It became a kind of a combination celebration and riot all rolled into one, and one of the most telling things about it was by the early morning, huge mobs of people started to flow through the streets of Havana making music and cheering revolutionary slogans. One of the first things they did was target the casinos. They went into a number of the casinos and trashed the casinos and dragged the gambling equipment out into the streets and set it on fire. So this was a really clear example of the degree to which the casinos and the gambling and the whole presence of the mob in Havana had become a source of resentment, anger and even revolutionary fervor that eventually boiled over on the morning of January 1, 1959.

And the actor George Raft was doing his usual business, greeting people at - was it the Capri Casino?

Yes, it was.

And what happened?

The people and the revolutionary guard stormed into the casino at the time when he was there. He was determined to save the place. And so he tells the story - there are other eyewitness accounts of this story. His version of it from his biography is, of course, the most flattering to him of how he stood up to the revolutionaries, and one of the lead revolutionaries who was there to trash the casino looked at him and said to the others, she said, That's George Raft, the actor.

So they all kind of stopped, a recognizable face, and he said to them Look, you know, take what you want, but there's no need to trash the casinos, and so the legend is that he kind of talked them down and saved the Capri Hotel casino from being trashed.