While Hollywood has been inundated with TV series featuring Latin American drug cartels in recent years, shows like Narcos, Queen of the South, and Griselda aren’t going away anytime soon. Viewers continue to be fascinated by the shady underworld of these stories. Next in line to test audiences in the ways of the narcocultura is Hotel Cocaine, a crime thriller TV series set in Miami during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Hotel Cocaine, which is currently streaming on MGM+, stars Danny Pino (Mayans M.C.) as Roman Compte, a Cuban expatriate who manages the Mutiny Hotel, an upscale venue that served as an epicenter for the Miami cocaine scene during that time.
Yul Vazquez (Severance) plays Nestor Cabal, Roman’s estranged older brother, who is a major cocaine kingpin in the area. Nestor is surprised when Roman comes to him in hopes of joining the trade. Little does Nestor know, however, that Roman’s interest in his criminal dealings stems from a DEA agent (Michael Chiklis) who has forced him to infiltrate his brother’s cartel and help bring it down.
For Pino, drug cartel narratives – whether they’re about El Chapo, Griselda Blanco or someone as infamous – are much too broad to put a number on how many series should be produced, especially since viewers have been so fascinated by them for decades.
“The world of the nefarious illegality of recent arrivals to the United States doesn’t start with Griselda or Scarface or Hotel Cocaine,” Pino told Remezcla during a recent interview. “There’s not one story that covers it all. The Sopranos doesn’t cover all of that experience.”
Pino, who is of Cuban heritage, said Hotel Cocaine is much different because it’s about a “very specific moment in time” in Miami that captures what some Cuban Americans were going through after losing their homeland to a communist dictatorship. “[Hotel Cocaine] is adding to the tapestry of the world of criminality and mobster films and drug dealing,” he said. “Those are things that have not really been explored in the most authentic of ways.”
Vazquez, too, is Cuban and agrees with Pino about the objective of the series. It’s in its distinctiveness of the story that he sees Hotel Cocaine as something special.
“I think it’s very specific to these brothers and what they have been through being Cuban Americans and being forced to flee their homeland,” Vazquez said. “This is not a blanket drug [story]. Drugs are involved, but it’s very unique to this particular family.”
Pino adds that Hotel Cocaine isn’t a TV series trying to romanticize drug dealers. Sure, some of these criminals live in glamorous houses and have limitless amounts of money at their disposal, but that type of lifestyle comes with a downside.
“Every pleasure has a consequence,” Pino said. “There is a social awareness to what the series is talking about – this hedonistic adult paradise being fueled by these narcotics. If you watch the show with specificity, you’ll see that there’s a price to be paid.”
Hotel Cocaine season 1 is currently airing on MGM+ with new episodes on Sundays.
