The Sugar King of Havana (6 page)

“Now we’ve got you where and how we want you,” he said to Lobo, without getting up.

“How is that?” replied Lobo, standing in front of his old desk.

“Stripped of everything, almost naked.”

“
Chico
, I was born naked, I will probably die naked and some of the happiest moments of my life were when I was naked,” Lobo shot back, and then left.

That afternoon, Lobo caught a crowded airplane flight to Mexico and from there to New York. He took with him a small suitcase and a toothbrush. He left behind his El Greco paintings, his palaces, his vast enterprises, and his locks of Napoleon’s hair. Lobo was then sixty-two, eight years younger than Don Fabrizio, and if not an old man, then at an age when most people think of retiring rather than starting again. The day after his departure, the Cuban government nationalized his sugar assets and made itself “custodian” of almost all the art and artifacts, leaving Lobo with virtually nothing.

Lobo foresaw all of this after his midnight meeting with Guevara. As he had readied to leave the island, he told his secretary, “This is the end.” Of course it was not the end, it was just another beginning, and everything that came before or that follows after flows from this thought.

—BISHOP JOSEP TORRAS I BAGES,
La Tradició Catalana,
1892

 

 

I
always wanted to de-exoticize Cuba—land of palm trees, championship women’s volleyball, and machete-wielding rebel heroes. Yet whenever I traveled to the island, it seemed to require me to step into another state. Once, in 2004, my nerves about the forthcoming trip even prompted a fever. It came on while I waited in an airport lounge in Madrid. It rose as the Iberia flight crossed the Atlantic, and by the time the plane landed at José Martí airport in Havana, I was jittering with cold sweat. The night drive into the city passed in a hot blur—I was normally so attentive to the details: the sugar train railway tracks that crisscrossed the road into town, the billboards carrying political messages on the outskirts of Havana, the finishing loop around the one-way system circling the university, the persistent elegance of the art deco mansions that surrounded the campus, and the old graffito ABAJO BATISTA ASESINO, “Down with Batista the Assassin,” still proclaiming its message in faded red paint on a white wall at a crowded intersection at the head of Neptuno Street.

I checked into a state-run hotel and went to my room. The brown carpet was blotted with stains and there was a threadbare patch one step in from the door. The shabby brown curtains smelled of damp, as did the brown bedspread and the brown chair with a dark patch on the headrest that marked where others had sat before. I lay down and turned the knobs of the broken radio set built into the headboard that dated from the 1950s. I switched on the modern television made in Japan and then clicked it off when I found only static and dancing black specks on the screen. I flicked through a copy of the state newspaper
Granma
that I had picked up in the lobby, and a small story caught my eye. It paid tribute to Ignacio Agramonte, a hero from Cuba’s war of independence against Spain, and described in four crisp paragraphs how a group of sixty international students from thirty-five foreign countries had accompanied a small band of aging rebels from the Sierra Maestra on a march to the Cuban battlefield where Agramonte had died 170 years before. I put down the newspaper and opened the window. I listened to the sea breeze swish past the building; it sounded like a long dress trailing on the floor. Hot and thirsty, I went downstairs to ask at the bar for ice. A waiter emerged from the kitchen, shrugged, and said there was none. “I know: for a bar man to have no ice is like a
puta
not having a
coño
,” he admitted without mirth. I went back to my room, pulled the sheets over my head, and sweated into a dreamless sleep.

It wasn’t always so dismal, although I had felt similarly despondent the first time I visited Cuba thirteen years before. I remember a cool September weekend, Havana gray with gentle rain, and a muffled city—as though covered with a thick layer of dust. It was the beginning of
el periodo especial
, the special period, the time of severe rationing that followed the end of Soviet subsidies in 1991 and has never formally ended. I wandered through Havana’s back streets and felt safe in a way I never would have in Caracas, Bogotá, or Mexico City. Yet as I walked around Havana for the first time, I also heard no music filter through the open doorways of people’s homes and saw none of the Spanish Caribbean’s usual bustle. The city lacked buoyancy. Compounding the disillusionment was my companion, a well-meaning English girl. Like her, I saw the pathos and crumbling beauty of the once-grand buildings that lined the Malecón. I saw the irony of the dilapidation of my grandfather’s old store, the roof caved in, just two naked mannequins standing in a cracked display window on San Rafael Street. But I also felt anger and, outside Havana’s Museum of the Revolution, had launched into a neo-conservative tirade about the merits of capitalism that had surprised me. My companion rose to the revolution’s defense—its education and health care, the greater Latin American poverty elsewhere. Yet she too then felt confused, and struggled through the rest of our short visit with a splitting headache, as she tried to reconcile the ambiguities we saw around us.

DESPITE MY GRANDFATHER’S DEPARTMENT STORE in Havana’s former shopping district, the wealth of my mother’s family was rooted, like so much else on the island, in sugar—not as encompassing as Lobo’s but still substantial. Just like Lobo’s family, it was also contained in one man: Bernabé Sanchez, owner of the Senado sugar mill in Camagüey. The first of my mother’s forebears to arrive in Cuba, Don Mateo Sanchez-Pereira, a Spanish soldier, had landed in Havana at the dawn of the seventeenth century from Mexico’s Yucatán. Predating that even, my maternal grandmother’s family is distantly related to the bastard conquistador Vasco Porcallo de Figueroa, who arrived in Cuba in 1511. Figueroa joined Hernando de Soto in the invasion of Florida in his doomed quest to find the fountain of youth, wisely turned back to Cuba to found Camagüey’s capital, among other cities, and made an immense fortune from Indian slaves, marrying the Taíno princess Tínima, daughter of the local
cacique
Camagüebax. The stories of such men are fables, though. Three hundred years later, Bernabé, my great-great-grandfather, is the first figure to really come alive in family lore. He is the benign but epic patriarch of our imagination.

A tall and wide-shouldered man with a broad chest, thick mustache, and close-cropped silver hair, Bernabé was born in 1841, when Cuba was still under Spanish rule. His father was a merchant in the provincial port of Nuevitas, and when he retired, Bernabé took over the business, expanded it, and in 1883 built his first sugar mill, Congreso, the Congress. Bernabé later rechristened it Senado, the Senate, another name that hints at his political beliefs. A progressive modernizer, like Lobo many years later, Bernabé achieved a modest renown after he used sturdy burlap sacks to bag sugar at Senado
.
These replaced the wooden boxes made from imported North American pine that had been the norm before; although expensive, U.S. pine was preferred to Cuban woods, such as sandalwood or mastic, which scented stored sugar with their resin. While an apparently small innovation, Bernabé’s sacks changed the way sugar was handled, stored, shipped, and measured.

Bernabé’s mill was also among the first of the newly mechanized sugar operations to spring up in eastern Cuba after the abolition of slavery in 1880. Such mills were called
centrales,
literally centrals, which gives a sense of the system of lands, machines, transport, workers, and credit that revolved around the biggest of them. Their hub, the nucleus of every
central
, was the
batey
, a town square around which were arranged the huge buildings that housed the grinding machines, the railway shunting yards where cut cane was unloaded into wooden carts pulled by oxen or locomotives, the homes of the mill owner and senior managers, as well as the provisions warehouse, perhaps a church, a school, and a hospital. Behind these buildings, in smaller one-story houses, lived the skilled and semi-skilled technicians who measured the pressure of the rolling mills, the heat of the boilers, the viscosity of the sugar solution, the rate of crystallization, and the polarization of the sugar—a measure of its whiteness. Farther out lay the barracks of the field hands.

Centrales
were more like factories than farms. The largest were industrial giants, such as the American-owned Las Delicias or the United Fruit Company’s Boston, which looked like cities set down on the edges of vast rolling fields of cane. There, foreign managers lived with their families in mosquito-screened bungalows set in gated communities, a world apart from the rest of the island. By contrast,
cachimbos,
the smallest mills, re-tained a sense of almost artisanal production. At the start of every harvest, in a creole vision of the sugar idyll, the yeoman planter fired his boiler, and tufts of white smoke would float over Cuba’s green and peaceable countryside. Senado lay between these two extremes.