Life in Havana (RWC)

From Havana:  Life under the cross-dressing Raul Castro continues to improve.

Cuban government employees who are retired on pensions, which is much of the population, are going to get a monthly increase in June. That’s the good news.

The bad news is it will be about $1.95 cents.

That brings the average monthly state pension up to around $9.50 cents. 

That’s $9.50 cents… a month. 

And, in the same city, old Robert Vesco caught the “westbound freight”, to use a term once popular with hoboes. He apparently died six months ago from lung cancer in Havana and was buried without fanfare or announcement.  He was a fugitive from the US for many decades.  Remember Investors Overseas Service, IOS ?  Vesco ripped off those investors big-time.

He settled finally in Cuba, one step ahead of US law enforcement and after yachting episodes on the high seas.  He ultimately caught himself in a wringer with Fidel Castro, who had allowed him to operate criminally, until some member of the Castro family got burned.  Vesco ended up doing nine years in a Cuban jail cell for that.  He has been pretty much invisible for the past couple of decades and the Castro regime has said practically nothing about him. He once had a partner named Bernie Cornfeld.  You might remember him, a kind of nutty celebrity while he was at IOS.  He was a very high profile prisoner in Switzerland for a while.  Bernie had a huge house in Beverly Hills in the early 70’s, which he rented.  It was like a castle and had been built by John Barrymore or some other earlier film star.  I went to a couple of parties there. 

Bernie lived quite lavishly with a constantly replenished troop of good looking young women in residence, Playboy Mansion-style.  One of them was the very young Heidi Fleiss, who later famously turned professional.  I don’t actually remember her but, I learned later, she was a main squeeze of Bernie’s and was very young at the time. Bernie’s mother, a nice lady from Brooklyn, lived upstairs in the castle.  Bernie has since also caught the west-bound freight, though he more likely would have said he cashed in his chips.