The Sugar King of Havana (16 page)

The events of 1933, such as the killings at Senado, set Cuba’s political course for the next three decades. For one, they secured Batista’s position. When Welles made it clear that he would never recognize Grau’s government, Batista shifted his support to a more acceptable leader. Grau resigned, and within five days the new government received recognition and a twenty-one-gun salvo from the battleship
Wyoming
anchored off the Malecón. Henceforth, Batista would dominate Cuban politics, either as president or as head of the army from behind the throne. Welles’s refusal to recognize Grau’s progressive government also left Cuba with a feeling of unfinished business, the sense of an incomplete revolution. Castro’s revolution therefore grew out of this revolution, as Hugh Thomas writes in his magisterial Cuban history, in the same way that the Second World War followed the First. Furthermore, the bloodletting—led by the anti-Machado movements of the ABC, the students, the unions, and the Communists—glorified violence in the pursuit of that unfinished revolution.

In a presentiment of events to come, the poet and Communist leader Rubén Martínez Villena wrote in 1933 of the red flags that would one day fly over the island’s sugar mills. “Eyes still young today,” he foretold, “will not yet be old when they look upon this marvel.” Chilling prophecy and unheeded warning: Fidel Castro—living in the foothills of Oriente province, near the United Fruit Company’s Miranda mill, and born to a wealthy landowner and his common-law wife—was seven years old at the time.

T
he sun slices through gaps in the wooden shutters of a small walk-up apartment in Havana, and I wake slowly in a wooden rocking chair where I had fallen asleep. I had just lunched with a Cuban historian at her home, we had discussed Lobo, and afterward she had retired to her study, asking if I would like to stay in the front room and sit out the midday heat. I watched television; there was a program state-broadcast from Venezuela. President Hugo Chávez, Cuba’s closest ally in the Americas, was inaugurating a new hospital, and Evo Morales, the Bolivian president, was at the opening ceremony, as was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran. I had listened to Chávez tell the audience that Che Guevara was a doctor, and Fidel Castro the greatest doctor of them all, “a doctor of the soul,” which made him “a father, our father of all the Latin American revolutions, and my father.” And then I had dozed off.

Stirring from my sleep, I switch off the television and look at the dust in the air, normally invisible, glitter and dance in the light. I turn the handle on the shuttered windows and force them open, pushing against the sunlight as if it were a wind. I look across the street and see an old woman, as brown and wrinkled as a raisin, sitting in a dark room on the first floor of a rundown building opposite. I watch her, watching me, both of us motionless, separated by fifteen feet of still afternoon air. In the silence and the heat it feels as though time has stopped again in Cuba, and with that as though the past might come alive.

Even today, a mysterious aura surrounds Lobo’s success, as is so often the case with the very rich. Before the revolution, envious competitors believed he had an almost occult ability to create wealth. As early as 1937, one Havana newspaper described him as:

Many years later, Lobo’s Midas touch won him a walk-on part in Alejo Carpentier’s last novel,
The Consecration of Spring
. The great Cuban writer described him as “the Sephardic millionaire, renowned for his miraculous ability to weather the market’s ups and downs”—a halfway accurate description. Others believed his wealth was evidence, surely, of some great crime. Such distrust was more than just tropical malice or the usual suspicion of corruption. It grew out of the misgivings that speculators face everywhere.

Lobo’s office was in Old Havana and I had an appointment there. I closed the shutters, washed my face, and said goodbye to the historian, who was now half-dozing, an open book across her lap. I let myself out the door, walked down a narrow staircase with blue walls, and stepped out into the street. In the distance I saw the pale, porous stone of the old city, filigreed with late afternoon sun.

 

 

LOBO HAD AN almost mystical attachment to the firm. He called it
la casa,
the house, the same as stockbrokers did in London when English finance was still a cottage industry and city gents wore bowler hats and carried furled umbrellas to work. It stood on a corner in Old Havana, two blocks west of the Plaza de Armas, the old seat of the Spanish governors. Down one side ran Obispo, Havana’s traditional street of bookshops. Down the other was O’Reilly, known as Havana’s street of banks. It was an apt address for a bibliophile and speculator such as Lobo.

I walked through the colonial splendor of Old Havana
.
In Lobo’s day, it was not the pretty town that it has since become, the buildings freshly restored and painted, the streets newly laid with cobblestones. Then it was an almost dingy place, filled with architectural inconsistencies, much of it simply falling down. There was little space, no vacant lots, no rustling trees, and few tourists—except for the American sailors who spilled out of bars like the Floridita and Sloppy Joe’s and wandered into the colonial quarter. There were somber government ministries and dark churches, pathologically baroque, filled with candles and the smell of incense. Many of the old colonial palaces had been turned into dismal flats.
Es anticuado vivir en la ciudad,
it is old-fashioned to live in the city, real estate developers had advertised in glossy magazines like
Social
. And by the 1930s, most of the grand families that once lived in the old city had sold out and bought new homes in the leafy suburbs of Vedado and Miramar. They were followed in turn by the jewelers, tailors, milliners, artificial flower makers, and hairdressers that had once lined Obispo. Most of these set up shop a few blocks west in the new town center, by the department stores around San Rafael Street that had improbable names such as El Fenix (the Phoenix), El Encanto (the Enchantment), Fin del Siglo (End of the Century), and my grandfather’s own shop, Sanchez-Mola. The colorful goods they displayed in abundance were as much a reflection of American-inspired consumerism as traditional Cuban hedonism, the desire to live, dress, and eat well.

The banks, though, remained in Old Havana while the rest of the city moved on. Among the most important Cuban lenders there were Banco Gelats, Banco Pedroso, and the Falla-Gutiérrez family’s Trust Company of Cuba. By the late 1950s,
Fortune
magazine ranked them among the world’s five hundred biggest banks. Meanwhile, among the sugar brokers, there were Galbán Lobo, the houses of Luis Mendoza and García Beltrán, and Rionda’s Cuban Trading Corporation, run by his nephew George Braga. (“The only other trader,” Lobo once said, “to whom I would tip my hat.”) In the 1920s, Cuban merchants had all looked up to Rionda and his organization as an emblem of success. But as the Cuban economy recovered from the Great Depression in the years leading up to the Second World War, Lobo had grappled his way to the front and led the field. “G[albán-Lobo] with his organization in Cuba can today wipe the floor with anybody else,” one of Rionda’s partners in London cabled Havana in early 1940.

I wandered down O’Reilly, Havana’s former “Wall Street,” where brokers and lenders had once financed the island’s sugar crop. The buildings still look austere, massive, and pompous, as was the long-held custom. In 1859 the American writer Richard Henry Dana described the stone floors, panels of porcelain, high rooms, and colossal windows of one Havana sugar merchant’s stately offices. Inside, amid rich and heavy furniture, sat the merchant, dressed “in white pantaloons and thin shoes and loose white coat and narrow neck tie, smoking a succession of cigars, surrounded by tropical luxuries.” These opulent buildings have long since found new use. Through one open door, a massive entrance flanked by Doric columns and white stone plinths, I saw how the cavernous vestibule of the old Royal Bank of Canada had become a garage, filled with parked cars, yellow Coco Taxis, and motorbikes leaking oil onto the marble floor. At another I marveled at two metal safes, the size of small rooms, their doors swung open to show locks as intricate as the workings of a watch. The site had first been a church. Then it was bought by the Banco de Comercio in 1926, which installed safes where the altar had once been. Recently the building has been converted into a concert hall, and I sometimes listened to grave chamber music played there in the evenings.

I noticed similar progressions—from the sacred to the profane and then the melancholic—repeated elsewhere, even in the names of sugar mills. Cuba’s first plantations were named after saints. Then neoclassical names like
La Ninfa
, the nymph, became popular. By the end of the 1800s planters christened their mills
Atrevido
(Audacious) and
Casualidad
(Chance), reflecting sugar’s variable fortunes, and when the planters’ own wealth waned, more desperate-sounding names like
Apuro
(Wit’s End) and
Angustia
(Anguish) cropped up. One of Lobo’s mills, founded just before the last war of independence, was called
Perseverancia
, or Perseverance. In the 1960s, such mills were renamed after revolutionary heroes or important socialist dates, and Lobo’s Perseverancia was rechristened
Primero de Mayo
, the first of May, after Workers’ Day. Before that, one of my cousins remembered playing at a ruined mill in Camagüey that was built in the 1950s but never operated. It was called
El Desengaño
, the Disappointment—a fitting Cuban epitaph.

Old Havana was scruffy and noisy, but Lobo enjoyed its bustle and dreaded the day when the migration of businesses to some “uptown” area might force Galbán Lobo to move too. From the second floor of
la casa
he could see cargo steamers and pleasure boats glide through the Havana bay, headed for the deeper blues of the open sea. Sometimes early in the morning, when the water was calm and the sun’s rays bounced off the surface, flooding the city with light, rowing skiffs with four- and eight-man teams from the Tennis Club practiced in the bay.

During the sunniest hours of the day, many of the streets were shaded by colorful canopies, turning them into temporary shopping arcades. Then noise exceeded even the usual high Cuban decibels. Music blared from Victrola phonographs that played from the dark bar tucked inside the ubiquitous corner shop, the
bodega.
There was the sound of street sellers, the
pregón
. Some used a bell or whistle; many simply had a call, each sound a distinctive cry for the ice seller, the knife sharpener, the fruit vendor, the peanut salesman.
¡Manííí!
On street corners, passersby exchanged a few thousand words of casual conversation with each other. Traffic horns punctured the din. During one visit to her father’s office, María Luisa remembered watching a driver stop his car in the middle of the street and block the traffic while he drank, with characteristic insouciance, a thimble of sweet, black coffee bought from a street stall. There were also smells, the thick odor and blue haze of frying pork fat from the Chinese restaurants, and the aroma of freshly made pastries from cafés such as the Europa. There, a genial Catalan baker served delicious pastries to his old city clientele of clerks, secretaries, and bankers, treating them all equally as royalty. The plain-looking dowager was a
su altesa
, your highness; young girls were all
princesas
; anyone with gray hair was a
distinguido
; men were counts, barons, and marquises.

The baker’s patter at the Europa was all part of the tropical fantasy of a country where everyone, as the Condesa de Merlin remarked, was either “a master or a slave.” And who wanted to be a slave—especially when there were so many Cuban kings and queens? To name a few, there were Ramón Fonst Segundo, fencing gold medalist at the 1900 Olympics, known as El Nunca Segundo, the Never-Second; José Raúl Capablanca, King of Chess and world champion from 1921 to 1927; Kid Chocolate, twice world featherweight boxing champion; and several and various kings of baseball and queens of
son
. Even Havana’s beggars, or especially its beggars, shared this penchant for grandiosity. In Lobo’s day there were the Emperador, the Emperor, who wore a braided jacket of the Austrian court, bristling with medals; another who called herself the Marquesa, a mulatta with rouged cheeks and ornate hats from the 1900s; and, most famously, the Caballero de París, the Gentleman of Paris, a quixotic figure who wore a black waist-length cape clasped at the throat of a soiled white shirt, faded black trousers, and broken shoes.

The Caballero de París first appeared on Havana’s streets in the 1920s and paced them for the next fifty years. With his shoulder-length hair and Christ-like beard, he walked through the Dance of the Millions, the fall of Machado, the prosperity of the two decades that followed, and then the epoch-changing event of the revolution itself. Nobody knew why he walked, although it was thought it was because he suffered a broken heart, which made him a popular symbol of great love gone wrong. The Caballero de París neither drank nor smoked, was well spoken, unfailingly polite, and especially gallant with ladies. He once honored my mother with a rose and read her a poem, which was his calling card and for which she thanked him politely. He refused charity and said he slept in a “divine castle”—the boulevard of the Prado, whose bronze lion statues were his subjects. “I am the
King of This World
because the world is always at my feet,” this gentlest of madmen once said: