The Sugar King of Havana (39 page)

 

 

CUBA’S GREAT AGE OF SUGAR has passed. Two thirds of the island’s mills have closed, their parts cannibalized as spares for the mills that remain. Production has dropped to a fraction of what it once was, and Cuba’s rickety sugar industry can no longer compete with more efficient producers elsewhere. Fidel Castro’s retirement from the leadership, his replacement by his brother Raúl, both brothers’ inevitable death, and the eventual unpicking of the U.S. embargo may well downsize the history of Cuba further, and maybe the island itself. The charisma of the Castro brothers’ revolution has been unique, but then so too have been its material failures. Castro may have summoned a small part of the future that he promised Cubans in 1959—the island’s independence, or “dignity,” as he called it. But not, as journalist Ann Louise Bardach has put it, breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

Havana, meanwhile, for all its splendor, looks like a city under siege, scarred by the traces of constant attack. Yet it is the “projectiles of mismanagement and the bullets of a centralized economy that have shaped its landscape.” Yoani Sánchez, who wrote that phrase, is the best known of a growing number of Cuban bloggers who record daily Havana life in all its inadequacies and, despite Internet access restrictions, manage to post their thoughts on the Web. Awarded the Ortega y Gasset prize for journalism in 2008, Sánchez’s thoughts range from the domestic—how, whenever she approaches her Soviet-era apartment block, she hugs the wall to avoid walking under the balconies because of the kids who kill their boredom by throwing condoms filled with urine onto passersby below—to the gently political. One of her commonest refrains is a weary complaint against an official political rhetoric that still embraces words such as
conflict
and
struggle
, instead of “prosperity, reconciliation, harmony and coexistence.”

Such seemingly mild objections—for which, on November 6, 2009, Sánchez was forced into an unmarked car, beaten, threatened, and dumped in the street—point to a deep and enduring problem of the Cuban revolution. Because for all the talk of sovereignty, almost one in ten Cubans lives
outside
the island today. When anyone in Europe seems to take that for granted, and somehow views exile as a necessary corollary to what was,
surely
, a just revolution, a righteous poke in the eye of the Yankee imperialists, I point out that it is as strange and absurd a situation as if six million British people lived in exile in Calais, eighty miles from London, and Harold Macmillan—dead for more than twenty years—was still prime minister, as he was when Castro and the other
barbudos
came down from the hills. If “Who am
I
?” is the primary question of philosophy, “Who are
We
?” is the primary question of politics, and it is one that Havana has been unable to answer.

“Ahhh, everything was so beautiful in those days,” Angela, the daughter of María la Gorda, Fat Mary, remarked to me. I was visiting the family of my mother’s old nanny in Havana. Now in her late nineties, María la Gorda lives in a three-room house on a street with tiny porches out front in a respectable working-class neighborhood behind the Tropicana night-club, cared for by her daughter, an energetic seventy-five-year-old. Angela was proudly reminiscing about her own father, who before the revolution had worked in Matanzas as a
colono,
a small-time sugar farmer, near the
central
Álava, one of Rionda’s former mills, while María worked with my mother’s family in Havana, six days a week, every Sunday off, for twenty-five years.

Our families have never lost touch. Fifty years ago, María used to sneak food to my mother because she suffered from allergies and my grandmother’s cure was to starve them out. Now it was my turn to sneak her food, or rather money, as I handed Angela a small envelope that my mother had asked me to take to Havana. “I hope it helps,” I said. Angela’s mouth then settled into a caricature of a sad clown’s upside-down smile. She never went out, she said. The last time she had made a day excursion was three years ago. Besides, where would she go? Everything was so expensive. Transport was a huge problem. Even if she had to go to the doctor herself, she could never be sure when she would get back, and she couldn’t leave María alone. So they stayed indoors and scraped by on their ration cards and a monthly pension of 150 pesos a month, worth about $7. Other than weekend visits by Angela’s children—an engineer; a soldier; a daughter, although she had just emigrated to the United States, having won a visa in the lottery; and another son, a doctor, although he had been sent to work in Caracas—that was it. Such isolation made Angela and María extreme examples of
insulados
, in-isles, people who have turned their back on a Cuba they find ugly or threatening, and stay indoors, a mirror image of
exiliados
, the ex-isles of abroad.

 

 

THE LEGACY OF CASTRO’S REVOLUTION will be disputed for decades. For every argument advanced in its favor—the health care that had enabled María la Gorda to have a pacemaker, the education that had allowed one of Angela’s sons to become a doctor—there is an equal riposte: the lack of medicine, classroom books, jobs, pretty much everything. Such discussions only circle back on each other. What is inarguable, though, is that the island has lost its capital. In many ways, this is a historical repeat of Cuba’s legacy from the struggle for independence against Spain, when the country was left half-free and also half-ruined, as Bernabé Sanchez recorded from his fallen-down mill in Camagüey more than a century ago.

Luis Machado, a prominent Cuban businessman in the 1930s, reflected on that struggle in words that are still relevant today. “Three generations of Cubans have fought and died for the freedom, sovereignty and independence of our people,” he wrote. “Our generation’s challenge is economic and social. If our parents forged an independent Cuba, we have to make our country not only wealthy, but Cuban.”

Lobo was one of those to heed Luis Machado’s call. He sought to make the country “great through wealth.” He had an impressive ability to compete with and beat American capitalists on their own terms. He turned the U.S. sugar quota, “the yoke,” as Che Guevara called it, to Cuba’s advantage in 1934 by squeezing the market and driving sugar prices higher. He was at the forefront of those Cubans, and there were many others, who bought back foreign-owned mills after the Second World War. While Castro stood on the steps of the University of Havana in 1948 and denounced the foreign ownership of Cuba, it was Lobo who did something about it, launching a hostile corporate raid on one of the biggest of those American enterprises, the railroad firm Cuba Company, a move that eventually delivered it into Cuban hands.

Many Cubans still hold themselves and their country in high regard. The island may look small compared with the United States. But next to its Caribbean neighbors, with a landmass the size of England and Wales, Cuba is rather large. Few countries—perhaps none—waged three successful African campaigns in the second half of the last century, as Cuba did. The country has as much a tradition of empire as it does of victimhood, and, for better or worse, Cubans have often been more in control of their own destiny than is frequently presumed. There is little reason why it should be less so in the future.

Lobo was rootless and cosmopolitan in ways that harked back to the great sugar kings of Cuban history, such as Francisco Arango y Parreño, the first person to refer to Cuba as “a country” at the Spanish court in 1788. Like such men, Lobo was intellectually restless; the global nature of sugar required them to be so. Yet for all his globe-trotting, his strange obsession with Napoleon, and his international love affairs, Lobo felt resolutely Cuban and always returned to the island. He was proud of the scholarships, the schools, and the hospitals that he built on his mills, and was withering in his criticism of those who established sugar companies abroad, which then competed with Cuba. “I always felt this was wrong,” Lobo once wrote, even as he realized how rash it was to have concentrated so much of his own wealth in one place.

The period when Lobo’s empire was at its peak coincided with that moment when the old Cuba that he in many ways represented was also about to fall—the glorious if corrupt Havana of the Batista years. Yet Lobo saw the country’s failings and vanities for what they were, and like many others wanted to change them. He was apolitical to the extent that this was possible under Batista during the 1950s. When their business interests clashed, Lobo was as relentless with the president as he was with any other business foe. Does that sound too good to be true? The apolitical businessman is a familiar figure in Anglo-Saxon countries; less so in the Latin world.

Lobo’s attempts to transform the Cuban sugar industry—last truly liberal in the 1920s, and by the 1950s almost state-controlled—were genuinely revolutionary. Because of that, his efforts were also unpopular. The final irony is that many of the innovations that Lobo wanted to introduce—such as mechanization and land tenure reform—were introduced by the revolutionary government itself. “That bunch of robbers have managed to do what Batista, Mañas and Barroso didn’t allow, for their own reasons,” Lobo wrote to one of his old lieutenants in 1974. Yet economics if not politics would have eventually forced those same changes—just as Batista would also have fallen even without Castro and all his madness.

Lobo died in Madrid, deposed from the country he loved, his legacy all but obliterated and, if not in poverty, down to his last two hundred thousand dollars—a five hundred and sixtieth part of the fortune he had once had. To some, that may seem like a fitting end for Cuba’s richest man and one of the world’s greatest speculators. Yet his drive and financial genius ensure that he would have made a success of himself anywhere. Cuba’s struggles have meanwhile left the island a sad curio, patronized by visitors from abroad who want to see the country before “everything changes.” Yet does the end of something—a life, a period of history—always tell the full truth about it, or about what might happen next?

 

 

IF THIS STORY was a piece of theater, the curtain would now fall, only to rise again shortly after to show an empty stage onto which all the characters involved would appear to take a bow. First would come the chorus: foreigners in business suits, tourists wearing flowery shirts, swarthy-looking types with trilby hats and machine guns under their arms, bearded men dressed in olive fatigues, showgirls in tasseled sequins, plump Spanish shopkeepers, and thin but muscled cane workers, mostly black. A corpulent president and his family—the children wearing patent leather shoes, the wife a pencil skirt, jacket, and hat, and he in white linen—would take a bow, perhaps to boos, and so too an instantly recognizable figure carrying a telescopic rifle, with a large but soft and well-tended beard, the son of a well-to-do Spanish sugarcane farmer who appeared in the first scenes. Last to step up to the footlights, with a slight limp, would be a short man, wearing white trousers, a guayabera, and a black bow tie. Then the curtain would fall for the last time, the lights would come up, and everyone would go home. But Cuba is not a piece of entertainment with a neat ending, and the story goes on.

Lobo’s obituaries dwelt on his fame as the onetime King of Sugar, his vast former properties in Cuba, his remarkable Napoleon collection, his business acumen, his exile, and his reputed wealth—although that was all gone. He sometimes seemed to prefer it that way. “I am happier now with nothing than when I had the largest fortune in Cuba,” Lobo had written to Hilda Krueger ten years before he died. “Money is a diabolical invention that separates parents from children, brothers from each other, and friends from friends.”

I once thought that might be a fitting epitaph, and for so many reasons: for Lobo’s own turbulent and bloodied life before Castro came down from the hills, for the years of division that followed after, and for the endless possibilities for forgiveness that the revolution’s eventual and welcome end will finally hold. Yet while Lobo, a stoic, lived happily with little at the end of his life, he always relished the memories of when he had had it all and reigned over a global empire from an office in Old Havana. Lobo made Cuba not only wealthy but more Cuban. So let there be more Lobos, as Tinguaro
’
s workers once declared. The King is dead! Long live the King!—and Cuba’s future Queens, Emperors, Empresses,
princesas, distinguidos
, and
caballeros
too.

While this is not an authorized biography, it would have been impossible to write without the help of Julio Lobo’s family. So I would especially like to thank Leonor Lobo Montalvo de González for the many hours that she spent talking to me about her father’s life; I deeply appreciated her trust and candor. I also owe a hefty thanks to the Ryan Lobos—Victoria, John, Carolina, and Alin—who opened their grandfather’s archive to me. To others, I would like to make clear—because the question was sometimes asked, especially in Havana—that I received no favor or promise of any kind from the Lobo family to fund this project.

I am, however, extremely grateful to the J. M. Kaplan Fund for its generous financial support during the early stages of research and to Carl Van Ness at the University of Florida’s George A. Smathers Library, who found me an academic berth from which to do it. The book might never have gotten off the ground without their help.

It has been said that the only debts that leave one richer are debts of gratitude. In which case I became a very wealthy man during the course of this nearly five-year project. Almost everyone I spoke to helped in some way. In particular, though, I would like to thank, by geography and in roughly alphabetical order:

In the United Kingdom: Flavia Campilli, the staff at Canning House library, Frank Canosa, Malcom Deas—for the perch at St Antony’s College; Isabel Fonseca, William Fiennes; Eleo Gordon—for showing me her family’s memoirs; David Herbert, Rurik Ingram—Julio Lobo’s godson, not least for introducing me to his extraordinary mother, Varvara; Mario Lobo, Sophie Molins, Julio Nuñez, and Bella Thomas. At the
Financial Times
, Kripa Pancholi and Graham Lever helped with the artwork. At Breakingviews, I am grateful to my then editors Hugo Dixon and Jonathan Ford, who gave me leave to write.