The Sugar King of Havana (22 page)

—NÉSTOR PIÑANGO, Cuban politician, August 1946

—UNION OF SUGAR WORKERS, Tinguaro sugar mill

 

 

L
obo returned to Havana with his daughters in high spirits after the trip. On August 1, Heriberto and Virginia celebrated their golden wedding anniversary. They hosted a large party at home in Vedado, and Lobo gave them a set of twenty-four gold dinner plates from Tiffany’s. He also settled the strike at Pilón, having agreed to a pay raise. Then he set his eye on a new prize, the sugar mill Caracas.

As well as its name, the mill had a number of evocative associations for Caracas-born Lobo. It had once belonged to Tomás Terry, like Lobo a Venezuelan-born merchant-planter who had made his fortune after arriving in Cuba. It was now owned by First National Boston, the same bank that Lobo had done battle with during his “perfect squeeze” on the New York sugar exchange twelve years before. Caracas would be Lobo’s largest mill, almost twice the size of nearby Agabama
,
although with a grinding capacity of 4,400 tons it only ranked nationally as midsize. It was also badly run. Lobo would pay $1.6 million for Caracas and estimated that he would make almost all of that back from the extra sugar it could produce the following year. It would be a sweet deal.

Lobo signed the deeds with Enrique León at First National Boston’s office in Havana early in the evening on August 6. León left afterward to take his wife out to dinner to celebrate their own wedding anniversary, and then to see a late movie, one of the Hollywood gangster films then so popular in Cuba. Lobo meanwhile returned to his office with Carlotta to tidy up loose ends. Lobo was at his desk, thinking of the party he would give at the mill to celebrate its purchase, when the phone rang. On the line was Alberto Inocente Álvarez, Grau’s minister of state.

“What are you still doing in the office so late?” asked Álvarez.

“I don’t know why that seems strange to you—I am often here until later,” Lobo replied, surprised by the call. It was just past 7 p.m.

“Well, take care. I just want to warn you
they
are going to kidnap you,” the minister said.

They
referred to the trigger-happy
bonches
, or bunches, the political militias that had fought against Machado in 1933, supported Grau’s re-election in 1944, and since degenerated into gangs of armed thugs. Like Grau, these “student revolutionaries” of old were now more often interested in lucre than liberty. Led by men with picturesque names such as El Oriental, El Colorado, and El Extraño, the strange one, they “marauded through the dark streets and the musty ministries of Old Havana,” Guillermo Cabrera Infante wrote, “killing each other over ideologies more obscure than the streets themselves.” Their violence did not color all of Cuban life; the
bonches
had never targeted a wealthy businessman like Lobo before. Their victims, instead, were associates of the old Machado regime, who had been protected during the administrations controlled by Batista. Under Grau, the
bonches
now meted out punishment themselves. Grau condoned these political thugs and provided many with government sinecures, which fed public disillusionment with his presidency. After all, voters had elected the old revolutionary to office with high expectations of honest government under conditions of peace and prosperity. But Grau’s administration had become an orgy of extortion and theft. In one celebrated scandal the year before, on St. Dismas’s Day, which honors the patron saint of thieves, a robber stole a twenty-three-carat diamond from the base of a statue in the central lobby of the well-guarded Capitolio building. The perpetrators were never found, and the diamond reappeared mysteriously on Grau’s desk a year later. When a journalist asked the president how it arrived there, Grau had replied: “Anonymously.”

Lobo thanked Álvarez for calling, put the phone down, and turned to Carlotta. He told her that he wasn’t worried about the men that were supposedly going to kidnap him. “They know they won’t get a cent from me.” But he was worried about his family. At the same time, Lobo did not want to call home and alarm anybody needlessly. “I have to act,” he said.

They set off from the office in his car, a black Studebaker parked nearby. Lobo drove down the Malecón, went up Linea and dropped off Carlotta in Vedado on the corner of Twenty-third and Twenty-second streets. As he drove away from her apartment building, the headlamps of a car following behind glared in his eyes. Lobo adjusted the rearview mirror and thought no more of it. Then he crossed the Almendares River, heading west, and dropped down to Eighteenth Street, making good time to his home, which lay on the other side of Fifth Avenue, Miramar’s main strip.

Despite the minister’s warning, Lobo later recalled that he felt in a buoyant mood. It was a beautiful summer night, a gentle breeze was blowing in from the sea, and he drove with the car windows open, enjoying the cool after the heat of the day. He discounted the possibility that anything serious might happen; everything else was going so well. The Pico Turquino trip had been a success. His parents had celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. He felt elated by the deal he had just signed. He stopped briefly to post a letter to a girlfriend in Mexico and thought again of the party he would give at the mill to celebrate its purchase.

He drove down Eighteenth Street and heard the eight o’clock bells ring from Miramar’s clock tower on Fifth Avenue, a few blocks away. As he passed the corner of Ninth Avenue, the car that had been trailing him suddenly accelerated down the middle of the street and drew close to his rear bumper. The first pistol shot came through the back window, whistled past Lobo’s head, and punched a hole through the windshield. The second shot hit Lobo’s rear door, the third ricocheted off the front door-frame and buried itself in the dashboard. Then the attackers pulled alongside, firing from close range. The next shots hit Lobo in the head, right leg, and left knee. Lobo’s car swerved to the side of the road, bumped over the curb, skidded on the grass of a trim lawn, and crashed into a telegraph pole. The lights of the nearest house flickered and went out. Inside, Alberto Alejo, a twenty-four-year-old doctor, was having dinner with his wife. Alejo later told the newspaper reporters who swarmed around the scene how he ran to his front door to find out what was the matter, saw a black car on his front lawn, steam rising from the crumpled hood, and rushed to see if there were any survivors from the crash. “I am Julio Lobo,” groaned the folded body inside the car. “I am wounded, call my family.” Then Lobo blacked out, and his body slumped forward against the car horn on the steering wheel. It had broken in the crash and only made a plaintive
thweet
.

Alejo called for an ambulance and rang the police. It was the forty-third
bonches
shooting that year and the Havana press, which listened for crime traffic on radio frequencies used by the police, quickly relayed the news that Lobo, the famous speculator, might be dead.

Five blocks away, at Lobo’s home, Leonor was brushing her hair, listening to a popular radio show,
Tamakún
, the nomadic avenger, when the announcer suddenly broke off the program. “We interrupt this broadcast to bring you the extraordinary news, the
noticia luctuosa
, that Julio Lobo has been shot and killed.” Leonor ran to her mother’s room. María Esperanza, who had also heard the news, was frantically packing a small bag. She called an aunt to come and stay with her daughters and rushed off to Camp Columbia’s military hospital. Meanwhile, in central Havana, León was leaving the cinema with his wife when he saw the newspaper hoardings on the pavement outside. León dismissed the lurid headlines as sheer sensationalism, as he had been with Lobo only a few hours before. “You might be wrong,” remarked his wife, Rosario Rexach, a literary scholar with an eye for detail. “Look at the date. These aren’t the evening papers that were being printed this afternoon when you were with Julio. They are tomorrow’s.”

The front pages of the newspapers that the rest of Havana woke up to the next day had all the grimy realism of a scene captured by Weegee, the Polish-American news photographer then famous for his stark black-and-white pictures of New York City crime. One photograph showed Lobo’s head wrapped in bandages stained in blood, his eyes closed. In another, Lobo lay in the back of an ambulance, surrounded by medics. Others showed the metallic dimples of gunshots in the car body alongside panoramas of the scene drawn over with white markings and arrows, as in a police file. Cuba had absorbed not only the method of North American gangland executions, but their gory aesthetic too.

Havana was filled with speculation over who had tried to kill Lobo, and no two theories were the same. The other shootings that year had all been obviously political. That alone made Lobo’s unusual. Shooting no. 42 had taken place only a few weeks before, when assassins had peppered a former chief of police under Machado with bullets while he read a newspaper on his front porch. They left behind a black-humored note, “Justice comes late, but it comes.” It was the telltale sign-off of the Union of Insurrectional Revolutionaries (UIR), one of the
bonches
that operated with impunity from within Havana’s university. Constitutionally off-limits to the police, the two-hundred-year-old university provided an almost Greek backdrop to the brutal goings-on inside. The entrance to the campus at the top of San Lázaro Street was a magnificent sweep of 163 white stone steps, dominated by a statue of the alma mater dressed in Greek robes. At the top, Doric columns flanked the schools of science, philosophy, law, and engineering. Inside, almost every day someone was killed in a political turf war. Fidel Castro, an active
pistolero
and UIR member, had joined the university as a law student the year before and later remembered it as even “more dangerous than all the time I fought against Batista from the Sierra Maestra.”

The ambulance took Lobo to the nearest hospital at Camp Columbia. Carlos Prío, the prime minister, hurried across town from the Presidential Palace. When Prío arrived at the hospital, he pushed his way through the crowd of journalists downstairs and went up to Lobo’s room on the third floor. Lobo was lying on a hospital bed and had regained consciousness. He had even dictated a brief will after the military doctors had patched him up, roughly sewing a large chunk of his skull back onto his head. Lobo later recalled their conversation in his diary.

“Who did you think did it?” Prío asked, standing by Lobo’s bedside.

“I don’t know,” Lobo replied. “Why don’t you ask Inocente? He seems to know. He called me up before to warn me. Inocente seemed worried—although not worried enough to send an armed guard.”

Prío bent over Lobo’s bed and whispered quietly in his ear, as he didn’t want the doctors and nurses milling around the room to hear. “Inocente called and told me the same.”

“That makes it all the worse,” Lobo grunted back. “Two ministers who knew something was about to happen, but didn’t do anything to stop it and don’t even know who the perpetrators were.”

Such cynical unknowingness was typical of Grau’s administration. A colonel then burst into the room and approached Lobo’s bed. “In the name of General Pérez Gamera [the acting head of the army], you can stay here as long as you need until you are fully restored to health,” the colonel barked. Turning to the rest of the people in the room, he added in a loud voice, “Mr. Lobo, you can be sure that you will be fully protected by the Army while you stay here.” But it was a pantomime performance of military authority, because the colonel then came closer to the bed, bent over Lobo’s head just as Prío had done, and whispered in his ear, “But if I were you, I would leave immediately as the people who shot you are nearby.”

Doctors whisked Lobo away from the military hospital to the Anglo-American, a private clinic in Vedado. There Octavio Montoro, the brother of his sister’s husband and a well-known doctor, took charge. The following night, Montoro spelled out Lobo’s position. A bullet was still lodged in his head and had to be removed. “If we operate you may end up blind, aphasic, or an idiot. And if we don’t operate you will die for sure,” he explained.

“What are you waiting for?” Lobo replied.

While the doctors scrubbed down, Lobo turned to the head nurse and said that he wanted to confess. Although he was ambivalent about religion, “I was born a Catholic,” Lobo explained, “and before they operate I want to be at peace with God.”

A priest was summoned, and Lobo spoke while lying on his back on the hospital litter, staring at the ceiling.

“Father, I’ve lost a lot of blood, the wounds make it hard to concentrate, and I have forgotten how to confess,” he remembered saying. It had been fourteen years since Lobo had last told a priest of his sins, and that had been on the eve of his wedding to María Esperanza.