The Sugar King of Havana Read Free Page B

Havana’s very seaminess—existing in a parallel universe to Lobo’s world and that of my mother’s parents—that had attracted Greene. “In Batista’s day, I liked the idea that one could obtain anything at will, whether drugs, women or goats,” he wrote.
    Indirectly, Lobo himself had been involved in the manufacture of Havana’s steamy nightlife, sensual glamour, and racy reputation. Alongside his other business interests, Lobo had helped finance the Riviera and the Capri, two of the glitziest casino-hotels to open in the 1950s, when Cuba was known as the American Riviera. The latter had a flashy casino and a rooftop swimming pool; the former, a futuristic Y-shaped tower overlooking the sea, was the first major Havana building with central air-conditioning, and had an egg-shaped windowless casino at its heart. Both hotels’ links to the Mafia were an open secret. George Raft, the movie tough guy of the 1930s and ’40s, worked as a greeter at the Capri, glad-handing and joking with customers. Havana’s hotels would later gain further notoriety in the movie The Godfather: Part II when one breezy terrace, overlooking the Caribbean, provided the setting for a Mafia birthday party and a famous scene in which sixty-seven-year-old mob leader Hyman Roth carved up his birthday cake—a map of Cuba—for the assembled guests.
    A grayer and more militaristic mood had fallen over the city since Castro assumed power. The atmosphere was tense with invasion rumors. The purifying uniformity of the revolution that visitors such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir would comment on had started to set in. The days of privilege for Cuba’s upper and middle classes were coming to an end, and increasing numbers were leaving on the ferries and shuttle flights to Miami. As many as sixty thousand had already left by the late spring when the northerly vientos de cuaresma, or Lenten winds, would have whipped the bay of Havana into whitecaps, leaving the city feeling airy and fresh and at its most beautiful. Indeed, around that time Lobo had written to a former girlfriend, the daughter of a Danish aristocrat, that her invitation to stay with him remained a standing one. He warned, though, that Havana would not be as pleasant as she remembered. “Gracious living has practically disappeared,” Lobo wrote. “We are entering a period of austerity.” Then he had added the surprising afterthought, “. . . which may have some good points and perhaps even benefits in the long run.” Lobo, the billionaire businessman, could be a revolutionary patriot too.
    By October, the roulette wheels were still spinning in Havana’s big hotels, but most of the prostitutes were off the streets and the world of exclusive yachts, private beaches, and casinos had disappeared. Instead, groups of uniformed and armed guajiros , poor farmers from the Cuban interior, chanted revolutionary slogans and roamed the streets. In the hotels, trade and cultural delegations from the Soviet bloc took the place of American tourists. Simone de Beauvoir wrote that compared to her visit the year before, there was “less gaiety, less freedom, but much progress on certain fronts.” In the half-empty Hotel Nacional “some very young members of the militia, boys and girls, were holding a conference. On every side, in the streets, the militia was drilling.”
     
     
    MY MOTHER’S FAMILY, Sanchez y Sanchez, would soon join those sixty thousand Cubans who had already left the island—although my mother had moved abroad several years earlier for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. After the Havana cardinal visited her house to explain why her wedding to an American divorcé the next day had to be broken off, she went to live in New York. There she reveled in the anonymity of a big city, free from what she viewed as the claustrophobia and pettiness of upper-class Havana’s social mores. She got a job as a buyer for the department store Bergdorf Goodman, and met