The Sugar King of Havana (23 page)

“I just want to say that other than killing and stealing I have broken all the other commandments, many times. Absolve me, Father, I cannot remain conscious anymore.”

The hospital orderlies gathered to wheel Lobo into the operating theater while the priest intoned the absolution in Latin. Then he made the sign of the cross, and Lobo closed his eyes.

 

 

HAVANA SPECULATED WHILE the surgeons operated. Who had tried to kill Lobo, and why? Many believed it was because he had refused to pay extortion money to one of the
bonches
. It was a natural assumption, but one that Lobo denied from the start. “I don’t have any problems with anybody,” he had told reporters at the hospital on the night of the shooting. “This act of aggression is unexpected.”

Others supposed the attempted killing was a general warning to Cuba’s gilded commercial class. Postwar shortages were high, black markets rife, and ordinary Cubans struggled with the high cost of food. If a man like Lobo “the wolf” was rich, it was easy to believe he was shot because his wealth was ill-gained; that was the dark side of Lobo’s public renown.
Hoy
, the Communist newspaper, ran the headline “CUBAN BLACK MARKET KING SHOT.” Néstor Piñango, a minor politician and sometime journalist, wrote in
Prensa Libre
: “To say the name Lobo is to speak of money-changing, speculation and black markets. Why should the government mourn the fate of such a man?”
Bohemia
then commented that Piñango’s statement merely echoed what everybody else said under their breath. Among the few newspapers that condemned the attack,
Diario de la Marina
, the voice of the establishment, ran a story about three other businessmen who had fled to New York, fearing for their own lives. “I feared such terrible conditions would come,” Lawrence Berenson, an American lawyer with long experience in Cuba, cabled Lobo a week later. “Perhaps you understand why I have not wanted to come to Cuba these past two years.”

Indeed, subsequent events seemed to confirm that the Lobo shooting
was
part of a broader social vendetta. Piñango revealed that he had found a note at the scene of Lobo’s crime which explained the murder attempt. On a piece of paper headed
Committee of Public Health
, someone had scribbled the name “Julio Lobo” and next to it a list of basic necessities, such as beans, butter, and cooking oil, each labeled with question marks. When no other newspaper reported the note, casting doubt on its authenticity, Piñango insisted he had found it inside Lobo’s damaged car.

Then, on August 9, three days after Lobo’s assassination attempt, Antonio Valdés, a prominent lawyer, narrowly escaped a drive-by shooting as he left his house. His attackers sent a message to the newspapers, signed
The 13
. “We are not hoodlums,” it read, “but we cannot remain passive in the face of such official inertia. Our wives and children are suffering from speculation. We are going to liquidate all the barons of the black market.” A few days later, the sixteen-year-old son of Joaquín Martínez, a senator and lawyer, was also shot while driving his father’s car. Fearing for their lives after the trio of shootings, Havana’s haut monde shivered in their Miramar and Vedado homes.

Ironically, it was the workers’ union from Tinguaro that rallied to the defense of Cuba’s cowed captains of industry. “Mr. Lobo may not be an angel, he has no halo, and makes no boasts about his honesty,” the union replied to Piñango’s charge in
Prensa Libre
. Lobo “invests, he works quietly and assiduously.” He makes cheap credit available to his employees and builds extra school and hospital rooms, they continued. “This mill never enjoyed as much investment when it belonged to an American company as it does now, under Mr. Lobo, the ‘wolf,’” the union wrote. By contrast, “what has Mr. Piñango done for Cuba? Nothing that we know of . . . Cuba would be a much happier place with many more Julio Lobos and far fewer Piñangos.”

The unionists’ letter injected richer subtleties and truths into the speculation that had gripped Havana. Great wealth might imply great crime. That was the experience of many during Grau’s presidency (as the notorious political career of his education minister had shown: José Manuel Alemán stole millions—allies said ten, enemies fifty—some of which he used to build Miami’s Key Biscayne). But gross criminality and corruption were not always to blame. In fact, it soon transpired that the Valdés and Martínez shootings which followed Lobo’s attempted killing had nothing to do with a supposed
bonche
-led social vendetta against the black market speculations of the Cuban well-to-do. Instead, they formed part of an elaborate crime of passion. Furthermore, by a process of tendentious logic, it was assumed that Lobo’s shooting was somehow linked to this sad love affair as well.

The saga’s complexities are worthy of a radio soap opera. Enrique Sánchez del Monte, a recently divorced planter from Oriente, had gone mad with jealousy when he learned that his ex-wife was enjoying a high social life in Havana and that Lobo was reputed to be one of her lovers. Unhinged, Sánchez tried to join a monastery. Rejected for lacking any vocation, he turned his thoughts to revenge.

He hired a Havana hood known as El Manquito, who had gained a revolutionary reputation in the fight against Machado and since been rewarded with various sinecures at the Education Ministry. Manquito handed out these jobs to friends on commission. He also ran a series of rackets from within the university, including a garage that remodeled and repainted stolen cars. The mobster charged Sánchez $3,000 to kill each of his ex-wife’s divorce lawyers—first Valdés, and then Martínez—and a further $6,000 to finally murder his ex-wife herself.

The plan unraveled when the police caught one of Manquito’s gang members and he confessed. Newspapers subsequently reported that the police now thought the .38-caliber pistol used in the Martínez shooting might have been the same gun used against Lobo. Furthermore, police believed that Manquito might even have been responsible for the theft of the Capitolio diamond. That added a touch of Pink Panther glamour to the whole affair, while also suggesting that Lobo, the “King of the Black Market,” the “Cuban Tsar of Speculation,” had somehow been involved in the unsolved diamond robbery as well.

So much could be made to seem to connect, to explain something else. Many years later, in a musty storage deposit in downtown Miami, I found a bloodstained letter among Lobo’s papers. He had jammed it in his suit pockets before he raced downstairs with Carlotta to his car, so I reasoned it must have been important. I unfolded the letter under a strip light and looked at the brown stains made by Lobo’s dried blood, thick around the creases. I examined the signature at the bottom and the date at top, a week before the shooting took place. It all reeked of so much potential significance that even now I somehow believe the handwritten note might be a clue. But it was only an innocent message. “Will you write us confidentially what your objections are?” the registrar at his daughters’ school in Pennsylvania had asked Lobo, a concerned parent. “It would seem in fairness that we should know.”

Who tried to kill Lobo that summer remains a mystery. There was never a proper investigation into why two men armed with .38 revolvers tried to kill Lobo that night. It is possible that Inocente Álvarez, who made the warning phone call, might have told Lobo later how he knew something was about to happen. If he did, Lobo never recorded the answer. Many years later Lobo told León, ominously, “that everyone who tried to kill me is now dead.” Yet León believed Lobo was only expressing a ghoulish probability, playing the story tough, as he did when he told embroidered versions of the tale to his wide-eyed grandchildren. After all, an escape from a gangland shooting lends itself to forgivable hyperbole.

 

 

LOBO LEFT HAVANA on September 3 for the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. He was accompanied by María Esperanza—their marriage now on its last legs—his daughters, and a military doctor. He was almost completely paralyzed from the waist down, and could only move one of his toes. It would take six months before he could walk again. Even so, Lobo remained active from the hospital bed. It was as if the assassination attempt goaded him into action. By sheer force of will he
would
move again; the shooting would
not
stop him from his work and his life.

First, Lobo quarreled with the Cuban doctors over their fees; to the anesthesiologist, he offered $300 instead of the $500 that was billed; to another doctor, $2,000 instead of $3,000; and for the surgeon who had led the trepanning operation on his skull, $10,000 instead of $25,000. Lobo had checked with his brother-in-law Montoro on what similar treatments would have cost in the United States, and perhaps the Cuban doctors had overcharged. Still, Lobo’s tightfistedness, reported in the Cuban press, won him little admiration at home.

That was only practice, however. Next, also from his hospital bed, Lobo sold the Galbán Lobo provisions business—the same one he had worked at when he first joined
la casa
almost two decades earlier
,
hawking beans, flour, and chickpeas. Some took the sale as indirect proof that Lobo had been speculating in foodstuffs after all, ramping up the price of butter and cooking oil, as Piñango suggested. But Lobo had little fondness for the operation; he described the period he worked in it as “very disagreeable years.” The basic food products it sold at fixed prices were also rationed, so although it was a profitable operation, it was also controversial and complicated, a constant headache. Furthermore, by the end of the war, it had shrunk relative to Lobo’s huge and growing sugar operations. Selling it looks wise rather than like a tacit admission of guilt.

Physical pain continued to spur Lobo on, even as he convalesced. He was frustrated at being invalided, so his mind had to travel in different ways. Six months after the shooting, he limbered up for his biggest fight of all: a corporate raid on one of the island’s largest firms, the Cuba Company. Founded just before the turn of the century, it owned much of Cuba’s eastern rail network and two mills, and had large amounts of cash on its balance sheet, although it had not paid a dividend since the mid- 1920s. It was run by sleepy North American directors who rarely visited the island and enjoyed their undemanding posts on the company’s board in New York. At the end of the year, the Galbán Lobo office formed a consortium that began quietly buying its shares on the New York Stock Exchange. The following year, it filed a proxy notice to shareholders saying that the consortium wanted to take over the firm. The aim was to restructure the company and release its cash. Today the move would be recognized as a classic hostile takeover. Then it was an unprecedented piece of corporate buccaneering. What made it all the more remarkable is that Lobo orchestrated the operation from a hospital in North America while he could still barely stand. Fragments of lead remained embedded in his body, by his right knee and in his head, and he suffered fierce, crushing headaches.

The takeover attempt was ultimately unsuccessful. After a general meeting that dragged on for two weeks, until then the longest in U.S. corporate history, the Galbán Lobo office only gained control of 45 percent of Cuba Company, and later sold this stake. Even so, the raid ultimately led to control of the firm being transferred to Havana, with a Cuban board appointed in 1948. The incident shows again how confident Cuban financiers felt when they took on their North American peers. In finance, if not in politics, Cuba was less a neocolonial satrapy of the United States, as so often depicted, than simply the Latin American economy most closely integrated with the mainland.

A further irony is that even as the attempted takeover of Cuba Company was taking place, a young Fidel Castro had broken onto the national political stage with a speech at the University of Havana in which he first talked of ideas that would later become favorite themes. Castro spoke of the nationalist revolution that Grau had promised Cuba. But it was a “betrayed revolution,” Castro said, that had left “the country’s wealth in foreign hands.” Lobo, by contrast, was doing something about such Yankee imperialism, albeit in ways that Castro and other hotheaded students might not give due weight or understand. “Some people have made the country great with the sword, others with the pen. I have done so by creating wealth,” as Lobo liked to say.

Yet by the end of 1947, even the thrill of a big corporate dustup had faded for Lobo. He wrote from New York to his mother in Havana the next spring that work left him with a flat taste in his mouth. It “used to be a source of diversion and pleasure for me, and I was starting to feel enthusiastic again about fresh projects; no longer.” He added that he felt like an uprooted tree “which can’t be transplanted without fear of damaging its roots.” He said that he could not make plans, was unsure what to do, that he needed to think things through. Lobo had always liked to travel, be that around Cuba on holidays with his daughters or on business trips around South America, Europe, and the United States, and he relished the adventure, visiting new countries with a curious eye. During one trip to Haiti in 1941, he noticed over lunch with President Élie Lescot that all the cutlery around the table had been taken “from various hotels in New York like the Astor, the Waldorf and others.” Yet now, normally so alive to the unusual and the picturesque, Lobo wrote that he was “tired of hotel life, of living out of a suitcase, of not having a home or family around me.” He wanted to return to Cuba but felt unsure that it was safe to do so. He felt “banished from my country, with no plans of return.”

Other than a few fleeting visits, Lobo stayed away from Cuba for two years. He only properly returned to Havana after the elections in 1948, Cuba’s last free vote to date, won by Carlos Prío, Grau’s former prime minister, who had visited Lobo in the hospital on the night of the shooting. Even so, when Lobo arrived in Havana he traveled home from the airport in a bulletproof car with an armed guard. For someone used to mixing freely in Cuban daily life, who even insisted that his daughters “went to the club by bus,” it was a potent symbol of the divorce between the island and its commercial class. Ultimately, the divide would cost them dearly.