The Sugar King of Havana (21 page)

Nevertheless, he was a doting father. In the mornings, Lobo woke his daughters to hear the “pop” of cactus flowers opening in the garden that he claimed he could hear. In the evenings, he sat with them in the garden to paint skyscapes of Cuba’s tangerine twilight on the back of old cigar boxes. “Let’s see if we can’t do something that doesn’t come out entirely kitsch,” he would tell María Luisa. “This evening light is so difficult. Chartrand was so right!” On weekends when in town, they scrambled together around the leafy Bosque de la Habana, a wild and half-tended city park by the Almendares River. On school holidays, Lobo took his daughters to the famous beaches at Varadero or to his sugar mills. On such jaunts, they traveled without their mother or governess through the same Cuban landscapes that Esteban Chartrand had eulogized in his sentimental nineteenth-century oils of
bohios
, small streams, and vehement Cuban sunsets.

María Luisa remembered these trips as “more romantic than any adventure on the Orient Express.” They caught a scheduled train from the Havana railway station at dusk, bounced and rattled through the night, and arrived at dawn, stopping unexpectedly in the middle of a cane field. From there they rode on horseback to the
batey
. After they arrived, Lobo gave the girls simple instructions. Go wherever you will, but never so far that you lose sight of the smoke from the chimney. While Lobo attended to sugar, Leonor and María Luisa swam in the river and rode on horseback through the rolling scenery of the Cuban countryside, which has the intimate qualities of every island. Instead of the mythic scale of the mainland—all those unexplored savannahs, giant mountains, and plains—Cuba’s landscape, much like England’s, has a softness won from long agricultural use. There is also the surrounding sea, which lends a special quality to the light—luminous and ever-changing—and palm trees, their trunks rising slender, fresh, and tall. Leonor and María Luisa chased each other among green fields glutted with sap, played hide-and-seek with the other young girls at the mill amid the sheds, cane-crushers, and boiling pans, and tobogganed down steep hills of sugar on jute sacks that they later used to slide down the marble steps of the central staircase at their grandparents’ house in Havana.

Even island scenery has its epic moments, though, and the biggest exception to Cuba’s tameness is the wilderness of the Sierra Maestra mountain range, which spreads for a hundred miles along the anvil-shaped easternmost tip of the island. The area still has a faraway feeling. Dominated by Cuba’s highest mountain, the 1,972-meter Pico Turquino, it was also then a place where primary rain forest, too inaccessible to cut down, survived. With only a few small towns and villages, it was inhabited by simple
guajiros
—the illiterate peasant farmers whose beaten straw hats, gnarled bare feet, and almost unintelligible Spanish made them folkloric icons, and sometimes the butt of disparaging jokes. The Sierra was the wildest part of Cuba’s “Wild East,” nearer to Port-au-Prince than Havana, a distance that made it a crucible of Cuban rebellion. It was here that Fidel Castro ran aground on the
Granma
when he invaded the island from Mexico with eighty men. It was also where José Martí had landed sixty-one years before, after dispatching a farewell note to his son.

Lobo’s daughters were intrigued by the black orchids said to grow on Turquino’s upper slopes and the fossilized seashells Lobo told them could be found there. “Is that proof Cuba was once Atlantis?” they asked him, and Lobo had smiled. So when Leonor, enticed by such stories, said she wanted to climb to the top as a reward for good school grades, Lobo had acquiesced. It was 1946; Lobo was then forty-seven years old, Leonor thirteen, and María Luisa twelve. Their trek to Cuba’s tallest point demanded more adventurous qualities than did their gentler adventures in the island’s old sugar lands. It was also, literally, the high point of a life-changing summer for all their lives. If they reached the summit, Leonor and María Luisa would be the first Cuban women to do so.

They arrived at Pilón on July 2 at the start of the school holidays, after an arduous three-day trip from Havana that ended with a short plane hop to Lobo’s mill. Although it was the dry season, and a jeep could have made it down the dusty track from the local town of Manzanillo, the road was blocked. Lobo had argued bitterly with a planter named Delio Núñez, who ran Pilón’s neighboring mill, the Santa Isabel. They had once been coinvestors in Pilón, but had quarreled over everything. They almost resorted to a duel—still common in Cuba then, especially around the Sierra, where differences were settled with machetes at dawn. Instead, at Lobo’s suggestion they wrote sealed bids for each other’s share of the mill on separate pieces of paper. Lobo’s higher offer won, and Núñez in a fit of pique subsequently forbade Lobo from using the road that ran through his land. So now Lobo flew over the Santa Isabel instead, a neat parry, as the plane doubled as a small air service delivering mail to some of the region’s remotest spots. It was a typical example of Lobo’s commercial adroitness, for which he was increasingly renowned. Back in Havana, when Lobo had attended three separate wakes at the same funeral parlor in one day, the owner had joked with Lobo as he left after paying his last respects: “Julio, business is not always this good, you know.”

The girls’ sprits were still flying high when the single-propeller plane taxied to a halt at the end of Pilón’s short airstrip. As they climbed down, Lobo told the girls to ask the mill doctor, Dr. Manuel Sánchez, if one of his daughters would like to accompany them on their adventure. Sánchez, a widower with eight children, was well known in the area as an accomplished and kindly doctor with an amateur interest in archaeology and Cuban history—he had discovered the spot where the “father” of the nation, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, had been ambushed and killed by Spanish troops seventy-two years before. A reedy-looking man with distinguished white hair and glasses, Sánchez later helped organize an expedition that carried a life-size bust of Martí to Turquino’s peak. He was also a local politician, having stood as a congressional candidate for Grau’s party in the latest election. Sánchez lost, despite winning more votes than the rival Liberal Party candidate, Delio Núñez, the neighbor with whom Lobo had quarreled.

Leonor and María Luisa tromped across Pilón’s sandy
batey
. They wore trousers, unlike most young ladies of that time, and were puffed up with self-importance, thinking the doctor would consider their request an honor. The Sánchez house was set back from the mill in a lush, wooded garden, and as the girls approached the front door a figure watched them from a tree house in the upper branches of a stately algarrobo tree that shaded the porch. She was wild-looking, Leonor remembered, with a stringy frame, tousled hair, and a defiant face. It was Celia Sánchez, peering out of the branches. Then twenty-six years old, Celia later became a close friend of María Luisa, and worked with her on social programs funded by Lobo to help indigent cane cutters around Pilón. Later, Celia helped set up the revolutionary network in the Sierra that supported Fidel Castro and his band of guerrillas while they hid from Batista’s forces in the mountains. Celia soon became Castro’s confidante, personal secretary, and rumored lover. Compassionate, like her father, Celia was also the one person who could tell Fidel that he was wrong or simply foolish. As Carlotta Steegers was to Lobo, so Celia Sánchez was to Castro. Celia remained close to the Lobos throughout the revolution, especially María Luisa, despite their political differences.

Dr. Sánchez came to the door and greeted Lobo’s daughters. They extended their invitation. Contrary to what the girls had expected, he took affront. “You can tell Mr. Lobo no, thank you,” the doctor replied. “My daughters are not
marimacho
tomboys who go climbing around hills. And certainly not in trousers.” Ten years later, when Celia was in the Sierra with Castro, Leonor would sometimes joke with María Luisa: “I wonder what Dr. Sánchez makes of Celia now that she is climbing around the mountains with combat trousers on!” By then, though, Celia’s proud father was riddled with cancer. Too sick to work, he refused to accept the wages that Lobo insisted he be paid, so arrangements had to be made to transfer his salary to Celia instead.

Leonor and María Luisa walked back from the house to find their father deep in conversation with the plantation’s general manager. Pilón was in the middle of a strike, and the manager had some grave advice for the group. “Julio, it is not safe here for you and your daughters,” he said. “This is not like Tinguaro, the people here are not the same, and they do not know you so well. Stay in the residency if you like, but I recommend that you do not leave on your expedition.”

Lobo ignored the warning. He was too headstrong to stop—he had come this far and he had promised Leonor the trip. Late the following night, Lobo and his two daughters sneaked out of the mill residence. They skirted the
batey
, dodging from tree to telegraph pole to tree in the moonlight, until they reached the wharf. There they climbed into a waiting launch that ferried them across a bay that sparkled with phosphorescence to a beach at the base of Turquino, a rocky cove called Bella Pluma
.
They splashed ashore through the shallows, and when dawn broke they began their climb. There was no time for rest; Lobo wanted to return quickly to Pilón to settle the strike
.

At first they passed through palm and coconut groves. Wild melons grew by the path and the sea spray mixed with the damp smells of the forest. The vegetation thickened as they climbed, and the scenery turned prehistoric. Huge fern fronds, more than a meter long, dripped with water. They saw hummingbirds the size of insects, and huge insects the size of small birds (“green, with ugly yellow eyes,” Leonor remembered). They stopped for a brief lunch at midday, eating freshwater shrimp caught in a rock pool. When they continued, a guide in front cleared the way with his machete, Lobo and the two girls struggled up the steep path behind, and three porters brought up the rear. A thick mist fell about them.

That night they camped at Alto de Cordero, a thin ridge 1,215 meters above sea level, shivering around a sputtering fire after a rainstorm drenched their clothes. They woke at dawn and Lobo and María Luisa, exhausted, decided to break off the climb. Leonor was more resolute. After a long discussion with her father, “harder even than the climb itself,” she set off after a light breakfast with three porters and a guide to try to complete the last several hundred meters. Lobo and María Luisa meanwhile returned down the mountain to the beach.

The way up was often blocked by thick stands of the
tibisí
plant and the small column had to hack improvised paths through the jungle to get around their spiny walls. The air grew thinner as the mist thickened, and Leonor caught occasional glimpses of the peak, “laughing,” she felt, “at our pretensions.” At the Paso de las Angustias, the Pass of Anguish, the track narrowed to an arm’s length across and deep chasms fell away a thousand meters on either side. Clouds streamed over the precipice, particles of water vapor flickering in the dull light. On the final approach the slopes became almost vertical. After a hard scramble, Leonor reached the top. Instead of breaking out onto a plateau lit with blazing sunshine, everything she saw was green: the lichen on the rocks, the ferns, the emerald carpet that covered the ground, the green raspberries that rambled among the rocks, the stunted trees, the bromeliads that grew on their branches, and the drops of water on the plants that caught the misty light. Minute streams crisscrossed the plateau like the veins of a leaf, and it was cold. Leonor shivered.

Elated to be the first Cuban woman to reach the island’s highest spot, she ran to the small cairn that marked the peak and opened the sealed casket at its foot. It contained a Cuban flag, and a stoppered bottle containing a note left by a scientific expedition the year before. “As lovers of liberty we proclaim our support for the triumph of Democracy in its struggle against the enslaving forces of the world,” its message declared, the familiar exhortation. The note closed with a final paragraph asking its reader to mail the letter to the Cuban Potholing Society at 11 Villegas Street in Havana.

So much future antagonism is contained in that plucky foray. Leonor went on to write a version of the adventure that was anthologized in school primers and became required reading for Cuban fourth-graders. Antonio Núñez Jiménez, the young geography professor who had led the potholers’ expedition and would later head Castro’s agrarian reform, invited Leonor to give a series of educational talks at Havana’s Liceo about the climb. María Luisa squirmed in the audience. She hadn’t made it to the top, and “my father called her a quitter,” claims Leonor. “And he hated quitters.” The girls were barely teenagers, but the Pico Turquino ascent was an early seed of a mutual antagonism that continued to the end of their lives. “They are two characters, wholly opposed,” Lobo commented to their grandmother shortly afterward.