The Sugar King of Havana (37 page)

Lobo lived modestly. The days were long gone when he could afford to misplace six officers’ uniforms from Napoleon’s Grand Army, as he had on TWA flight 703 from London to New York in 1965, and then breezily claim a fraction of their value from the insurers. Simple living did not seem to bother him. “What is more absurd than avarice in old age,” he wrote in 1972, quoting Cicero to Alexander Herman, an old friend. “It is like a traveler loading up with provisions when he is getting near the end of the road.” He had no pension. He no longer bought art except, as he joked, green U.S. engravings that depicted “the heads of Washington, Franklin, and Monroe.” He attempted to set up a sugar mill in the Caribbean, but it never got off the ground. He established a small business in Madrid, importing Scotch whiskey. Yet the Commerce Ministry gave Lobo the necessary import permits out of charity as much as anything else, and the business faded after a while. He sometimes itched to trade sugar, yet stuck to his promise made after the New York bankruptcy that he would never dabble in the markets again. “As you know, since leaving New York, I’ve not touched a grain of sugar,” he wrote to Maurice Varsano, a former competitor who had founded the giant French sugar group Sucre et Denrées and now called himself the “King of Sugar,” Lobo’s old crown. “Sometimes I feel like a fool when I can see the market as clearly as I used to,” Lobo added. “But I don’t want to break my promise to myself.” Anyway, Lobo had no capital to trade with. Any funds the family did have were tied up in the Moorings, the Florida property company owned by Leonor and María Luisa, and this was burdened with the last $3.7 million of Hershey debt, a point of frequent acrimony among Lobo and his daughters. Money was tight, everywhere. Leonor lived in Vero Beach, Florida, with her husband, struggling with the Moorings. María Luisa lived in London, at Thurloe Square, a smart residential address in the center of town, but took in lodgers to pay her bills.

By the early 1970s, Lobo had resigned himself to a life of contemplation—those meditative years he had often promised himself when he had been rich. “I am completely retired from business,” he wrote to Lillian Fontaine in 1972. “My creative years are over.” Lobo, a man who had once moved markets with a nod of his head, who had expected subordinates to snap to attention when he came into the office, and had turfed out ambassadors from Parisian hotels with a single telephone call, now lived off the monthly payments that his daughters sent him, and the sale of the last of his Napoleon papers that Leonor had managed to smuggle out of Cuba two decades before. “It’s painful to be selling the remains [of my Napoleon collection],” Lobo wrote from Madrid to his Parisian auctioneer, Dominique Vincent. “Unfortunately . . . that is the only solution.”

Lobo had one final Cuban encounter, suffered one last kick in the teeth. In addition to two crates of Napoleon papers that Leonor had got out of Cuba, in a brave dawn dash around Havana a few days before Lobo’s meeting with Guevara, she had also stashed a further two crates at the French embassy in Havana, where they had since remained. The idea that Lobo might retrieve them grew out of a trip that María Luisa made to Havana in 1975, her first return visit. It was a controversial trip, and in the hothouse of exile politics, many émigré Cubans felt that the journey marked her as a traitor to her class, and that María Luisa had simply swapped allegiances from one Big Daddy to another. But María Luisa was living in London then, and in the cold gray English weather her love for things Cuban, the romance of her past, and her father’s name had flared anew.

In Havana, María Luisa toured former haunts and met old friends, such as Lobo’s former secretary, Carlotta, and also Celia Sánchez, María Luisa’s former workmate from Pilón and still Castro’s closest confidante. In Havana they renewed their friendship, discussed the Napoleon documents, and when María Luisa left, Celia cabled Madrid to tell Lobo that he could take the two crates of Napoleon documents kept in the French embassy.

María Luisa returned to Havana on February 15, 1978, with Julio Enrile, Lobo’s Spanish lawyer. Their trip was never going to be routine. It turned into a disaster. The French behaved questionably, the Cubans criminally, and Lobo emerged poorer than he had begun.

First, the French ambassador told María Luisa that she owed $15,000 in storage fees. When she blanched, he suggested the payment could be offset by some of the documents themselves. A Napoleon expert from Paris had inventoried the collection in the intervening years, he said, and some of the documents were of particular interest to Paris, especially Napoleon’s letters to Talleyrand and a rare doctor’s report written on St. Helena about the emperor’s health. Suspicious of the offer, María Luisa declined. Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, the vice president, spoke to the French diplomat, while María Luisa negotiated with Celia. Because it was effectively impossible to find $15,000 in Havana to pay the storage fee, the apparent impasse was only broken after the Cubans offered to lend María Luisa the money instead. The terms were for thirty days, with the loan secured against the 178 packets of Napoleon documents stored in the French embassy, worth an estimated $600,000 out of a total collection that Lobo had valued in 1959 at $3 million. On March 23, after María Luisa paid the storage fee, the French released the documents, and the sacks were taken away in a flatbed truck to the National Museum, where they would be stored while shipping arrangements were made. María Luisa never saw them again.

At the National Museum, one of Celia’s aides said she wanted to keep back certain documents of particular Cuban interest—letters that Napoleon had written about the Russian campaign and also to Simon Bolívar. Then Marta Arjona, director of the National Museum, said the collection was incomplete. The French, she told María Luisa, had failed to release all the documents. Because of that, the terms of the loan were broken. Cuba would therefore have to keep everything until the French returned the missing papers. Starting to panic, María Luisa offered to pay off the loan in cash. Arjona refused. María Luisa returned to the French embassy. After a heated conversation, the ambassador asked her to leave. Shortly after, María Luisa returned to Europe empty-handed. Lobo was furious. Letters that he wrote subsequently to Celia Sánchez in Havana went unanswered. The French Foreign Ministry in Paris meanwhile brushed him off.

Lobo called it “the most crooked deal I have ever been into,” although he had had a similar experience twelve years before. That time it had been over his more valuable art collection. In 1966, the brother of the former head of the Galbán Lobo office in London wrote to Lobo in Madrid saying he had noticed some of his old paintings listed for sale at an art auction in Toronto. Until then, Lobo believed these artworks—three Diego Riveras, a Dalí, a Dufy, and a Murillo—had been lost for good. Carlotta, his secretary, had left them for safekeeping at the Venezuelan embassy after the revolution. When Caracas broke off relations with Havana in 1961, Mexico took over the embassy building and in the confusion Lobo’s paintings had disappeared.

Lobo’s private art collection was not the largest in Havana, but it included some notable works, including a Rembrandt landscape, two Renoir nudes, a Tintoretto, and dozens of sketches and watercolors by pre- and postimpressionist masters. It did not hold the same meaning for Lobo as his Napoleon collection, nor had he bought the paintings with the same connoisseur’s eye. But it was still worth a fortune by any standard, and in Havana Lobo had loaned three dozen of the best works to the National Art Gallery to hang on its walls. Indeed, the pictures now up for auction in Toronto formed part of that very collection he had loaned to Cuba’s National Gallery eight years before. They included an oil portrait of a woman by George Romney, an oceanscape by Alfred Sisley, and an oil of ships in a storm by the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Willem van de Velde.

That summer, Lobo met in Paris and London with two members of the Canadian syndicate, Irving Hennick and a man called “General” Starkman. He presented them with copies of the act of custody, signed by the then directors of Havana’s National Museum, which had pledged to look after the paintings on Lobo’s behalf. Other catalogues established the paintings were his beyond doubt. Starkman told Lobo that his group traveled frequently to Cuba, that it could retrieve any of his artworks which he might miss, and that they had obtained his pictures in Havana quite legally, they thought. He suggested that Lobo could buy back his pictures up for sale at the auction. Because their ownership was disputed, Lobo would pay a pittance. Having established ownership, he could then resell them for more. Lobo told Starkman he had “no intention whatsoever of dealing with thieves who have wrecked my country, stolen my worldly possessions, and those of my family and friends.” And there the matter rested, and with it a portion of Lobo’s lost wealth.

 

 

LOBO’S HEALTH WITHERED SLOWLY with the usual imprecations of age. He caught pneumonia in 1970. He broke two ribs when he tripped outside his sister’s apartment block on New Year’s Eve two years later and fell into a four-day coma after banging his head on the stone steps. Blood was leached from his skull, and the doctor’s report noted that shrapnel was still lodged at the base of Lobo’s skull. He struggled to keep his spirits up. “When you lose your wealth you lose nothing; he who loses his health loses something,” Lobo wrote to Herman after the operation. “But he who loses his dreams is really licked. I’ve lost the first, part of the second, and am trying damned hard not to lose the third.”

He still retained a lust for life. From Madrid, he wrote frequently to old flames and friends: Joan Fontaine; Varvara Hasselbalch; Hedda Hopper, the gossip columnist; and his second wife, Hilda Krueger—now married to a wealthy Russian-born industrialist. He found new female companionship, almost marrying for a third time to a Spaniard, María Dolores Vila-Coro. Businessmen still sometimes sought his advice. Carlos de la Cruz, a successful Miami-based Cuban entrepreneur then living in Madrid, remembered Lobo’s great “acuity, even though he was only making do.” Lobo no longer multitasked during these meetings as he had years before, answering questions while executing sugar trades at the same time. Lobo’s phones had stopped ringing with calls from brokers many years before, and his old team had long disbanded. He remained lucid, perceptive about the world, and up to date—but also diminished, and apparently immune to nostalgia. The end was growing near, each moment was valuable, and there was little time to waste over recollections. “Of Cuba I know little. I have left all that behind,” he told one Mexican journalist in 1975.

“Wouldn’t you like to go back?” the interviewer insisted.

“I think that my return is unlikely: I am seventy-seven, I am broken, I can hardly walk, and, besides, who wants a bag of old bones?”

Lobo admitted that he would like to see his things again, “to see if they have been looked after.” But, he added, “if they gave them back to me, I would rather they gave them to the people of Cuba instead.”

Lobo’s shrinking made a sad sight. His life had largely revolved around business, that business he had treated like a game, and now the game was over. He still traveled, around Europe, to Madeira, even to St. Helena with a group of Napoleon experts, and tried to write his memoirs, as Napoleon had done. But the attempt never got off the ground. Lobo knew his Shakespeare well: “I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” boasted Glendower in
Henry IV
. “Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?” as Hotspur replied. After the fall, Lobo could no longer summon his once prodigious memory. Only fragments of the past filtered back in unexpected moments, often from his distant youth, such as
thé dansant
at the Country Club in the 1920s when he had held a woman in his arms during a
danzón
. “Ah, they were quite a thing those afternoons,” he told Leonor, who often visited her ailing father in Madrid.

Some of his most vivid recollections came after he suffered a stroke in 1981 and was plagued by hallucinatory dreams. “Strange things happened,” Lobo recalled. “I went out into Havana at night, with no money, traveling on a tram or a bus to places I hardly knew. On one trip I went to an old bathing hut on the bay. On another, I went to a clothes store, asking for provisions for the poor and spent the night on a bunk left for those that needed somewhere to sleep. I also went to the Yacht Club once, and threw myself into the water. A strange bug bit me as I swam. I woke up crying, inconsolable at the thought of the death of my mother, my father, my brother and sisters, Leonor, Jacobo and Helena.”

Lobo suffered another stroke later that year. It was remarkable that he had lasted this long. Only his stubbornness had kept death at bay—that and the spur of constant physical pain. Most of his peers had already died, including his younger sister Helena and his brother-in-law Mario Montoro, although María Esperanza, who also lived in Madrid, visited daily. Despite everything, they had remained friends. Lobo’s health slid rapidly, his spark only sometimes reemerging. Frustrated one day because he wanted to go outside but nobody would take him as he had a cold, he called the police. “Hello, this is Julio Lobo. I am a very important man from Havana and I have been kidnapped by my daughters,” he said. Lobo must have been convincing because a policeman came around to the apartment shortly after. When Leonor explained to the bemused official what had happened, Lobo burst out laughing.

Varvara found a more depressing scene when she visited her old friend in Madrid in 1982. The plants in his room were half dead, the paintings crooked, and Lobo was coughing, half-conscious in bed. He was attended by a priest, Varvara remembered, who looked as though he “might have been painted by El Greco; tall, slim with a long, narrow face, an aristocratic nose and attenuated fingers, one eye pointing up, the other pointing down, as if he was glancing at God and the Devil at the same time.” When the priest left the room, someone whispered, “He has been looking for sinners—and money.” “No, he’s bankrupt,” someone murmured.