The Sugar King of Havana (14 page)

The ABC—so named because of its cellular structure, whereby if a member of, say, cell B1 was captured, he could not betray his superiors in any of the A cells, nor his peers in any of the B or C cells—continued to plant bombs and assassinate Machado supporters. There were nightly shootings in Havana, on the streets and in theaters and cafés. Unperturbed, Machado proclaimed he would serve out his second term, which ran until the middle of 1935, and “not one minute more, not one minute less.” But that spring Sumner Welles, the new U.S. ambassador, arrived. Tall, condescending, and patrician, a classmate of Franklin Roosevelt at Groton and Harvard, Welles landed in Havana on May 8, 1933, immaculately dressed in a three-piece suit. His brief was to mediate an end to the crisis. Further violence and unrest soon made it clear to Welles that Machado had to go. On August 4, the country was paralyzed by a bus stoppage that turned into a spontaneous general strike. In Havana not a wheel turned and not a factory was open; no cigar workers sat at their tobacco rolling tables, and all offices and businesses were closed. “Outwardly Havana was a tomb,” wrote one observer. “In reality it was a seething cauldron.” Seven days later, Machado learned he had lost both the United States’ and his own army’s support. He fled Cuba by plane the following morning, bound for the Bahamas with his family, five revolvers, and seven bags of gold on board. As he flew over the island, he saw the Cuban sky stained red by the fires of the burning homes of his former supporters.

The violence unleashed by Machado’s departure was unlike any other that Cuba had experienced since independence. Fed as much by desperate hunger as by a thirst for revenge, the printing presses of pro-Machado newspapers were smashed to pieces and the mansions of former Machadistas and the president’s mistresses were looted. Throughout the island, gunshots and shouts summoned witnesses to impromptu executions. Ruby Hart Phillips, the
New York Times
correspondent in Havana, watched one Machado supporter reach his end outside the Capitolio building.

Welles tried to reinstate order by installing a new government. It collapsed after just twenty-one days. Then, in early September, Fulgencio Batista, an unknown army sergeant, took control of the Camp Columbia army base outside Havana to press for better housing and pay. What started as an act of military insubordination soon escalated into a full-fledged coup. Strike leaders and the ABC student rebels saw the opportunity and joined forces with Batista and other dissident sergeants. The two groups formed an uneasy alliance.

Batista and his sergeants were men of action, generally from poor backgrounds. Batista was then thirty-three years old. The charming and quick-witted son of a mulatto cane cutter, he had grown up in poverty in rural Cuba and raised himself through the army ranks as a stenographer. It was a deceptively useful role: transcribing orders had exposed him to the flow of military orders and intelligence. The student and labor leaders, by contrast, were mostly middle-class radicals. They spent hours debating the finer points of public policy and were led by Ramón Grau San Martín, a forty-six-year-old man of inherited wealth who spoke cultured Spanish and was a professor at the university. Under the slogan “Cuba for Cubans,” Grau unilaterally abrogated the hated Platt Amendment, and instituted a minimum wage and a 40 percent cut in utility prices.

Taking power had been easy. Keeping it would prove difficult. “Who is ruling Cuba?”
El Mundo
newspaper asked on September 23, three weeks after the coup. Nobody knew for sure. The students and the sergeants were surrounded by powerful enemies. These included the U.S. ambassador; Welles was uncomfortable about Grau’s apparently socialist agenda and refused to recognize his government. There were also the Communists, a growing and insistent force on the island, backed by Moscow. Finally, there were the military officers that Batista had ousted and who disdainfully regarded the upstart mulatto sergeant as a
guajiro,
or country boy. Each made their challenge in turn.

The first confrontation came on September 29, when soldiers fired on a Communist rally at Havana’s Parque de la Fraternidad, Brotherly Park, killing at least six, although some estimates ran as high as thirty dead and more than one hundred wounded. A second battle followed three days later at the Hotel Nacional, where a group of two hundred military officers were making a stand against Batista’s army. The officers stationed sharpshooters in the Nacional’s red-tiled
miradores
, killing as many as one hundred. Batista summoned naval artillery, armored cars, and cannon to shell their positions. Crushed by this onslaught, and running low on ammunition, the officers surrendered. When they filed outside the building, a crowd opened fire from the tennis courts, killing eleven and wounding twenty-two.

The skein of violence and confusion that threaded through Cuba that year twisted itself around everybody, including Lobo. Shortly after the Nacional siege, a group of armed guards came to the Galbán Lobo office in Old Havana, arrested Lobo, and took him to La Cabaña fortress, a short boat ride across the bay. The soldiers told Lobo he was to be shot the next day for plotting against the government. Suspicions may have arisen because Lobo and his father knew Sumner Welles. When the American ambassador had first arrived in Havana six months before, aides had advised him to seek out the Lobos’ counsel, as Heriberto was “one of the soundest, if not the soundest” businessmen in Havana, someone “who avoided politics and so could be trusted to keep confidential matters inviolate.” It is also possible that Lobo was arrested because of his openly critical views about Cuba’s restrictive sugar policies. Lobo saw them as responsible for the immiseration of the country, and had long campaigned for their removal. The year before, he had even traveled to Albany to explain this to Roosevelt. The president-elect had wanted the Lobos’ opinion on how to relieve Cuba’s growing state of unrest under Machado. Lobo told him that “unless Cuba was able to sell more sugar and at higher prices . . . a general upheaval would come about on the island.” And so it had proved.

Lobo was held overnight in a subterranean dungeon. From the darkness of his cell he heard “the sea pounding against the rocks outside.” His cell mates were common criminals: a mulatto from Santiago accused of raping and killing a young girl; a black shopkeeper from Camagüey accused of murder; and a Spaniard who had stabbed his Cuban wife to death after finding her in bed with another man. Lobo protested his innocence and was released the next day when the authorities realized they had made a mistake. Later, Lobo breezily dismissed the incident, but it was still a close call. Other Cubans—such as the marching Communists killed at Brotherly Park, or the officers at the Nacional—were less fortunate.

The whole island was in a state of unrest. Outside Havana workers marched on the sugar mills, potent symbols of foreign capitalism. In Camagüey, five hundred armed workers took control of the Lugareño mill. At the Central Soledad, in the neighboring province of Las Villas, the manager—Llewellyn Hughes, the son of a Welsh village priest from Caerphilly and a longtime Cuba resident—was imprisoned in his house by a mob. “It is so comforting to hear an English voice that I must speak. But I must be careful,” he told a British reporter who called from the
Daily Express
. “This wire is tapped by the Communists. . . . The situation is so tense here that the slightest incident would undoubtedly lead to the loss of a good many lives.” The strikes spread. By the end of September, thirty-six mills were occupied, a third of the total, and at Welles’s request North American warships surrounded the island to glare over American property. Fearing intervention, Batista dispatched several columns of soldiers by train to the east of the island to bring order. It was a fateful decision. Many bloody and tragic events took place that year in Cuba, but one of the saddest happened at a sugar mill that my family once proudly considered their own.

NOBODY KNOWS, FOR sure, how many people were killed at Senado on November 18, two and a half months after Batista’s coup d’état. At the time, some said three died; others, ten. An investigation in the 1980s suggested that as many as twenty-two were killed. All versions are plausible, but nothing is sure, because the more I looked into the incident, the more confused everything became, and instead of a hard kernel of bitter truth, I found other stories, intermingled and contradicting each other.

The only part that everybody agrees on is that the incident began with a strike in the first week of September. Led by a Russian (or a Pole) called Pedro Stodolsky (or Stolovski), a thousand workers took control of Senado. Stodolsky’s red beard gave him the very image of an agent provocateur but was in fact a mask for his youth; Stodolsky was then only in his mid-twenties (police reports of the time were uncertain about his precise age). He organized Senado’s strikers. Some guarded the
batey
; they carried sharpened machetes and spiny branches cut from thorn trees. Others gathered supplies and food. Grau sent them a message from Havana:
firme con ustedes
, I stand firm with you. But then Grau fell out with the Communist Party and turned his back on the strikers. Stodolsky sent an
estaca
, a large wooden stake, to Havana in protest, a defiant response.

Senado was then a medium-sized mill. It provided employment for around four thousand workers and their families, and its St. Louis Fulton triple crushers produced around 200,000 bags of sugar, some 25,000 tons, every year. It was run by Don Emilio, the eldest son of Bernabé’s second wife. Don Pedro, the former manager and my great-grandfather, had moved to Havana a few years earlier after the mill had passed to his half-brother’s family following Bernabé’s death.

Emilio had a playboy reputation—as did his brother Julio, who knew Churchill, apparently well enough to invite him to Senado where they had played tennis on a mahogany court laid down by Bernabé many years before. Perhaps unfairly, I think of Emilio as a cold-hearted man. One family story, although it may be apocryphal, told of a mill worker who asked Don Emilio for help after he suffered an accident that threatened his sight in one eye. “There is so much unhappiness in the world that it is much better to have just one,” Emilio supposedly replied. “Two eyes would be too much misery to bear.” He had only one son, also called Emilio, who later became a successful painter in New York. Emilito, little Emilio, was apparently estranged from his father and, while this may only be a coincidence, in Emilito’s copious sketchbooks I have seen drawings of everything from teapots to roosters to skyscrapers and palm trees, yet never a drawing of a stalk of sugarcane.

Emilio was in Havana at the time of the strike, staying at the Nacional
.
A workers’ committee came to talk to him directly to try to end the standoff. It was two weeks after the Nacional’s siege, and the group met in the battle-scarred gardens of the hotel, its balconies shorn off by artillery fire, the insides looted to the walls. In the distance, the group could hear gunshots and the occasional bomb going off. Emilio was apparently befuddled and confused. Many years later, one of the five workers from Senado recalled their brief conversation. Emilio told the delegation that everything was too chaotic.

“When the situation in the country is sorted out, then we’ll sort ourselves out too,” he said.

Disappointed, the workers made to leave. As they turned to go, Emilio asked them: “You must be feeling the pinch, no?”

“Yes,” they replied. “But we are still on our feet.”

“Surely you need some money. Do you need any?” Emilio asked.

“No, we still have some left,” the men said proudly, rejecting the offer. But on the way back to Camagüey, they had an accident in their car and had to borrow ten pesos to continue the journey home.

Parsing this snippet of conversation, I figure it is possible that Emilio had tried to offer the men some kind of bribe, although his concern for their well-being could just as well have been genuine. Emilio had already arranged for weekly provisions to be distributed to mill workers and their families during the strike. He had also instituted an eight-hour day, one of the workers’ demands, even before the strike began. Furthermore, around 80 percent of Senado’s employees had paid work for the whole year— generous terms, on which the mill lost money, especially as sugar workers elsewhere were then lucky to be employed for seventy days, let alone a whole year. The mill had also allowed the formation of a union, albeit in opposition to the Communist group that Stodolsky had organized.