Steamy, Seamy

David Margolick

• BuyThe Havana Mob: Gangsters, Gamblers, Showgirls and Revolutionaries in 1950s Cuba by T.J. English
  Mainstream, 400 pp, £17.99, September 2007, ISBN 978 1 84596 192 3

When people try to capture the time warp in which modern Havana exists, they usually point to its cars, those Eisenhower-era Buicks and Oldsmobiles and Plymouths, held together by Cuban ingenuity and powered by Russian engines and other improvised innards. But on the Malecón, the grand boulevard along the Caribbean at the city’s northern edge, stands a row of other remnants from that era: battered off-white hulks like a mouthful of decayed, cigar-stained teeth.