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 architecture and design. He is the founder of the Palm Springs Modern Committee, an internationally recognized historic preservation organization, and the writer/director of Desert Holiday, a documentary film chronicling the history of Palm Springs as seen through vintage postcards. He resides in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles and in Palm Springs.
(20080515)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25851 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Perfect Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
A fascinating look at Havana, visually rich with hundreds of photos and other unique images, this addition to the literature on one of the world's urban architectural treasures is authored by an architectural historian. Moruzzi's fluid text embellishes the illustrations, drawn mostly from his own collection. Havana enjoys a captivating history, and the legacy of gambling, hotels, drugs, sex, and nightlife makes for an unparalleled reading experience.

Moruzzi emphasizes the building boom of the 1950s, when American mob characters benefited from President Fulgencio Batista's corrupt regime and tourists flocked to the enchanted island a mere 90 miles from America, helped by airlines and cruise lines offering tour packages to Havana. The vivid descriptions of casinos and hotels, many still standing, bring a lost era to life. This attractive book is written for a popular audience but is highly recommended for academic as well as public libraries.
(Boyd Childress Library Journal 20080901)

A juanty, poignant portrait of the city in its pre-revolutionary heyday as a Caribbean playground. [The book] goes a long way toward filling in the mental picture of a city that has been enticingly evoked by movies such as "Our Man in Havana" (1959) and "The Godfather: Part II" (1974)."
(Wall Street Journal )

A most extraordinary book that fills my heart with profound love, sadness, and deep nostalgia.
(Andy Garcia )

If you're looking for images, "Havana Before Castro" has them in bulk. Peter Moruzzi's infatuation with Cuba is illustrated in grand and grandiose style. It's a pop-culture potpourri.
(Peter M Gianotti Newsday )

The glamour of Old Cuba with its music, nightlife, culture and tropical beauty is perfectly expressed in these pages.
(Desi Arnaz, Jr. )

[The book] really put me there: It made me feel like I was staying in towering modernist hotels, ogling dancing girls at nightclubs like the Montmartre, swilling mojitos with Graham Greene and Meyer Lansky, and tapping my toes to the Orquestra Aragon.
(Los Angeles Times )

From the Inside Flap
Through vintage and contemporary photographs, brochures, and artifacts evocative of time and place, Havana Before Castro tells the story of the city that was the most popular exotic destination for Americans during the forty years between World War I and Castro's revolution.
See how 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.
Visit Havana's seamy Shanghai Theatre as well as its glamorous Tropicana, roam the stately Hotel Sevilla-Biltmore and ultramodern Habana Hilton.
Savor a daiquiri at La Floridita (one of Hemingway's favorite watering holes), rub elbows with movie stars at Sloppy Joe's bar, and learn why Cuban cigars remain the world's most highly prized.
Celebrate the influence of Cuban music on American popular culture-the rumba, mambo, cha-cha-cha, and salsa-from its earliest stars such as Xavier Cugat and Desi Arnaz to modern acts like the Buena Vista Social Club.
Celebrate the city's architectural heritage, a Havana Modernism unique to Cuba's topography and climate.
Follow the parade of corrupt presidents who, along with American mobsters such as Meyer Lansky, welcomed the mass tourism that led to Havana becoming a tropical Vegas swirling in a haze of rum and cigars, backed by a conga beat.
Born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1961 and raised in Hawaii, Peter Moruzzi graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and later attended the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. An architectural historian by profession, Moruzzi is an acknowledged expert on mid-century Modern architecture and design. He resides in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles and in Palm Springs, California. He has been obsessed with the history of Cuba since 1987.
www.HavanaBeforeCastro.com
(20080724)

About the Author
An architectural historian by profession, Peter Moruzzi is an acknowledged expert on midcentury Modern architecture and design. He is the founder of the Palm Springs Modern Committee, an internationally recognized historic preservation organization, and the writer/director of Desert Holiday, a documentary film chronicling the history of Palm Springs as seen through vintage postcards. He resides in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles and in Palm Springs.

Customer Reviews

Nostalgia at its best!
My wife and I escaped Cuba during the early sixties. Almost certain that we might be returning within a month or two (50 years ago) we did not bring along photographs, memories, or keepsakes of any kind.
"Havana Before Castro" is the best collection of memorabilia ever to touch my hands.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. You've made my day!


Andrew J. Rodriguez
Award-winning author: "Adios, Havana," a Memoir

A Trip Back in Time
All Cubans dream of returning to Cuba someday, but sadly the Cuba of the 1950s, when Havana was truly the Paris of the Caribbean has been lost. Gone are the days when Cuba was truly an international destination with first class hotels and hundreds of bars, restaurants, and night clubs -- from sketchy little neighborhood joints to fabulous casinos. Here you could hear Olga Guillot at the Tropicana and see spectacular stage shows under the stars. As today, the streets were filled with the latest American cars; only at that time, many were fresh from Detroit assembly lines. Buildings in even the poorest sections of the city were well kept and crisply painted.

Someday, Havana may regain some of its lost luster. Until then, a new book "Havana Before Castro" takes you back in time to relive this great city at its prime. Author Peter Morruzi has put together a great collection of vintage photos in both color and black and white. The book documents life in Cuba from the beginnings of the Cuban republic to the glory days when locals and tourists packed Sloppy Joe's Bar and La Floridita -- "the cradle of the daiquiri."

In "Havana Before Castro," you'll get a taste of a dynamic city where popular nightspots abounded along the Prado, central Havana's promenade, and along Calle 23 in Havana's Vedado district. A chapter on the Havana Riviera provides stunning images on this resort casino where Cuban sculptors created beautiful pieces of art. The Riviera's lobby is itself a work of art with a breathtaking circular staircase and architectural details that present the best of 50's modern.

We especially liked the chapter on "Life as an Habanero." You can almost smell the aromas of fresh Cuban bread, strong café cubano, and fritas frying on a street corner grill, all carried along the streets of Havana by swift, sea-scented breezes.

"Havana Before Castro" is well researched and well written, providing an engaging read that goes beyond the beautiful photos. For those who remember these glory days, the book is truly a trip back in time. For those who never experienced Cuba before Castro, the book is a revelation: Havana was truly a beautiful, world-class city!

Hope and pray that it can happen again...


THREE GUYS FROM MIAMI
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Great illustrations; Surprisingly good read
With a profusion of exquisite illustrations, "Havana Before Castro" is also a suprisingly well-balanced, perceptively written historical work. While one good picture is certainly worth a thousand words,this book goes beyond the typical illustrated book genre to recapture also in text a Havana which vividly lives in the memory of those of us lucky enough to have experienced it first hand and, now, in the memory of those who read this book.