Jordan Morgan
Peter Moruzzi make sit a habit of writing informative picture and poster filled books looking back at nostalgic vacation spots and his book looking at pre-Castro Cuba gives a reader an insight of what this tourist spot was for the plutocrat early jet and cruise travelers to the island neighbor of the United States. The amount of tourists and people form around the world going into perhaps the first of these global-city states was staggering and people who wish to see a snapshot of what life was like as people paid big bucks to watch Dezi Arnez and other bang them drums can be seen in the book "Havana Before Castro".
This cartoonish and picture filed book gives the reader many details of the bar and hob nobbing gangster party atmosphere Havana was before the communist revolution and how this luxury big spending lifestyle of foreigners coming into Cuba and taking advantage of a corrupt leadership lead to the Robin Hood small rebel faction of a Fidel Castro quickly taking over and over throwing it. This book gives a hard look at the great architecture of many of these classic buildings and theatres of this Las Vegas type city in the pre-Vegas era. The look at glazed terra-cotta buildings and other visual building imagery was my favorite part of the book.
Elsewhere through this book details of the exotic cabaret shows, rumba bands, and the houses of prostitution clearly give a reader the image that this place was also porn capital of the world before the industry really found a home in California. Rum, Rumba, and roulette was all Havana was about before the populace rose up against this perverse definition of what it meant to be Cuban and Cuba was all about and the author pretty much does a wonderful job exposing the hedonistic place. International corrupted bought Cuba and made it a money playground for the worlds elites as Mr Moruzzi features many old postcards and photographs of people drinking and dancing at the various nightclubs and big places he highlights throughout this visually appealing book to flip . The growth of Havana and big building construction of Havana under the Batista regime would influence many an American and European urban center years later as untold debt allowances allowed the uber-sick wealthy class to buy up old properties and create these adult drinkdom street scenes restaurants, bars , nightclubs, bathouses, caberests, shops, condos,
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