The Sugar King of Havana: The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's Last Tycoon Review
"The Sugar King of Havana" reads like a family story as told by a plainspoken old uncle or aunt who knows almost all, but not quite all the family secrets, and who gets distracted, wanders off in reminiscences about some particularly fun parties, tells the main events out of order, but eventually gets around to most of the good stuff.
It is a wonderfully engaging way of telling the tale, which is not just about Julio Lobo, who was born in the year the Americans kicked the Spaniards out of Cuba and who lived and loved long enough to be kicked out himself by Fidel Castro.
"The Sugar King of Havana" is also about the blindness of what anywhere else would have been a ruling elite, the wealthy creole mercantile class of Cuba. (Thankfully, John Paul Rathbone uses creole in its original and useful sense of residents of European colonies of pure European descent; rather than its upside-down current academic usage.)
Like several other Latin countries (Argentina, for example), in the early 20th century Cuba was rich, or at least appeared so, with an apparently sophisticated international gilded class. Lobo, for example, collected Utrillos and Rembrandts along with movie actresses and Napoleon's death mask; but like the rest of the creoles, he was fatally naive about democracy.
Life was good at the top, and they were content to leave the messy business of governing to a series of murderous, corrupt thugs, from Grau to Batista to Castro.
None thought it worthwhile to pledge life, fortune or honor to making Cuba a genuinely self-governing country; they were content to have seen the Yankees ousted. That was enough, wasn't it? As has been demonstrated again and again, most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, no, it was not enough.
Rathbone, whose mother was a friend of Lobo's daughter, makes Lobo sound more attractive than the other tycoons, well respected even by his workers, for whom he provided better medical care, schools and housing than other planters did. But Cuban rural people - mostly black - had no reason to bother preserving even the better of their landowners, and did not.
The creoles, including Lobo, also welcomed Castro, at first. Anybody but Batista, and, in fact, Lobo did better under Castro than he did under any precommunist government. The communists stole his Rembrandt, his sugar mills, his 342,000 acres and his houses, but they didn't beat him up or shoot him.
During the so-called democratic years, Lobo was shot up and, at one point, condemned to death at dawn.
Rathbone, a financial journalist, emphasizes the sophisticated market operations of the Cubans, and especially Lobo, who pioneered such things as the hostile takeover and frequently bested Wall Street.
But Lobo was, despite being a better than average businessman, mostly a speculator, and success in speculation is always a matter of luck, not skill. Lobo bet against Hitler in 1939 and would have been wiped out had he not been rescued by a surprising move by the French into sugar. Later, after leaving Cuba with only a few millions, he speculated again, prospering for a while, until he was definitively wiped out by guessing wrong again.
Lobo fundamentally misunderstood sugar, arguing that Cuba, as the low-cost producer, should produce as much as possible and take over world markets from the less-efficient. That was a sad mistake, because Cuba probably was not the most efficient producer (still using ox carts to deliver cane to the mills in the '50s), but mostly because men in Europe who had been starved of sugar as little boys were not about to let themselves go without sweets again.
Overproduction ruled. The sugar beet had made most countries more or less self-sufficient in sugar, so there was only a tiny international trade. As long as western Europe was going to guarantee itself plenty of sugar (and butter), then world prices would be under the costs of anybody's production, and producing more would have just made Cuba poorer; at least, once communism shut it off from the protected American market.
The same would have been true of coffee, tea and chocolate if Europe had been able to grow tea, coffee or cacao. Memories of deprivation live long.
Lobo died in 1983. Rathbone visited some of his centrales (what we would call "the mill") in the '90s, where they were fallen down and ruined. But it wasn't communism that did that. Hawaii, probably more efficient than Cuba even when Cuba was at its best, is also marked with fallen down and ruined sugar mills.
The Sugar King of Havana: The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's Last Tycoon Overview
The son of a Cuban exile recounts the remarkable and contradictory life of famed sugar baron Julio Lobo, the richest man in prerevolutionary Cuba and the last of the island's haute bourgeoisie.
Fifty years after the Cuban revolution, the legendary wealth of the sugar magnate Julio Lobo remains emblematic of a certain way of life that came to an abrupt end when Fidel Castro marched into Havana. Known in his day as the King of Sugar, Lobo was for decades the most powerful force in the world sugar market, controlling vast swathes of the island's sugar interests. Born in 1898, the year of Cuba's independence, Lobo's extraordinary life mirrors, in almost lurid technicolor, the many rises and final fall of the troubled Cuban republic.
The details of Lobo's life are fit for Hollywood. He twice cornered the international sugar market and had the largest collection of Napoleonica outside of France, including the emperor's back teeth and death mask. He once faced a firing squad only to be pardoned at the last moment, and later survived a gangland shooting. He courted movie stars from Bette Davis to Joan Fontaine and filled the swimming pool at his sprawling estate with perfume when Esther Williams came to visit.
As Rathbone observes, such are the legends of which revolutions are made, and later justified. But Lobo was also a progressive and a philanthropist, and his genius was so widely acknowledged that Che Guevara personally offered him the position of minister of sugar in the Communist regime. When Lobo declined-knowing that their worldviews could never be compatible-his properties were nationalized, most of his fortune vanished overnight, and he left the island, never to return to his beloved Cuba.
Financial Times journalist John Paul Rathbone has been fascinated by this intoxicating, whirligig, and contradictory prerevolutionary period his entire life. His mother was also a member of Havana's storied haute bourgeoisie and a friend of Lobo's daughters. Woven into Lobo's tale is her family's experience of republic, revolution, and exile, as well as the author's own struggle to come to grips with Cuba's, and his family's, turbulent history.
Prodigiously researched and imaginatively written, The Sugar King of Havana is a captivating portrait of the glittering end of an era, but also of a more hopeful Cuban past, one that might even provide a window into the island's future.
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