The Sugar King of Havana (44 page)

187
How interesting,
Bohemia
pointed out:
Cited in Thomas,
Cuba
, 800.

187
“nothing surprises me because he was a crook”:
Lobo memoir, LAM.

187
Blanco faced a large margin call:
Lobo comments in
Diario de la Marina
, Jan. 11, 1953. See also Cepero Bonilla,
Escritos históricos
, 225–29.

187
with two officials from the Sugar Institute:
León to author.

187
That had been the “good Batista”:
Mark Falcoff,
Cuba, The Morning After
(Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2003), 22–24.

188
Batista played canasta, watched horror films:
Thomas,
Cuba
, 791.1.

188
In his private office:
Szulc,
Fidel
, 212; and
Bohemia
, “La Mansion Campestre del Despota,” Jan. 1959.

188
“master of the world market”:
Cited in Thomas,
Cuba
, 1272.

188
Lobo offered three cents a pound:
Cepero Bonilla,
Escritos históricos
, 242–43.

189
schoolchildren emptied their piggy banks:
“Sweet rationing ends in Britain,”
On This Day: 1950–2005
, BBC News,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/5/newsid_2737000/2737731.stm/
.

189
Baron Paul Kronacher, a Belgian producer and occasional visitor at Tinguaro:
Letter from Lobo to Varvara Hasselbalch, Nov. 9, 1954. Kronacher’s Cuban involvement is also mentioned in the Braga Brothers’ files, Record Group III, Series 50, Box 7.

189
Jesus Azqueta, developed a mill in Venezuela:
Lobo memoir, LAM.

189
believed it “undignified”:
Ibid
.

189
Prices continued to fall, as did the Cuban crop:
By 1955, world production had risen to 38 million tons from 36 million in 1952; Cuban production meanwhile fell from 7.2 million to 4.5 million. Food and Agriculture Organisation,
The World Sugar Economy in Figures, 1880–1959
(Rome: FAO, 1960).

189
he founded a new enterprise, Banco Financiero:
Domestic banks were required by the government to finance Cuban planters for any sugar production in excess of their domestic quotas, but the banks could then repo these loans at a higher rate back to the National Bank. As a result, there was an automatic profit to be had. Lobo was quick to take it. León to author.

190
“I know now the time has come”:
Letter to Lillian Fontaine, July 19, 1953, LAM.

191
“The idea might seem fantastic”:
“¿Se retira Julio Lobo?”
Semanario de la Actualidad,
Sept. 9, 1954.

191
“The life I had been living”:
Letter to Varvara Hasselbalch, Oct. 15, 1953.

191
“I’ve been in pain for so long now”:
Letter to Lillian Fontaine, Nov. 4, 1953, LAM.

192
“As Jonah said to the whale”:
Letter to Varvara Hasselbalch, Oct. 16, 1953.

192
She had met Lobo two years before:
Hasselbalch,
Varvara’s Verden,
105–16.

195
A self-made millionaire:
James Grant,
Bernard Baruch: The Adventures of a Wall Street Legend
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983).

198
The clipping that Lobo sent:
“A home town is born,”
National Municipal Review
, November 1954, LAM.

199
This was probably Cuba’s first commercially successful steam-powered mill:
Ely,
Cuando reinaba su majestad el azúcar
, 93 and 512–14.

199
“If only current generations of
hacendados
”:
Lobo, “Tinguaro.”

200
“a Phoenix, rising from its ashes”:
Telegram to Varvara Hasselbalch, May 5, 1954.

201
“ The Americans invented wash and wear”:
Eladio Secades,
Las Mejores Estampas de Secades: estampas costumbristas cubanas de ayer y de hoy
(Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1983), 17.

202
At night a line was trailed out to sea:
Johnson Family history, 1860–2006, mimeo, 73.

203
“the fashion of impudent dressing”:
Time
, Jan. 24, 1949.

203
Lansky had revamped the Nacional’s casino:
Lansky properly arrived in Cuba after Senator Estes Kefauver’s hearings on Mob-related activities busted his Florida operations in 1953. Lansky served a two-month sentence and then moved south to Cuba, invited by Batista, who had seen the professionalism of Lansky’s operations firsthand in Florida. Batista put him on the government payroll as his tourism and gambling adviser.

203
Carmen maintains she is the inspiration for Eloise:
Cristina Rathbone, “Cuban at Last,”
Tropic Magazine; The Miami Herald
, Oct. 31, 1993, 8–11.

204
“first great patriotic, democratic and socialist revolution”:
Verde Olivio,
July 30, 1961, cited in Falcoff,
Cuba, The Morning After
, 29.

205
more doctors per capita than France:
According to one writer broadly sympathetic to the revolution, Richard Gott,
Cuba: A New History
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 165.

205
the “Paris of the Caribbean,” the “Monte Carlo of the Americas”:
T. J. English,
Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba
(New York: William Morrow, 2007), and Robert Lacey,
Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life
(London: Century, 1991).

207
The second volume was released on June 2, 2007, at a launch party:
Ciro Bianchi Ross, “Los Propietarios,”
Juventud Rebelde
, June 10, 2007.

209
“Not bad for someone who did not know how to read”:
Lobo memoir, LAM.

210
tourism was then Cuba’s fastest-growing industry:
Tourist revenues in 1947 were only $17 million. Over the following decade, they rose at an annual 14 percent rate. Sugar and tobacco, by contrast, were broadly stagnant, although there was impressive growth in Cuban light industry, such as textiles, as well as mining.
Anuario Azucarero de Cuba
, 1959; and
Estudio Sobre Cuba
(Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1963), 1126.

210
The number of hotel rooms in Havana doubled:
A fantastic rate of growth, but to put it into perspective, Las Vegas has 124,000 hotel rooms, twenty-five times as many as Havana did.

210
Pan American Airways made it easier to travel:
English,
Havana Nocturne
, 153.

210
Banco Financiero helped finance the construction of the Riviera and the Capri:
The attraction of such loans to Lobo was that the Bandes guarantee essentially made them risk-free. Hence, when a New York swell named Julio Rosengard one day presented himself to the board with impeccable references, including a seat on the board of trustees of a private university outside Boston, Suffolk, Lobo’s bank agreed to the loan. León to author.

210
it did count among its shareholders Amadeo Barletta:
Enrique Cirules,
The Mafia in Havana
(New York: Ocean Press, 2004), 184–86.

210
A successful businessman, Barletta:
English,
Havana Nocturne
, 100.

210
Their association ended in 1957:
Jiménez,
Las Empresas
, 112.

210
He paid a further $25,000 to Castro’s rebels:
León to author. Lobo also mentions it in his memoir. León confirmed the first payment; LAM contains a receipt for the second.

211
Both Castros later singled out the Bacardís:
Jiménez,
Las Empresas
, 528.

211
often boasted to Spanish officials:
Private information to the author.

212
Hershey spent most of his later years living on the estate:
Joël Glenn Brenner,
The Emperors of Chocolate
(New York: Random House, 1999), 137–38.

212
a classic Lobo market squeeze:
BusinessWeek
, April 1959, explores the possible sequence of events.

213
Lobo backed out, sold his stake to Loeb:
For a recap, see
Wall Street Journal
, March 7 and April 6, 1956;
Miami Herald
, March 4; also Raúl Cepero Bonilla,
Prensa Libre
, Dec. 7, 1956.

213
Krueger had first met Lobo in Havana:
“Propone Grau a la escritora Hilda Krueger el plan que su gobierno piensa desarollar,”
Diario de la Marina
, Dec. 26, 1945. Three years later, Krueger published
La Malinche, or Farewell to Myths
(New York: Storm Publishers, 1948).

214
In Berlin, Krueger also knew Jean Paul Getty:
Robert Lenzer,
Getty: The Richest Man in the World
(London: Grafton Books, 1985), 111–28.

215
a large real estate deal with the U.S. real estate tycoon Bill Zeckendorf:
Lobo and Zeckendorf planned to buy Cuba’s oldest mill, the Toledo, which abutted Havana and was ripe for real estate development. Zeckendorf had already agreed to the terms of Toledo’s purchase for $7.5 million with its owner Manuel Aspuru, Lobo’s old friend, but had called in Lobo as a partner. The failure to buy Hershey still fresh in his mind, Lobo counseled Zeckendorf to bring Batista into the deal as well. Zeckendorf traveled to Havana, drove through the gates of the Presidential Palace “under the muzzles of sub-machine guns on the roof,” and listened politely while Batista talked about the need for a large-scale housing development in Havana. “You have a fine prospect here in Havana,” Batista said at the end of the meeting, according to Zeckendorf. Aspuru traveled to New York to close the deal a few days later, but it unraveled unexpectedly at the last minute. Zeckendorf happened to sit next to Aspuru’s two daughters on the plane to Havana; they were aghast when he complimented them on the pending sale, which they knew nothing about, and on landing in Cuba phoned their father in New York and convinced him to cancel the deal, the sale of their “inheritance.” The old allure of being an
hacendado
still exerted its pull.
The Autobiography of William Zeckendorf
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 254–60. Zeckendorf ’s book is riddled with small errors, but León confirmed the broad outline of the story.

215
“My emotional life with my two wives”:
Letter to Mercedes Formica, July 13, 1971, LAM.

216
“Most people do the wrong thing at the right time”:
Letter to Varvara Hasselbalch, July 1, 1958.

217
Grau lacked funding for this ambitious plan:
BusinessWeek
, April 1958.

217
“Julio, you either buy it ”:
Loeb,
All in a Lifetime
, 168.

217
In May, a fire:
Cubazucar
, June 1957.

217
a bomb that would be placed at Leonor’s forthcoming wedding:
González to author.

217
He had edged Batista out of the shipping firm Naviera Vacuba:
Jiménez,
Empresas
, 491.

218
Loeb’s lawyers stood up and stopped the hands on the clock:
León to author; see also Oscar A. Echevarría,
Captains of Industry: Miguel Angel Falla; the Cuban Sugar Industry
(Miami: New House Publishers, 2002), 27.

219
“disgustingly quiet. The only real danger we faced”:
Cited in Shawn Levy,
The Last Playboy: The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa
(New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 227.

219
Sometime after one o’clock in the morning, an airplane rose:
Rosa Lowinger and Ofelia Fox,
Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub
(New York: Harcourt, 2005), 1–4.

220
As Batista boarded the plane, his incongruous last words:
Cited in Georgie Anne Geyer,
Guerilla Prince
(Little, Brown and Company, 1991), 197.

220
Batista had managed to conjure up a Who’s Who of Cuban business leaders:
See Pedro Manuel Rodríguez,
El Segundo Asalto al Palacio Presidencial
(Havana: Delegación del Gobierno, 1960).

220
Batista’s army was demoralized and ineffective:
Lobo knew this firsthand. The government troops dispatched to hunt down Castro and his rebels in the Sierra had first stationed themselves at Lobo’s mill, Pilón. Led by a cruel braggart, Alberto del Rio Chaviano, brother-in-law of the army chief of staff General Francisco Tabernilla, and infamous for killing and torturing prisoners captured after Castro’s attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago three years before, the soldiers had helped themselves freely to Pilón’s supplies. The army only reimbursed Lobo later when he filed three invoices: one for Chaviano, another for Tabernilla, and a final one for himself. “That is the way things were then,” Lobo recalled ruefully. LAM.

221
“ ‘Feliz año nuevo,’
I said as I got between my silk sheets”:
Lewis Yablonsky,
George Raft
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 221–22.

221
Lobo told journalists that Castro’s victory could “only be compared”:
Chicago Daily Tribune
, Jan. 8, 1959.

222
“The triumph of the revolution makes me very happy”:
Gjelten,
Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba
, 208.

222
“Instead of criticizing the executions”:
Ibid., 212.

222
The satirical magazine
Zig-Zag:
Estrada,
Havana
, 235.

222 (
“I resigned. Cuba did not protest ”):
Diario de la Marina
, Nov. 12, 1960.

222
Lobo went to the Ministry of Finance to pay a $450,000 advance on his taxes:
The fact that the Bacardi payment was the same size suggests these two businesses were of a similar scale—and profitability. Gjelten,
Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba
, 208.