use.33 However, another FBN agent, J. Ray Olivera, maintained that he had heard about the Prío brothers’ efforts to obtain cocaine in Havana.34 In addition, an FBN informant indicated that he had met Francisco Prío in Miami through a Bolivian drug trafficker, Blanca Ibáñez de Sánchez, from whom Prío wanted to buy cocaine.35 Taking advantage of these accusations, Carlos Prío’s foes hatched a plot to draw him into involvement with drugs in the United States.36 Though

the scheme proved unsuccessful, rumors linking the Prío Socarrás brothers to drug trafficking and drug use persisted.37

The corruption and the looting of the public treasury that characterized the Prío Socarrás presidency were damaging enough to Cuban interests, but as the final months of Prío’s government ticked away, a committee of the U.S. Senate enacted certain measures that eventually had important repercussions for both Cuba’s economy and its domestic politics.

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