[5] The Charter had a significant impact on urban planning after World War II and, through Josep Lluis Sert and Paul Lester Wiener, on the proposed modernization of Havana and in an effort to erase all vestiges of the 16th-century city.

[21] Most of the Platt Amendment provisions were repealed in 1934 when the Cuban-American Treaty of Relations of 1934 between the United States and Cuba was negotiated as a part of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's "Good Neighbor policy" toward Latin America.

Workers on the mill were in constant fear of eviction, with cheap imported labour from other parts of the Caribbean keeping wages very low and the prices for independent cane pushed down to a minimum.

[28] Most of the Platt Amendment provisions were repealed in 1934 when the Cuban-American Treaty of Relations of 1934[29] between the United States and Cuba was negotiated as a part of U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt's "Good Neighbor policy" toward Latin America.

[14] Gomez's successor, Mario Garcia Menocal, wanted to put an end to the corruption scandals and claimed to be committed to administrative integrity as he ran on a slogan of "honesty, peace, and work.

He reaped a vast number of lurid accusations at the hands of Cuban writers who described him as a "man of wax", who was "gross in character, rude in manners, of profound ambition and greedy for despoilment".

[14] Both petty and grand corruption spread to nearly all aspects of public life and the Cuban administration became largely characterized by nepotism as Zayas relied on friends and relatives to illegally gain greater access to wealth.

[22] Mauricio Augusto Font and Alfonso Quiroz, authors of The Cuban Republic and José Martí, say that corruption pervaded in public life under the administrations of Presidents Ramón Grau and Carlos Prío Socarrás.

However, as some of the polling put him in a distant third place, on March 10, 1952, just four months before the presidential election, Batista struck, claiming several unjustifiable reasons, using his position within the Army and being supported by some political sectors of the country.

[62] Throughout the 1950s, Havana served as "a hedonistic playground for the world's elite", producing sizable gambling, prostitution and drug profits for the American mafia, corrupt law-enforcement officials, and their politically elected cronies.

In a bid to profit from such an environment, Batista established lasting relationships with organized crime, notably with American mobsters Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, and under his rule, Havana became known as "the Latin Las Vegas".

Havana achieved the title of being the Latin American city with the biggest middle-class population per capita, simultaneously accompanied by gambling and corruption where gangsters and stars were known to mix socially.

[93][94][95][96][97][98][99][100][101] Allegedly, the meeting was held to discuss various topics including loansharking, narcotics trafficking, and gambling, along with dividing the illegal operations controlled by the recently murdered Albert Anastasia.

One of the most direct and significant outcomes of the Apalachin Meeting was that it helped to confirm the existence of a nationwide criminal conspiracy, a fact that some, including Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover, had long refused to acknowledge.

The east coast of Florida was a loosely knit conglomerate of New York family interests with links to Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Angelo Bruno, Carlos Marcello, and Frank Ragano.

Castro and other officials attempted to present an image of Cuba as a continued tropical paradise for American tourists, as the country desperately needed the revenue, but growing anti-American political rhetoric was already having an impact on bookings at the increasingly empty hotel.

The Havana Rivera was originally owned by mobster Meyer Lansky who had been inspired to build it after visiting his friend, Moe Dalitz's nine-storey Riviera Casino on the Las Vegas Strip.

[165] World War II hindered construction and the progression of architectural implementation in the region when Igor was required to take a job as Chief Engineer for the Army Air Force.

The work was based upon Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse (the Radiant City) book of 1935 and urban studies undertaken by the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in the early 1930s.

-Mumford, 2000, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960, The MIT Press, p. 85 Additionally, they said it was important to reduce commuting times by locating industrial zones close to residential ones and buffering them with wide parks and sports areas.

[178] Despite its title, the Athens Charter cannot be considered as the mutual outcome of the CIAM conference, which took place ten years earlier, but largely as an expression of Le Corbusier's individual concerns.

At a meeting in Zürich in 1931, CIAM members Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Siegfried Giedion, Rudolf Steiger and Werner M. Moser discussed with Cornelis van Eesteren the importance of solar orientation in governing the directional positioning of low-cost housing on a given site.

Van Eesteren had been the chief architect of Amsterdam's Urban Development Section since 1929 and the group asked him to prepare a number of analytical studies of cities for the next main CIAM meeting planned to be in Moscow in 1933.

[193][194] This type of modern administration building has its origin in the first sketches for the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau in 1919, which proposed a cruciform shape for skyscrapers and allegedly addressing questions of "radiating light and stability".

The Mall buildings loom menacingly, like aliens from another galaxy set down on this marble landing strip[211] At a special congress meeting in Berlin later in 1931, van Eesteren presented his findings to his colleagues.

[3] Concurrently, with the definition of the city limits, the Oficina del Plan Regulador de la Habana (OPRH) compiled an existing land-use map of the metropolitan area.

The architects of the JNP were cognizant this overwhelming sway of economic growth, Wiener apparently spent some spare hours in Havana evaluating prospective building sites for the New York developer Paul Tishman.

The architects were aware that their proposal required considerable renovation of existing physical and legal structures because the area they defined as metropolitan Havana was in fact composed of different independent municipalities.

These, Sert suggested, could establish a joint authority that would enact measures to limit the location and design of repartos according to the principles proposed by the JNP and Town Planning Associates.

The architects incorporated other patios into the new palace: the large public plaza in front of the building, the elevated terrace connecting the various reception halls and the residential component, and the smaller courtyards that were inserted among the rooms of the more private quarters.