The Sugar King of Havana Read Free Page A

New York, London, Madrid, and Manila. He also owned a bank, Banco Financiero, an insurance company, shipping interests, and the telecommunications firm Inalámbrica. Some of Lobo’s wealth derived from his father, who had fled to Havana from Venezuela in 1900 and entered into a profitable partnership with a Spanish private banker and importer. But Lobo had built most of his empire subsequently, by himself. A speculator and financier of genius, one business competitor observed with grudging awe that Lobo “doesn’t sense a trend, he smells it.”
    There was more to Lobo than money and sugar, though. He was a cultured man, famed for his private collection of art and the largest holding of Napoleonica outside France, including one of the emperor’s back teeth and his death mask—the revealing interest of a man who sought to project his ambition and sense of self by association with Napoleon. Politically, he was an enigma. Lobo’s wealth made him an emblem of prerevolutionary Cuban capitalism, of everything that Fidel Castro would eventually purge from the island. By marriage, he was linked to the remarkable Condesa de Merlin, who had married one of Napoleon’s generals and whose uncle, Lorenzo Montalvo, the Julio Lobo of his day, introduced the first steam-powered sugar mill to the island. With a due sense of dynasty, Lobo had even christened his eldest grandchild with cane juice in the same baptismal font that Napoleon had used to baptize his own son, the king of Rome. Yet despite these trappings of imperial grandeur, Lobo had also fiercely opposed the corrupt Batista government. “We didn’t care who overthrew Batista so long as somebody did,” he once said. A receipt nestled among Lobo’s papers and stamped with the swirling red and black Cuban revolutionary logo shows that he had even helped finance Fidel Castro’s rebels a few years earlier. That, however, was before Castro’s plans and eventually his Communist leanings had been fully revealed.
    On that October night, as Lobo drove across Havana, less than two years had passed since President Fulgencio Batista had packed his bags on New Year’s Eve and fled to the Dominican Republic, his departure cheered by nearly all. Since then much of Lobo’s land, although not yet his sugar mills, had been confiscated by the rebel leader whom Lobo had once helped. Yet Lobo still refused to leave the island, unlike many other middle- and upper-class Cubans. Nor had Lobo lent his voice to the growing flood of anti-Castro protest. Now Che Guevara was going to put Cuba’s King of Sugar to the test.
     
     
    LOBO’S CAR TURNED DOWN LINEA and toward the old city. October lies in the middle of the hurricane season, when high sea spray can spume over the broad wall that lines Havana’s waterfront drive, the Malecón. Lobo took this route every day to his office in the old town. The view from his car was little different from that evoked in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana , published two years before:
    The long city lay spread along the open Atlantic; waves broke over the Avenida de Maceo and minted the windscreens of cars. The pink, grey, yellow pillars of what had once been the aristocratic quarter were eroded like rocks; an ancient coat of arms, smudged and featureless, was set over the doorway of a shabby hotel, and the shutters of a night-club were varnished in bright crude colors to protect them from the wet and salt of the sea. In the west the steel skyscrapers of the new town rose higher than lighthouses.
    Yet while Havana looked the same, the atmosphere was quite different from that absorbed by Greene and depicted by his fictional British vacuum cleaner salesman, Wormold. A year ago, Havana was still an exciting city. It boasted casinos, nightclubs, bordellos, and a fabled live sex show popular with tourists in Chinatown’s Shanghai Theater, which featured a performing stud called “Superman.” Drugs such as marijuana and cocaine were freely available. It was