The Sugar King of Havana (36 page)

Lobo could have played it safe and hedged his position. That would have provided a floor if prices fell. Yet, once hedged, Lobo would also have locked in his gains at a lower margin. The big profit, he knew, only comes when you go all out. Lobo could not resist the siren call of great opportunity, the possibility of doing better than merely well. With a big win, Lobo could pay off his old Hershey debts. He could even start to rebuild his empire. “Every gain made by an individual is almost instantly taken for granted,” as Aldous Huxley once wrote. “The luminous ceiling toward which we raise our longing eyes becomes, when we have climbed to the next floor, a stretch of disregarded linoleum beneath our feet.” Lobo planted his feet on the linoleum and steadied himself for the ride.

“The trouble was it was really tough to fight the decision of a man who had such a record of good decisions,” remembered León. Gerry Ascher expressed Lobo’s overconfidence in another way. He sent a satirical verse to Lobo one Christmas, referring to his boss with the old cable-gram code, SUG.

The sugar price edged ahead by half a cent and it seemed that Lobo, sixty-six years old, still had his magic touch. But all men make mistakes and, as Karl Popper said, “great men make great mistakes.” The sugar price began to fall. When the descent accelerated, Lobo could not wriggle out of his position. Nor could he count on the physical sugar that he once commanded, all those hundreds of thousands of tons that his mills produced which allowed him to drive the price higher when need be, hanging short-sellers out to dry like so many bagasse husks. In the early summer of 1964, the sugar price dropped to 4.5 cents. Lobo had bought at a price more than twice as high. He had lost $6 million.

Now “that damned Hershey deal” returned to haunt him. On July 1, squeezed for cash due to his trading losses, Lobo missed a $500,000 payment on the $6 million he still owed to City Bank for the Hershey purchase. When he skipped the payment, the total of Lobo’s Hershey debt immediately came due. Learning of this, sugar traders demanded immediate payment of the $6 million that Lobo separately owed them. His business collapsed like a house of cards. On July 23 Lobo declared bankruptcy and sought Chapter 11 protection.

Lobo made brave promises at first. He said he would roll up his sleeves, keep working, and trade his way out of the losses. “I will take the consequences . . . as I always have in 45 years of world sugar trade,” he said. “I’ll pay everyone,” he added confidently.

“But he was crazy,” León remembered. “There was no way he could pay. Our lawyer said Julio should be taken to see a psychiatrist. This was a man who had always kept his word with the world, and now he just didn’t understand that he couldn’t.”

It was the same ending as befell so many other famous speculators through history—including Lobo’s erstwhile business partner from Cuba, the real estate magnate William Zeckendorf, who filed for bankruptcy on the same day. Like Zeckendorf, Lobo had stretched himself too thin. He had been rash, and his luck had run out. This time there was no telegram from the French government waiting for Lobo back at the hotel, as there had been in 1939 when a failed speculation had almost bankrupted
la casa
. Lobo no longer had the properties he had once owned in Cuba which he could have used to pay his creditors or to post as collateral; all that was gone. He was still known as the King of Sugar, the Cuban merchant who controlled the world market. Only Lobo was now operating solely from Wall Street, not Havana, and Cuba—three years after the Bay of Pigs, eight months after the assassination of JFK—was a dirty word in the United States. The
New York Herald Tribune
headlined its coverage of his bankruptcy “BIGGEST SUGAR SACK SPLITS SEAMS.”

Lobo left New York for Spain in 1965, pursued by creditors, lawyers, those who still believed he was rich, and the Internal Revenue Service, which said he owed $20 million in back taxes. The federal inspectors wanted to examine Lobo’s accounts from 1957, two years before Castro’s arrival in Havana, one year before the Hershey deal, and another world. By the time he left New York for Franco’s Spain, Lobo had arranged for the sale of his seat on the New York sugar exchange, the company apartment on the eighteenth floor of the Sherry-Netherland, and his share in the new “Tinguaro” sugar mill that he had built in the Louisiana bayou, where he had invited Bette Davis to stay. Lawyers meanwhile picked over the carcass of the New York trading business. It was eventually taken over by Czarnikow-Rionda, the merchant business of Manuel Rionda’s Cuban enterprise which had collapsed in 1930 under the weight of its own debts. The spokes on the wheel had turned again.

“Lobo had such huge prestige. That’s why the bankruptcy was so tragic,” said León. Over forty-five years, Lobo had built the world’s largest sugar business. He lost the greater part to the revolution, and the remainder to the markets. He had nobody else to blame. The final dissolution of his empire marked the end of an era, almost a death. Even the messages that Lobo’s friends sent to him read like letters of condolence.

 

 

I ALSO LEFT NEW YORK for Europe the following autumn, only for England and due to my family’s politics rather than because of a sudden change in fortune. My father’s father had been a member of Parliament during the Second World War, and his wife, my paternal grandmother, had assumed his parliamentary seat after he was shot down during a bombing raid over Belgium. My father’s great-aunt, Eleanor Rathbone, had also been a formidable social reformer, in the mold of her Quaker forebears from Liverpool who had campaigned against slavery in the eighteenth century. My father felt these family traditions as a call to duty and a political career of his own.

I was not quite three years old at the time, and our departure for London—my father, my mother, my ten-month-old sister, a prim norland nanny called Sally, and I—is my first memory. I knelt on a red plastic banquette, pressed my stomach against the wall of the ship’s cabin, and looked out of a brass porthole at New York. I remember seeing sailboats keeling in the breeze on the bay, pennons fluttering, and the jagged silhouette of the New York skyline receding into the haze. Our ship slipped out onto the Gulf Stream, the twisting snake of warm water that Hemingway called the “great blue river” and that circles up from the Gulf of Mexico, past Havana, through the Florida straits, and north along the eastern seaboard of the United States. It is the strongest ocean current in the world, and as it circles north and then east toward the British Isles, water evaporates, the current cools, and by the time the Gulf Stream passes Scotland it is more briny too. In sugar-toothed but gray London, life for my mother would also feel less sweet.

In England, she got lost in the usual transatlantic linguistic confusions: a bend in the road versus a curve, private versus public schools, pants versus trousers, losing more than words (but developing a fondness for English humor) when searching for the ladies’ room/loo on the first floor/ ground floor of a store—or rather a shop. More than strange vocabulary, though, England for her was a triple exile: from her new home in New York, from her family that had settled there, and, because of that, a final farewell to the last shreds of her former life in Havana as well. Gabriel García Márquez had visited London eight years before and described what he saw with a Caribbean eye that could have been my mother’s. He wrote of the “people that left work with the same trudge as they went to it, and on the small step outside the houses, always the same, always silent, always closed, stand half a dozen bottles of milk.”

My father rented a house on a street of red-brick terraced houses, with black drainpipes trellised like vines around the back. I went to school in the basement of a nearby church, stuttered in Spanish and English, and learned to “Do the Hokey Cokey” in a gloomy stone crypt, holding hands in a circle with the other children. The nanny wheeled my younger sister to the park in a perambulator. My mother gave birth to my younger brother, and my father was elected a member of Parliament in 1974, a conservative of the lightest blue.

As the wife of an MP, my mother posed for campaign photographs, thumbs-up next to my father. At the Houses of Parliament, police guards ushered her inside past the queue of tourists that trailed from the Strangers’ Entrance, around the block and past a bronze statue of Oliver Cromwell. She was now more part of the Establishment than she had even been in Havana. Yet she also felt more estranged. The Englishwomen she knew wore lumpy tweed jackets and skirts, rough hair pinned back with garish silk scarves, and had voices that sounded as though spoken through a mouth full of potatoes. In New York or Miami, by contrast, even a friend of my mother’s dressed in a gray office suit somehow managed to look luscious, like a mango wrapped in protective foam. She missed what she remembered of Latin gaiety and was awed by the English reserve.

Cuba and Castro were frequent topics of conversation in London, and her hot outbursts about the island were often followed by a distrustful look and then a patting of her hand, like the “there, there” spoken to a distressed child. She planned her revenge on this condescension at a parliamentary reception, and I picture the scene now, my mother fixing her hosts first with her arrogant look, then her charming look, then her insouciant look, her “hair done up, long dangling earrings, a lot of make-up—and nothing else.” Sadly she never acted out this provocative fantasy, as she was sure her hosts would fix their gaze on her face, smile politely, and say
Margarita
,
how good of you to come
(so eliciting her disappointed look, and lately there had been too much of that).

Self-protectively, she resolved these cultural differences into prejudices, a very Manichean scheme, buttressed by the part-truths of Latin versus Anglo-Saxon racial stereotypes, and the weather. In England the clouds hugged the ground like wigs. In Cuba they paraded in orderly rows of puffy dirigibles over feathery palm trees. My mother could not always contain the contrast.

One afternoon, when very young, my brother, sister, and I had wailed from the backseat of her car after a burst of intense sunlight punctured the English gloom, blinding us. “Argh, the sun!” we had screeched. She was trolling gently down the high street, on the way to the supermarket, and swerved suddenly to the side of the road. She rarely drove with such alacrity, except sometimes at the approach to an amber traffic light. Then her knuckles whitened on the steering wheel of her red Renault 5 as she accelerated and shouted “Fangio!” after the Argentine racing car driver who had mesmerized Havana in 1957. Those who had seen drivers like Juan Manuel Fangio, Stirling Moss, and the gifted amateur Alfonso Gómez Mena tear around the Havana circuit that year still remembered the way Fangio negotiated the ninety-degree corner into Calzada with his Ferrari in a beautiful four-wheel drift. Who could resist, or forget, such élan? In London, drawing on such memories, my mother stopped the hatchback in a screech of brakes, turned around in her seat, and in a grim voice, not quite shouting but fluted by high notes, said to my brother, my sister, and me: “Don’t you
ever
complain about the sun again.” Chastened, we squinted into the glare as she put the car back into gear and set off again.

ARRIVING IN MADRID, Lobo took a small apartment on Hermanos Bécquer, a street that lies off the central Paseo de la Castellana. Taking no chances, he practically hugged the United States this time: from his fourth-floor apartment, the fortress of the U.S. embassy was only ninety feet across the street. In Havana, the United States had been ninety miles away. Franco’s daughter also lived nearby, yet Franco’s Spain rarely figured in Lobo’s Madrid life, hardly even as backdrop, even when Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, Franco’s prime minister, was killed by a car bomb on Hermanos Bécquer on December 19, 1973. To a worldly businessman from Havana—or any other Latin American from Venezuela, Colombia, or even Panama—Madrid was then an unsophisticated town, with sheep grazing by what is now the M30 ring road, cut off from Europe by fascism. Rather than look to Spain, Lobo gazed outward and backward to Cuba.

He helped Cubans that he knew when he could, sending his former secretary, Carlotta, shoes after she mailed him a paper cutout of her foot size. He set up a Cuban center in Madrid, modeled on the Spanish regional centers that had once flourished in Havana. It was a place, Lobo said at the inauguration in 1966, “where Cubans of all races and creeds can meet; not a Country, Yacht or Tennis Club, but not a poor house either.” Lobo applied himself with his usual tenacity. He raised funds, organized talks and seminars on Cuban themes, and ate in the club restaurant under a huge photograph of the Malecón that spread across a whole wall. He always wore a black tie in mourning for Cuba’s fate, and once suffered to sit next to Batista, a distasteful experience.

Journalists still beat a path to Lobo’s apartment on Hermanos Bécquer, curious to know the fate of the Napoleon of Sugar, who, like Napoleon himself, had ended his days in exile. All of these newspaper stories noted the entrance hall of Lobo’s apartment, hung with the Cuban coat of arms; a view of palm trees and a bay at sunset, framed on a triangular shield topped with a red Phrygian cap and an oak branch and laurel wreath on either side. They described the cluttered desk in Lobo’s otherwise sparse office, where he sat under another Cuban coat of arms, emblazoned with Philip II’s famous phrase, “He who holds the island of Cuba also has the key to the New World.” Yet at home or at the center, as in Cuba, Lobo remained a controversial figure. José R. Fernández, a founding member of the center, recalls that Lobo’s detractors outnumbered his fans. Critics found him stingy, crafty, and severe with employees and subordinates. All, though, agreed he was intelligent and cultivated, and, as Fernández wrote, the center in Madrid enjoyed its best years when he was in charge.