By Maria Leonor Rodriguez Prat

In Cuba, the economic crisis and resource scarcity contribute to petty corruption, while opaque institutions and military control over key economic sectors enable forms of grand corruption. Cuba’s partial financial isolation both limits and obscures illicit inflows, but select recent cases indicate a growing vulnerability to transnational money laundering. While formal anti-corruption frameworks exist in Cuba, enforcement remains highly selective and politicised, particularly in cases involving state and military elites.

Bergen: U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre, Chr. Michelsen Institute. , U4 Help Desk,2025, 29p.

By Eduardo Sáenz Rovner and Russ Davidson

A comprehensive history of crime and corruption in Cuba, The Cuban Connection challenges the common view that widespread poverty and geographic proximity to the United States were the prime reasons for soaring rates of drug trafficking, smuggling, gambling, and prostitution in the tumultuous decades preceding the Cuban revolution. Eduardo S?enz Rovner argues that Cuba's historically well-established integration into international migration, commerce, and transportation networks combined with political instability and rampant official corruption to help lay the foundation for the development of organized crime structures powerful enough to affect Cuba's domestic and foreign politics and its very identity as a nation.S?enz traces the routes taken around the world by traffickers and smugglers. After Cuba, the most important player in this story is the United States. The involvement of gangsters and corrupt U.S. officials and businessmen enabled prohibited substances to reach a strong market in the United States, from rum running during Prohibition to increased demand for narcotics during the Cold War.

Chapel Hill, NC:University of North Carolina Press, 2008. 247p.