Cuba Sugar King Draws Bullets, Flees Che, Corners Market in Bio
"The Sugar King of Havana"
Penguin Group via Bloomberg
The cover jacket of "The Sugar King of Havana: The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's Last Tycoon," by John Paul Rathbone.
The cover jacket of "The Sugar King of Havana: The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's Last Tycoon," by John Paul Rathbone. Source: Penguin Group via Bloomberg
Julio Lobo
Penguin Group via Bloomberg
Julio Lobo in his trading room. Lobo once controlled 14 sugar mills in Cuba.
Julio Lobo in his trading room. Lobo once controlled 14 sugar mills in Cuba. Source: Penguin Group via Bloomberg
John Paul Rathbone
Serenella Cazac/Penguin Group via Bloomberg
John Paul Rathbone. "The Sugar King of Havana: The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's Last Tycoon" is the latest book by Rathbone, a Latin America editor for the FT.
John Paul Rathbone. "The Sugar King of Havana: The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's Last Tycoon" is the latest book by Rathbone, a Latin America editor for the FT. Photographer: Serenella Cazac/Penguin Group via Bloomberg
Fifty years ago this October, Ernesto “Che” Guevara summoned sugar magnate Julio Lobo to a midnight meeting in his office at Cuba’s central bank.
The revolutionary turned central banker was 32, bearded and wore battle fatigues. He signed banknotes “Che” -- Ben Bernanke, dream on -- and had a revolver slung across his desk, writes John Paul Rathbone in “The Sugar King of Havana,” an evocative history about a chronically misunderstood island.
Lobo, by contrast, was a dapper 62. He collected paintings, Napoleonica and Hollywood actresses (think Diego Rivera, a death mask and Joan Fontaine). He wore bowties and limped, the legacy of a drive-by gunning years before that ripped up his legs and blew a chunk out of his skull.
“We have left you to last,” Che told the Cuban capitalist that night in 1960.
The King of Sugar soon flew into exile, carrying “a small suitcase and a toothbrush.”
The cinematic detail of that scene typifies Rathbone’s lush mixture of research, journalism -- and personal exorcism. For this is a book by the son of a woman who mingled with Lobo’s younger daughter in Cuba’s “haute bourgeoisie” in the 1950s, married an Englishman and wound up a stranger in her own land.
Rathbone, who grew up in Britain, is the Latin American editor for the Financial Times. His account may please neither Cuba’s communist authorities (“Socialismo o muerte!” they still cry) nor the Cuban exile community in Florida.
‘Flat-Earth Society’
“I objected to Fidel,” he writes. “I objected also to the feverish hatred of many exiles’ anti-Castroism. From England, the vehemence of their passions, their bitterness and rage, sometimes had the feeling of a flat-earth society.”
The subtitle casts the book as biography, “The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo.” And Rathbone delivers on that promise, meticulously documenting the audacious ascent of Lobo, a descendant of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492.
Rathbone says he spent almost five years on this project. He gained access to the Lobo family archive; uncovered 500 letters written by his own great-great-grandfather, himself a mill owner; and had the good fortune to interview survivors from the prerevolutionary era, including Lobo’s lawyer and consigliere, Enrique Leon, who invited Rathbone into his three- room apartment in a condominium overlooking Miami’s South Beach.
The result is a nuanced portrait of a man who amassed and lost two fortunes. Lobo once controlled 14 sugar mills in Cuba and handled about half of the 6 million tons of sugar the island produced each year, the author says. He maintained trading operations in New York, London, Madrid and Manila and once cornered the global market for the sweet stuff.
$5 Billion Fortune
Yet Rathbone also views Lobo, whose wealth reached an estimated $5 billion in today’s dollars, as a means to an end -- as a vehicle for understanding Cuban history and Rathbone’s own complicated heritage.
“If any story could reveal how Cuba worked in the prerevolutionary years and disentangle the contradictions that I held inside me, I thought, it would be his,” he writes.
The result is a collage that shifts smoothly from Lobo’s life to the history of Cuba and the story of Rathbone’s family. He gives us glimpses by turns of the rhythms of the sugar-cane harvest, or zafra; of the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor in 1898; and of the August night in 1946, when two goons with .38 revolvers sprayed Lobo with bullets as he drove his black Studebaker. Who and why remain a mystery.
‘Catch Me!’
Nor does he omit the exile’s nostalgia for the old days, including one party where his mother gleefully flung herself from a wall into a crowd, crying “Catch me!” She broke a leg.
Rathbone has little patience with Europeans who voice sympathy for a communist regime that he says has left almost 1 in 10 Cubans living abroad. He compares the situation to 6 million Britons living in exile in Calais, France, with Harold Macmillan still in 10 Downing Street.
As for Lobo, Rathbone exposes his faults and hubris yet portrays him as a loyal Cuban who built schools and hospitals at his mills, sought to modernize the industry, and opposed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. A receipt among Lobo’s papers shows that he even helped finance Fidel Castro’s rebels at one point.
That was, of course, before Castro’s “Communist leanings had been fully revealed.”
“The Sugar King of Havana” is from Penguin Press (304 pages, $27.95). To buy this book in North America, click here.
(James Pressley writes for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer on the story: James Pressley in Brussels at jpressley@bloomberg.net.
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