Epilogue

The foreign traffickers who smuggled drugs from either Europe or Latin America to the United States using Cuba as a transit point abandoned the island after the revolution and relocated in other countries. Corsican Paul Mondolini left Cuba for Madrid in January 1960, returned to Havana at the beginning of the next month, and then quickly left again, this time for Mexico City. Mondolini later met up with his Canadian associate, Lucien Rivard, in Acapulco. The two drug lords continued making trips to Mexico for some years to come.1 Mondolini also maintained his heroin operations in France, as did Jean-Baptiste Croce and Ansan Bistoni, and his client networks in Mexico, Canada, and South America. He also joined a criminal organization run by Edouard Toudayan. Bistoni operated a processing laboratory near Cros-de-Cagnes, in France, and established a second facility, in partnership with Croce, in Corsica.2 By 1966, French drug traffickers had begun to base some of their operations in Madrid and Barcelona, and both Mondolini and Croce frequently traveled to Spain.3 On the other side of the Atlantic, the Corsican mafia now transported heroin from France to the United States via Argentina and Mexico.4 The Corsican traffickers also operated in reverse, sending cocaine from Buenos Aires to Europe.5 In 1967, more than seven years after he had last stood on Cuban soil, Mondolini was captured in France, indicted, and put on trial.6

Lucien Rivard, who owned a summer resort near Montreal, was captured and jailed in Canada in June 1964. He attempted to avoid extradition to the United States, where he faced charges of having imported heroin from Europe via Mexico and Canada. The Rivard case erupted into a political scandal when one of the assistants to the Canadian minister of justice was accused of attempted bribery on behalf of Rivard. The scandal broadened when the justice minister and a member of Parliament stepped down after admitting that they had failed to investigate the assistant’s actions. Further embarrassing the government, Rivard escaped from jail in March 1965 and remained

on the lam until he was captured in his hideout in provincial Quebec four months later. He was extradited to Laredo, Texas, and tried for having arranged four deliveries of between seventy and seventy-five pounds of heroin. Rivard was convicted and sentenced to twenty years in prison, while three of his Canadian associates received prison terms ranging between twelve and fifteen years.7

The monitoring and pursuit of other traffickers who had operated or found sanctuary in Cuba during the time of Batista’s dictatorship continued to yield results. Antranik Paroutian, another of the French drug runners who had brought heroin into Cuba during the 1950s, was captured in Beirut in March 1960. Paroutian was extradited to the United States, tried, and sentenced to twenty years in prison for bringing heroin into the country. Testimony revealed that Paroutian had transferred more than half a million dollars from several New York banks to secret numbered Swiss accounts. He appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to consider it.8

Mexico also became home to several gangs of Cuban drug traffickers who needed a new location in which to continue their illicit activities.9 On 30 June 1960, authorities discovered a cocaine-processing laboratory in Mexico City as the result of an investigation in which U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) agents stationed in both Cuba and Mexico shared information with their Mexican and Cuban counterparts. The raid turned up 3 kilos of cocaine and 11 kilos of heroin.10 Some months later, six more Cubans were captured, along with a Mexican associate, after a cocaine laboratory exploded in Cuernavaca.11 Despite these successes, however, other Cuban drug traffickers who had relocated to Mexico continued to ship cocaine, obtained from South America, to the Miami and New York markets.12

After the revolution, the Cubans who headed the island’s drug trafficking gangs generally stayed away from the United States, since their names appeared on the list of criminals sought by American agents. At the same time, however, New York’s long-established Cuban drug distribution networks gained strength.13 Cubans were involved in drug trafficking in Miami, California, and Texas. At least eighty-six Cubans were convicted and sentenced for violating U.S. antidrug laws between July 1959 and early 1966, providing some indication of the measure of their involvement. Forty-nine of these individuals operated in the New York–New Jersey area, while thirty-five operated in Florida. Furthermore, nearly three-quarters of the group came from Havana and its environs. Their sentences ranged from as little as one year in

prison to twenty-five years behind bars, but most terms ran between five and ten years.14

Between 1959 and 1966, virtually all of the Cubans convicted in Florida on drug trafficking charges had arrived in Miami after the revolutionary government took power. With some exceptions, these people trafficked for the most part in cocaine.15 The pattern in New York City differed somewhat, however: Cubans formed the largest group among those convicted of cocaine trafficking during the period, while a smaller but still significant number were convicted of selling heroin to New York’s huge market for that drug, in which traffickers of various nationalities participated. These Cubans generally were arrested for making retail sales of the drug on the street.16

In addition to their involvement on the U.S. mainland, Cubans also participated in drug trafficking in Puerto Rico. As the director of the Puerto Rican Division of Drugs and Narcotics declared at the end of the 1970s, “Many [Cubans] increased the traffic and use of drugs, especially cocaine.”17

Central America also figured in the new scheme, as Cuban exiles set up a laboratory in Managua, doing so, according to U.S. authorities, with the likely complicity of the head of Nicaragua’s immigration service. This gang included Cubans who lived in Miami as well as in Nicaragua, and its members used young Americans as their mules. The gang had extensive networks that reached as far as Detroit.18

Before the revolution, Cuba’s cocaine trafficking had been handled by people of other nationalities, and they, too, continued sending the drug to the United States after Castro took power. In August 1965, for example, chemist Luis González Aguilera shipped eighteen pounds of cocaine to the United States using Blanca Ibáñez as his courier. Ibáñez, however, was intercepted by agents in the Miami airport and subsequently convicted and imprisoned.19

Extant records offer no further information regarding the drug-related activities of Colombian brothers Rafael and Tomás Herrán Olózaga, although in 1958 one FBN agent reported to his dismay that they were free on bail and that “reliable information existed that they had gone back into trafficking.”20 Colombia, however, had figured in the international drug trade well before the time of the Herrán Olózaga brothers. During the 1930s and 1940s, illegal drugs were smuggled into Colombia from Europe through the coastal ports of Cartagena and Barranquilla. Some of the contraband drugs were consumed locally, though their high cost restricted them only to the well-to-do, while the remainder was reexported to the United States.21

After 1965, a new dimension of the Andean connection was opened when Colombian drug traffickers, in tandem with traffickers of other nationalities, including Americans, began to establish distribution networks in the United States. Its main centers were New York and Miami. Los Angeles served as a secondary hub. Cubans who had settled in the United States helped to set up these networks, through which cocaine and to a lesser extent marijuana were distributed. In addition to the department of Antioquia, Colombian drug traffickers came in considerable numbers from the cities of Bogotá, Barranquilla, and Cali. Some managed to exist in two worlds, running both legal businesses and clandestine laboratories in which they processed coca paste from Peru. Still others combined drug trafficking with emerald smuggling. Typically, mules (citizens of countries increasingly tied to the U.S. economy) would bring cocaine and marijuana on commercial flights to Miami and New York, hoping to blend unremarkably into the larger pool of Colombians traveling between the two countries. Not all, however, got past the customs and drug enforcement agents, and several of the intercepted mules were found to be carrying false passports, suggesting that the traffickers had developed relatively sophisticated criminal networks.22

Inevitably, the higher volume of drug trafficking was reflected in law enforcement statistics. According to one official report, Florida’s crime rate increased 60 percent during the 1960s. Moreover, the report concluded, Florida suffered under “conditions of organized crime that were among the most aggravated in the United States.”23 Yet the scope of the drug problem in Florida was a matter of degree, since in the mid-1950s, Florida’s Office of Narcotic Drugs had already reported that the state was witnessing a rise in the number of arrests and convictions stemming from violations of the drug laws.24 Despite warning against the inference that a “disproportionate amount of illegal activity” could be attributed to the large colony of Cuban refugees, subsequent reports issued by the same Florida agency noted that the cocaine “found in insignificant amounts before the arrival of the Cubans, is now being confiscated on a frequent basis and in great quantities.”25 However, the pattern of involvement by citizens of different countries in drug trafficking in Florida was simply too diverse to permit any single and unvarying cause-and-effect relationship.

Nevertheless, Cubans and South Americans from other countries had significant influence, and a considerable number of Americans were also involved in the Florida drug trafficking business during the 1960s.26 For the most part, the illegal substances involved were heroin, cocaine, and mari-

juana. In a significant number of cases, those selling the drugs were addicts themselves.27 Thus, drug trafficking in Florida could not be ascribed purely to foreign interests or portrayed merely as something that had been “imported.” Rather, much as in Cuba in earlier years, drug trafficking both in Florida and in the rest of the United States became a multinational business whose participants (who accorded the law little if any respect) included both Americans and foreigners as well as fortune-seeking, business-minded immigrants.

On the basis of this mixture of ingredients and players, drug trafficking networks took shape and filled the exploding demand for illegal drugs in the United States. Beginning in the mid-1960s, drug use in the United States ceased being peculiar to fringe groups and became, on a massive scale, an activity pursued by middle-class youth for whom drugs provided an outlet for anti–Vietnam War protests and their rejection of the values transmitted by their parents and older Americans as a whole.28 The enormous growth in U.S. drug use and the development of domestic and international trafficking networks to service it are part of a different history.

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