The Sugar King of Havana (34 page)

Lobo’s own views at that time are unclear. His mills collectively owned 342,000 acres, and eleven of them had more land than allowed by law—Tingauro alone had 18,000 acres. Yet the land reform was aimed mostly at foreign-owned properties, and Lobo would keep the
centrales
that milled the cane, which is where his real wealth lay. “We have been going through some ugly times in Cuba,” he wrote to Varvara in late June. “I don’t recall more trying moments in my 40 years in business than these.” Even so, Lobo added that he remained a confirmed optimist. A week later he wrote again, adopting a more Napoleonic stance, “I have just begun to fight.” The following month, he returned to his usual irrepressible form. Lobo opened a new branch of Banco Financiero in Camagüey, the local paper showing him flanked by local business leaders and the Havana and Camagüey carnival queens, both looking fetching in white pillbox hats. In Havana, he hosted a birthday party for his grandchildren. In November he left for Paris to celebrate the publication of the collected correspondence between Napoleon and his finance minister, the Comte de Mollien. From there he traveled to Tangiers to sign a sugar deal, his interests there being represented by Prince Moulay Abdellah, son of King Mohammed V of Morocco. Returning to Cuba, there were the usual Galbán Lobo end-of-year lunches for employees, and the annual party at Hershey with fairground rides for the children, roast pork and dancing for the grown-ups, music provided by the Orquesta Continental and Conjunto Latino. For the moment, some traditions remained unchanged.

The atmosphere was turning sour, though. While liberals in the new government had one agenda, a parallel one was being written by Castro and Guevara in the offices of INRA, the agrarian reform institute, a fourteen-story building that overlooked the white obelisk of José Martí in the renamed Plaza de la Revolución. Indeed, by the end of 1959, the first year of the revolution, many of the moderate cabinet ministers that Castro had chosen in January had either left government or been dismissed. President Manuel Urrutia had resigned in July, after stating his opposition to communism, and taken refuge in the Venezuelan embassy. The following day, Castro had declared to a crowd of half a million that there was no need for elections because the will of the people was supreme. “This is real democracy,” Castro concluded, to wild cheers. In October, Huber Matos, Camagüey’s popular military commander, had also denounced Communist encroachment in the government. Sensitive to the charge, as he was still consolidating power, Castro had Matos arrested and brought to Havana to stand trial. Raúl Castro called for his execution; Matos was sentenced to twenty years in prison instead.

In 1960, the Revolution moved up a gear. Soviet deputy premier Anastas I. Mikoyan opened an exhibit of farm machinery and Sputnik satellites at the Museo de Bellas Artes in February. He commented privately to Castro and Guevara that Cuba’s revolutionary romanticism reminded him of the Bolshevik uprising of his youth. The government began to clamp down on independent media. The newspaper
Avance
was “intervened” by the authorities, followed shortly after by
El País,
then
Diario de la Marina
, and finally
Prensa Libre
. The government justified the moves by saying it needed to protect Cuba from its enemies. Indeed, Eisenhower had just issued a secret presidential order to the CIA to begin recruiting exiles to return to Cuba and wage guerrilla war.

At the start of the year, Lobo had written to Varvara inviting her to stay in Havana, even if it would not be the same city as she remembered from only a few years ago. Jean-Paul Sartre may have believed he was witnessing for the first time “happiness that had been attained by violence.” But Havana’s happy-go-lucky atmosphere was increasingly being replaced by a grim military barracks lifestyle with bearded sentries, barely out of their teens, patrolling the streets. In Vedado, Cuban-American writer Carlos Eire, then eight years old, noticed that his morning bus route to school had also shortened. “There were more empty seats on the bus . . . Seats vacated by kids who suddenly vanished without saying goodbye. Not many, but enough to make me aware of an emerging pattern. People were beginning to leave the country.” By the spring some sixty thousand Cubans, about 1 percent of the population, had turned the locks on their front doors, pocketed the keys, and boarded the ferry or a flight abroad.

On March 17, Guevara outlined his philosophy in a televised speech:

Lobo bent with this wind. In early 1960, he had closed his last celebrated squeeze of the sugar market, forcing his prices down the throats of U.S. refiners who had refused to buy Cuban sugar in the hope that it might weaken the revolutionary government. In March, he donated a telescope and new library to the school in Colón, the nearest town to Tinguaro. From a roughly built wooden podium, Lobo spoke of how he had always been guided by the idea of duty—to family, friends, community, and country. “All of life is duty,” Lobo said, “and our duty is to help develop the future of our country.” Among those duties, there was his collection of European old masters that Lobo had just entrusted to the National Museum, on permanent loan. He was finalizing plans to move his Napoleon collection into a permanent museum, a reconstruction of Josephine’s Château de Malmaison to be built at the Hershey property. He had also long striven to better his workers’ living conditions, certainly at Tinguaro, but at other mills too; unions had hailed the $1 million Lobo invested when he bought the mill Araújo in 1953 as a model of development.

His great wealth and talent suggest that Lobo could have done more. Yet he was also in his sixties, in poor health, often in pain, and running the world’s largest sugar-trading business and Cuba’s second-largest sugar producer, if not single-handedly then in a manner more centralized than any other comparably sized organization. This was both Lobo’s strength and his weakness. There were few in the family he ever delegated to. There was no one to succeed him, either. Lobo could have accomplished more, and perhaps more generously, if he had controlled less. But that was neither his style nor the way he had achieved success.

Cuba raced toward the denouement. The creation of a planning ministry was announced; Cuba would have a command economy. In May, Havana formally reestablished diplomatic relations with Moscow. The next month, Esso, Texaco, and Shell refused to refine Soviet crude oil on the island, and their assets were nationalized. In July, the U.S. Congress authorized the end of the sugar quota. Nikita Khrushchev then publicly suggested that Soviet artillery could support the Cuban people in the event of an invasion.

Lobo made a last push in September with the launch of a countrywide program to build new schools for impoverished rural children. “If we don’t ensure that education reaches everywhere in our country,” Lobo said at the launch party at his Vedado home, “we risk losing the civilized western ideals that we have accumulated over the centuries, for ever.” He made a first payment of $10,000, tax deductible, and a list of Cuban well-to-dos pledged their contributions as well, all members of a class among whom the spirit of philanthropy had never burned bright before.

It was too little, far too late. The end was coming soon. Leonor and her husband Jorge, who was vice-president at Banco Financiero, began to use coded phrases over the phone.
Estoy encantado
, I am charmed, meant there is trouble;
el jardín está muy bonito
, the garden is beautiful, meant Lobo had to watch out. The family made preparations to leave the island. On October 11, Lobo met with Guevara. The old order was crumbling.

The rest, as they say, is history—or rather geography. A year after Castro rode into Havana, my father and mother met in New York. Six months after that they got engaged, and in September they married at her house in Havana. My mother had her elegant wedding after all, even if the militia were drilling in the streets outside. One month later, her family left Cuba, as did Lobo shortly after his midnight interview with Guevara. On the flight from Havana, the last great capitalist to leave Cuba carried with him only a regulation small suitcase and what he could fit in his pockets.

A
bad memory and good health, Lobo liked to say, makes for a happy life—a useful maxim during the early days of exile when bad memories and good health were all that many émigrés had. For every Cuban
hacendado
like Jesús Azqueta, who had bought a sugar mill in Venezuela, or planter family like the Falla-Gutiérrez, which transferred $40 million abroad on the eve of the Revolution, most other Cubans had kept what money they had on the island. That included Lobo. It included even Meyer Lansky. The cautious accountant-mobster had gambled everything on his hotel in Cuba, the Riviera, and lost. As Lansky said, “I crapped out.”

When he arrived in New York, Lobo still owned the Olavarría trading office on Wall Street and the other Galbán Lobo offices around the world. These were valued at some $4 million, at least on paper. There was also cash and some Florida real estate held in trust for his daughters that was worth perhaps another $1 million. That totaled $5 million, a fraction of Lobo’s original $200 million fortune. Furthermore, he still owed City Bank almost $7 million from the Hershey purchase, a debt he had secured against his name. That reduced his net worth to less than zero. Still, Lobo often said he was happiest when he had nothing. Although sixty-three, an age when most people think of retiring rather than starting again, he set back to work with zeal.

My aunts, uncles, and cousins meanwhile crammed into a crash pad in Miami, mattresses on the floor. Two months later, they went north to New York. Snow, flecked with dirt, seemed like unimpressive stuff. They moved into a rambling Charles Addams–style house in Jamaica, Queens. There José, my eldest cousin, shined shoes, looked after his younger siblings, and fought with hefty Irish and Polish kids who made fun of his accent and called him a spic. He took it all personally—and challenged Fidel to a duel, believing they should settle accounts, man to man.

Everyone looked for work.

“Have you come far?” a New York hostess asked my aunt one evening. She had inveigled her way into a swell drinks party, given by the Madison Avenue advertising agency where my father worked. She hoped it might produce job leads for her husband.

“Well, quite far; I live out on the island.”

“Which island?”

“Jamaica,” my aunt replied, dissembling about her Long Island address in Queens.

“Oh, so you arrived from the Caribbean tonight,” the hostess sympathized. “The flights are horrible, aren’t they?”

My aunt invented a university degree and taught Spanish at a yeshiva. My grandfather worked at Macy’s on Thirty-fourth Street. Still weak from tuberculosis, he suffered frequent internal hemorrhages, often coughed blood, but never told his superiors for fear of being dismissed. My grandmother gave piano lessons and rented a cheap room in a nearby hotel so he could rest during lunch. My mother moved to a two-bedroom apartment on the higher reaches of Manhattan’s Upper East Side with my father, and began a new job working at the United Nations as a guide.

She felt proud of her smartly tailored uniform.
These are the United Nations’ guiding principles
, she would tell tourists in Spanish and English.
Here is an architectural mock-up of the building. These are the chambers where the Security Council sits
, and she would lift her left arm, uniformed with gold braid and a UN insignia, and open the door.
Please be quiet when you enter
,
there is a session in progress
.

My mother took the impartiality required of her role seriously, even after Castro spoke at the United Nations on September 26, 1960. Much had changed since Castro’s rapturous visit to New York a year before. This time protesters chanted “Cuba Sí! Russia No!” outside the thirty-nine-story UN headquarters in midtown Manhattan. Castro spoke for four and a half hours, the longest speech in UN history. He had met Nikita Khrushchev six days earlier at his hotel in Harlem, the two men squeezing each other in a bear hug. That afternoon they hugged again, Khrushchev striding across the UN assembly floor to embrace Castro, the photograph subsequently running on the front pages of the world’s newspapers. That day, my mother became the first UN tour guide to resign over politics, a quirky act of defiance.

Relations between Cuba and the United States had by now all but collapsed. After Washington revoked the Cuban sugar quota in July, Havana responded by nationalizing all remaining U.S. companies in Cuba in August. Washington retaliated with the trade embargo in October. Meanwhile Cuban exiles trained at secret bases across the Americas. The Normandy of their invasion was to be the Bay of Pigs.

A lanky North American approached my mother one evening. He knew her name, produced a badge from his pocket, and said what he was about to tell her was confidential. Would she like to become a spy, he asked, and be parachuted into Cuba and work as an agent behind enemy lines? Training would take place during office hours at a secret station in the Carolinas. She would travel there by helicopter in the morning, and be back home by the afternoon before her husband returned from work. No one need know, he added.

My mother’s mind described an arabesque. This was her chance to join the glorious
lucha
for the
patria
—the century-long struggle that had begun with the
lucha
against the Spanish, then the
lucha
against Machado, then the
lucha
against Batista, and now the
lucha
against Castro. It was all part of the special Cuban affection—or affectation—for revolution. She imagined herself dressed as a French resistance fighter, or as Mata Hari perhaps.