We’ve seen this kind of Gangster, Klepto-State before when Cuba’s Fulgencio Batista ran the Island for the Mob and the CIA, and stole and grifted $3.3 billion (in today’s dollars) from his own people.
Jan 21, 2026
(The Golden Telephone gifted to Cuban President Fulgencio Batista by the United Telephone and Telegraph Company as a symbol of the American company’s closeness to Batista’s government and the company’s investment in Cuba. Photo in the public domain, from the Havana Museum of the Revolution, on display as a symbol of the Batista era corruption.)
The most historically accurate and prescient scene in the trilogy of Godfather movies comes in Godfather II, co-written by Mario Puzo, the author of the original Godfather book, and Frances Ford Coppola, the American filmmaker and Academy Award winning director, writer and producer of both The Godfather and Godfather, Part II.
In that scene, American leaders of Organized Crime—as well as major American corporate leaders—travel to Havana to meet with Cuban President Fulgencio Batista and celebrate the birthday of the king of the Mob in Cuba, Hyman Roth—a barely fictional representation of the real-life head of the Havana Crime syndicate, Meyer Lansky. They are all there to celebrate the carving up of Cuba (symbolized by a birthday cake adorned with a map of Cuba being sliced up) by the American Mafia and American Corporate interests, with more than a little help from U.S. Intelligence Agencies.
The scene takes place on the sunny afternoon of December 31, 1958, just hours before Cuba’s corrupt dictator Fulgencio Batista is overthrown by Fidel Castro and Cuban Revolutionaries. Batista ruled Cuba with an iron fist from 1952-1958, propped up with powerful support from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, American financial interests, and American organized crime. Batista was running the perfect “criminal state,” or as Enrique Cirules described it in his book, The Mafia in Havana: A Caribbean Mob Story,(Ocean Press, 2010, North Melbourne, Australia) “a state in the service of the American Mob.”
While the video of that specific scene (see below) is astonishing, parts of the dialogue not seen in the film live loud today, 52-years later, as the Trump Criminal State operates only 90 miles off-shore from Cuba, salivating over the prospect of bringing back a new, lucrative American-controlled, Batista-syle dictatorship. The most meaningful metaphor for Batista’s utterly corrupt rule—and the “gold standard” for representing the kleptocratic, golden idol-obsessed Donald Trump—is the Golden Telephone, which plays a prominent role in Scene 5, from Godfather, Part II. The telephone, a gift of grift from a large international telephone company to President Batista of pre-Castro Cuba, was the quintessential symbol of wealth, power and corruption, a physical representation of how much of Cuba, and Batista, American financial interests owned.
As you view the clip, think of how the Golden Telephone would perfectly match the decor, and the decadence, of Trump’s tacky redecoration of the White House Oval Office, and how it’s unmistakeable symbol of wealth, power and corruption would have found a fitting home.
(From Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather, Part II, Scene 5)
Not seen in the 5-minute film clip is Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino), recounting a story to the Meyer Lansky character (Hyman Roth, played by Lee Strasberg), of how he witnessed a Cuban rebel blowing himself up after being arrested by Cuban Police.
MICHAEL: We’re making a big investment in Cuba; that’s my only concern.
ROTH(LANSKY): My concern is that the $3 million never arrived at Batista’s numbered account in Switzerland. He thinks it’s because you have second thoughts about his ability to stop the rebels…
The Meyer Lansky character—who, in real life kept Batista on his payroll for years, funneling thousands of dollars a day in drug and gambling profits to the Cuban President—expresses how the Cuba they’ve created under Batista is the kind of Nirvana for organized crime, he’d like to create in the United States. Pay particularly close attention to what Puzo and Coppola wrote 52 years ago, anticipating the rise to power, wealth and corruption of someone precisely like Donald Trump:
ROTH (LANSKY): “If only I could live to see it, kid; to be there with you. How beautifully we’ve done it, step-by-step here; protected, free to make our profit without the Justice Department; 90 miles away in partnership with a friendly government. 90 MILES, just a small step, looking for a man who desperately wants to be President and HAVING THE CASH TO MAKE IT HAPPEN.”
Astonishing. Read that again:
“. . . protected, free to make our profit without the Justice Department.”
Is Trump’s existing hands-off Justice Department what these model American Mobsters dreamed of? What unbridled corporate interests were making millions of dark-money political contributions to for year to create? What the new Crypto ciphers were circling the White House for, like vultures?
Then to underscore what would round out the perfect criminal state in the U.S., Puzo and Coppola spelled it out in giant letters: “LOOKING FOR A MAN WHO DESPERATELY WANTS TO BE PRESIDENT, AND HAVING THE CASH TO MAKE IT POSSIBLE.”
How could they possible know that Donald Trump, consummate con man, grifter, fraud, shake-down artist, sex abuser, pedophile protector, and felon would be the one to answer their advertisement for a pliable American President? The same Donald Trump, Wayne Barrett wrote in the then-seminal book Trump: The Deals and the Downfall (1991, Harper Collins, NY.) on Trump’s lifetime of corruption who “met with Genovese Crime Family boss ‘Fat Tony Salerno’ in the apartment of their mutual attorney, Roy Cohn in 1983.?” How could they not know it would be someone like Trump—a crooked capitalist, ready to defraud anyone at will; a wannabe mob-boss in search of a para-military force to do his bidding?
It took the New York Times decades of not paying serious attention to Trump’s scams & crimes which were occurring right under The Times nose in New York, to finally face how Donald Trump was the American Fulgencio Batista, running the US government as his own criminal enterprise. By the end of his six-years as Cuba’s President, Batista illegally pocketed $300 million, equivalent to $3.3 billion in 2026 dollars.
In a blistering editorial (“How Trump Has Pocketed $1,408, 500,000,” by the Times Editorial Board, published on the first anniversary of Trump’s second term, January 20, 2026) the Times used devastating, easy-to-understand graphics to depict the enormity of the ethical depravity of Trump’s $1.4 billion grift.
Accusing him of “exploiting the Presidency,” the Times says that:
“President Trump has never been a man to ask what he can do for his country…but what his country can do for him .”
Then, in a line straight out of every single historical account of how Fulgencio Batista fleeced Cuba and the Cuban people from 1952-1958, with the active help of American corporations, the American mafia, and US Intelligence Agencies and the Department of State (under Allen and John Foster Dulles), the Times writes:
“Just how much money people, corporations and other nations are willing to put into his pockets in hope of bending the power of government to the service of their interests.”
Batista’s Golden Telephone anyone?
Symbolic as that golden grail of greed may be, that’s small change for Trump as the Times reports, pointing out that:
- The Trump family made $23 million for licensing Trump’s name overseas, since the 2024 election (in Oman, in India, in Saudi Arabia, and in Vietnam) on more than 20 overseas projects. One such project is the $1.5 billion golf complex outside of Hanoi in exchange for Trump’s lowering the threatened tariffs on Vietnam.
- Pocketing $28 million from Amazon on the “Melania” documentary, with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos currying favor on Antitrust Regulation and Defense and Space contracts;
- Major tech and media companies (X, ABC News, Meta, You-Tube & Paramount) paying Trump more than $90 million in forced “settlement” fees, which, in Paramount’s case, after coughing up $16 million for CBS’ “deceptive editing” of a 60-Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, got approval from Trump’s FCC of it’s $8 billion merger with Skydance.
- More than $867 million of secret payments through Cryptocurrencies, including a $2 billion bribe from the UAE, in exchange for Trump giving them access to advanced chips.
In a line that could have been written some 68 years ago about Cuba’s Batista, the Times writes that:
“The President gleefully squeezes American corporations, flaunts gifts from foreign governments, and celebrates the rapid growth of his own fortunes.”
“A culture of corruption is pernicious because it is not just a deviation from government in the public interest; it is also the destruction of the State’s democratic legitimacy;”
“The demands of avarice gradually corrupt the work of government…worse, such a government corrupts the people who live under its rule…the laws are written by the highest bidder.”
In the case of Cuba and Batista, not even that corrupt, tin-pot dictator’s benefactors in the CIA, among American corporate interests or American organized crime could save him from being thrown out of power by a legitimate people’s uprising, which was more about ending pervasive corruption, theft of government services and door-to-door repression, than it was about any political ideology.
Batista barely escaped Cuba with his life (and his fortune) in the early morning hours of January 1, 1959, when the CIA and the Mob—partners in international crime—ushered him to the safety of Dominican Republican, ruled by another CIA puppet Rafael Trujillo, who was assassinated two years later.
With Trump, and Marco Rubio—born of parents who fled Batista’s corruption and repression not Castro’s Cuba—mapping out a new American dictatorial doctrine for Latin America, Trump may yet get his chance to follow in the footsteps of Fulgencio.
After all, there’s a Golden Telephone awaiting his grasp in Cuba’s Museum of the Revolution. How could he resist going after that historic holy grail of greed, wealth, power and corruption? How could Trump resist being carried on the shoulders of some gnarly, old Bay of Pigs invaders, anti-Castro expat-Cubans, into Havana’s Museum of the Revolution, breaking the glass case, ripping out the Golden Telephone, and holding it high, like the Bible he brandished in Washington, DC, six years ago.?
It’s a made for television moment, and no one in the world will have ever seen anything like it.
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