The Sugar King of Havana Read Free

if I have done so through the lens of its past.
    I think of a speech that Winston Churchill gave in the House of Commons when Neville Chamberlain died in 1940. The great British wartime prime minister—who first saw action in Cuba as a young man, where he began to smoke large cigars—described to Parliament how history, “with its flickering lamp, stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.” So it is that my concern here is with the flickering myths, untold stories, and simple facts that surround the life and businesses of Cuba’s once-richest man, Julio Lobo, and the Cuba in which he lived. Sometimes I have turned to my mother’s family to help reveal these half-hidden times. This is not out of any sense of vanity. Rather it is because they also played a small but not always insignificant part in helping shape a prerevolutionary way of life that supposedly heaped so many inequities on the island that civil war, the exile of a tenth of the population, and the enduring struggle of those who remained were somehow inevitable. Shrunken, their stories form part of a calumnious revolutionary narrative that diminishes prerevolutionary Cuba’s past—sometimes inglorious, sometimes the opposite. Expanded and brought back to life, they also suggest happier futures.

PART ONE

One
    A TRISTE TROPICAL TRYST

    There’s a violent smell of sugar in the air.
    —AGUSTÍN ACOSTA, La Zafra
     
     
    O n October 11, 1960, Ernesto “Che” Guevara summoned the sugar magnate Julio Lobo to his office at the Cuban central bank in Havana. It would be a midnight meeting—odd, but not entirely unusual during those chaotic times. The Cuban revolution was barely eighteen months old, an inexperienced government was remaking the island, and, anyway, Guevara often worked through the night, if only to keep up with events and as an example of his iron will and revolutionary discipline. Stories abounded in Havana of foreign dignitaries turning up at the central bank for a meeting at three o’clock in the afternoon, only to be told that their appointment was at three in the morning.
    Lobo hastily called his lawyer and consigliere, Enrique León. “Che wants to see me,” he said, and hung up the phone. León arrived shortly after at Lobo’s neoclassical mansion in Vedado, a residential area west of the old city. The two men conferred briefly in the hallway and then left in Lobo’s car, driving east through the Havana night.
    Lobo sat behind the wheel of the humming black Chrysler, his lawyer by his side, the car headlamps picking out a few sudden faces on dark street corners. Curiously, in letters written a few months earlier, Lobo had often depicted himself driving a machine. Sometimes it was a vast ship, Lobo the captain on the bridge, confidently guiding his empire through the rough waters of revolution toward a safe harbor. “We are going through very difficult times, though I am a confirmed optimist,” he wrote in one letter. Yet just as often the machine was a more modest contraption. “I often feel like a man on a bicycle: if I stop, I will fall. . . . I am quite incorrigible and in a way irrepressible,” he wrote in another. There is a sly humor to these words, a quiet, self-confident gloss, which suggests that when Lobo drove to meet Comandante Guevara that evening he was resolute, hopeful, perhaps deluded about what would happen, but certainly not scared. Fearful was not Lobo’s style.

    Lobo in his trading room.
    Short and stern-faced, balding but with a strong jaw, Lobo was then the most important force in the world sugar market. Sixty-two years old, he was known as an authoritarian empire builder who handled about half the six million tons of sugar that Cuba produced annually. As part of his personal fortune, he controlled fourteen sugar mills in Cuba, owned hundreds of thousands of acres of land, and had trading offices in