THE SUGAR KING OF HAVANA
The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's Last Tycoon
By John Paul Rathbone
Illustrated. 304 pages. The Penguin Press. $27.95.
When Life in Cuba Was Elegant and Sweet
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: August 12, 2010
The glamorous, slightly risqué picture many of us have of
prerevolutionary Cuba comes from the movies or the theater. Havana is
the racy, romantic getaway where the prim and proper Sarah Brown begins
to fall for the raffish charms of the high-rolling gambler Sky Masterson
in "Guys and Dolls." Havana is also where Michael Corleone in "The
Godfather: Part II" goes to meet fellow mobsters to divvy up control of
the lucrative casino business. It's the Paris of the Caribbean, the
Monte Carlo of the Americas, a place where, in the words of "The
Godfather" character Hyman Roth, the hotels were "bigger and swankier
than any of the rug joints we've put in Vegas," where American tourists
could down exotic drinks, take in live sex shows and carouse in one of
the greatest party towns on earth.
As the journalist John Paul Rathbone reminds us in his fascinating new
book, "The Sugar King of Havana," prerevolutionary Cuba was also an
aristocratic haven, where the members of the upper class — like the
author's mother, the daughter of a well-to-do department store owner —
passed their time at the yacht club, the country club and fashion galas.
Street after street was lined with gracious white stucco houses. There
was a planter so rich that he traveled from New York by private railroad
car and boat, and there were rounds of extravagant debutante parties and
even more extravagant weddings.
And then suddenly, with Fidel Castro, everything abruptly changed: "Then
all the parties with the men in black tie, the women in cocktail
dresses, the debutantes in fluffy confections of white silk and linen
and tulle; the extravagant shows at the Tropicana; the Mafia, their
casinos, and the famous American actor drunk in a small bar in Old
Havana were suddenly over, gone with the wind, and the traces and
stories that they left behind grew into legends."
In this book Mr. Rathbone, a former editor of the Financial Times
business column "Lex," tells the story of prerevolutionary Cuba through
the prism of the man who was once known as the Sugar King: Julio Lobo,
the country's richest man in that era, a figure who "has become
emblematic of a way of life that existed in Havana before the dictator
Fulgencio Batista fled the island on New Year's Eve 1958."
Although Mr. Rathbone, who grew up on his mother's stories about those
"elegant, decadent and whirligig years," occasionally romanticizes Lobo
and his world, he gives us a richly detailed portrait of this
complicated, conflicted man while deftly weaving a thumbnail history of
modern Cuba into Lobo's story. He leaves the reader with a palpable
sense of the glittering and increasingly violent world that this "new
sugar magus" and his family inhabited, and conveys both the profound
emotional dislocations of exile and the dangers and persistence of
nostalgia.
A brilliant businessman who pioneered the hostile takeover, Lobo was
thought to have "an almost occult ability to create wealth." Mr.
Rathbone reports that in his heyday, Lobo handled about half of the six
million tons of sugar that Cuba produced annually and that he had "an
estimated personal fortune of $200 million, about $5 billion in today's
dollars." Indeed, Lobo's gifts as a financier were so legendary that Mr.
Castro's government even asked him to come work with it.
Lobo helped finance the Riviera and the Capri, "two of the glitziest
casino-hotels to open in the 1950s"; dated movie stars like Joan
Fontaine and Bette Davis; and once reportedly filled one of his swimming
pools with perfume "so that Esther Williams, the Hollywood starlet of
'Bathing Beauty,' could practice her swimming routines when she visited
the island." As depicted by Mr. Rathbone, he emerges as an almost
folkloric figure from the pages of a novel: someone who swam the
Mississippi, survived assassins' bullets and was once "put against the
wall to be shot but pardoned at the last moment."
But Lobo was more than a tough-guy businessman. He was also an ardent
art collector and Napoleonic scholar, amassing the largest collection of
Napoleonica outside of France. And while he identified with the
world-conquering ambitions of Napoleon, he was at heart a loner, who
cherished the writings of Emerson, Shakespeare and the stoic philosopher
Epictetus.
Mr. Rathbone writes that Lobo contemplated finding a way of turning
control of his favorite sugar mill, Tinguaro, over to its workers; that
he fiercely opposed Batista's corrupt government; and that he even
helped finance Mr. Castro's rebels before that guerrilla leader's
communist leanings became apparent.
In the small world that was Cuba, where associates of Batista, the Mob
and the rebels were often connected to one another through "a dense and
complex web of relationships," Mr. Rathbone says, Celia Sanchez — who
would become Mr. Castro's confidante, personal secretary and rumored
lover — happened to be the daughter of the dentist on one of Lobo's
eastern plantations. She worked with Lobo's daughter María Luisa "on
social programs funded by Lobo to help indigent cane cutters" and
"remained close to the Lobos throughout the revolution," despite their
political differences.
Unlike some planters and businessmen who got their money out of Cuba
early, Lobo "continued to invest in Cuba to the last," Mr. Rathbone
writes. "In part, this was sheer hubris. Lobo ignored early warning
signs of trouble, such as a bomb that damaged Tinguaro in 1957. In part,
it was because Lobo believed, like so many others, that he could somehow
control Castro, or that the Americans — only 90 miles away — would.
Conversations Lobo said he had had with Allen Dulles, the head of the
C.I.A., may have convinced him of that. In part it was because Lobo
believed deeply in Cuba and was critical of anyone who did not. And in
part Lobo continued to invest in the island because events moved so
quickly that it soon became too late to stop."
In October of 1960, shortly after a meeting with Che Guevara, Lobo
caught a crowded airplane flight to Mexico and from there to New York.
He took with him nothing but a small suitcase and a toothbrush. He left
behind his El Greco paintings, his palaces, his vast fortune.
By the 1970s Lobo was leading a quiet life in Madrid, living off the
monthly payments his daughters sent him and the sale of the last of his
Napoleon papers that one of them had managed to smuggle out of Cuba. He
died on Jan. 30, 1983, and his body, dressed in a guayabera and wrapped
in a Cuban flag, was buried in Madrid. By then, Mr. Rathbone reports,
most of his friends and enemies were dead or abroad, and "only a handful
of mourners attended."
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