At 10:30 p.m., gamblers are already packing the slot machines at the casino. Bartenders offer free booze, dancers swing to merengue music, and bingo players compete for a $500 prize near the poker tables. At midnight on this Friday in May, one lucky player wins a raffle for a $2,900 Yamaha motorcycle, then trades the keys for cash.

It’s Las Vegas with a Latin American twist. Not that long ago, gambling would have been illegal here in Caracas, bastion of the far left. Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s firebrand populist leader who died in 2013, banned casinos, saying they caused social decay comparable to “prostitution, addiction, and drug use.”

Those days are gone, as is clear to anyone visiting Las Mercedes, the bustling neighborhood east of downtown that’s home to the new Humboldt Casino. “During this past 10 years, we were missing a place like this, where we could have fun,” says Maria Elena Millan, a 52-year-old real estate broker, before heading to a roulette wheel with her husband.