The Sugar King of Havana (35 page)

Six months later, on April 17, 1961, some 1,300 armed exiles landed at Playa Girón, a glittering beach surrounded by mangrove swamps on the southern coast of Matanzas Province. My mother was not there to guide the troops ashore. Sworn to secrecy by the CIA recruitment officer, she had returned home that night and immediately told my father. He quickly dissuaded her from joining any invasion force, and she, in turn, helped to persuade Carlin, her brother, and Otto, her brother-in-law, to stay behind as well. They had been on the point of deciding who would go by drawing straws. One would fight; the other remain in the United States to act as joint breadwinner for their families.

It is hard to imagine a less likely place for a successful invasion than the Bay of Pigs. Accessible only via a single rutted road or by boat, the area crawls with crocodiles and its swamplands make it better suited to defense than attack. Lacking U.S. air cover, the exile soldiers of Brigade 2506 never got off the beach, and almost one hundred died during the sixty-five hours of fighting. The rest were captured, publicly interrogated, tried on Cuban television as war criminals, and imprisoned. Tía Angelita’s husband, Don Alvaro, was chairman of the Families Committee that flew to Havana the following year to negotiate the prisoners’ release in a swap for medicine and food. The former cattle rancher from Senado sat around the table at the cabinet room in Havana’s Presidential Palace with Castro and James Britt Donovan, a tough Irish-American lawyer who acted for the prisoners and had been recommended to Alvaro by Bobby Kennedy as the best man for the job. Alvaro acted as Donovan’s translator, and clenched his fists under the table each time he repeated Castro’s words in English. Alvaro’s youngest son was amid the prisoners held in the dungeon at La Cabaña fortress.

It is remarkable that the negotiations took place at all. A few days before their first meeting, a rebel group based in Miami had shelled a Havana hotel from their small boat. “Those who contribute one penny to the prisoners’ negotiations shall be taking it away from the war of liberation,” it said. Such opposition was an early sign of the tensions that would split the exile community for the next five decades between hard-liners and
dialogueros
, those more willing to negotiate with Havana. Then, in October 1962, the Cuban missile crisis erupted and the United States and the Soviet Union hovered on the brink of war. The prisoners’ talks were canceled, and when they resumed after a two-month hiatus, Castro was more hostile. He now argued for more—cheaper medicines, more food—in return for the prisoners. Donovan snapped at Castro: “You can’t shoot them. If you do, you’ll go down as one of the greatest butchers in world history. . . . If you want to get rid of them, if you’re going to sell them, you’ve got to sell them to me. There’s no world market for prisoners.”

On Christmas Eve 1962, twenty months after the Bay of Pigs landing, 1,113 prisoners flew from Cuba to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. Alvaro called their departure “a rosary of miracles.” He had visited the dismal Presidio jail at the Isle of Pines a month before and described to Bobby Kennedy what he saw. The prisoners, Alvaro said, looked like animals, their necks slack, their heads down, ready to die. Bring them home before Christmas, Alvaro urged. “If you wait you will be liberating corpses.” The final price paid for their release was $53 million of medicine, food, and equipment, equivalent to $48,000 a head.

During the negotiations, Donovan and Castro had established a rapport of mutual respect, leavened by humor. As the last plane readied to leave Havana for Florida, Donovan turned to Castro. “Premier Castro, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this and about all the good I’ve done for Cuba in the last few days,” Donovan said. “I’ve not only relieved you of a lot of liabilities, but have helped the children, the sick and the elderly. So I have decided that I’m going to come over here and run against you in the next election. Furthermore, I think I can win.” Castro nodded his head. Then, shouting above the roar of the plane’s engine, he replied: “Doctor Donovan, I think you may be right. So there will be no elections.”

During the first years of the revolution, many Cubans who left the island had imagined only a short stay abroad. After the Bay of Pigs, Castro’s hold on Cuba became stronger and more popular than ever before. For exiles, the years of no return had begun.

 

 

LOBO SET ABOUT rebuilding his fortune. He traded sugar from his office at 79 Pine Street in New York—much as he had from the Galbán Lobo office on O’Reilly Street in Havana. The motions and routines of his days remained much the same—the ringing telephones, Lobo’s arms like an octopus reaching out to take the calls, the changing prices, his rapid calculations, the apartment that he lived in at the Sherry-Netherland hotel, even his courtship of famous actresses.

Lobo met Bette Davis in early 1963 at a Beverly Hills party given in his honor by a mutual friend, the Hollywood socialite Mary Rollefson, whom Lobo knew through his movie friends from Tinguaro. An enormous ice sculpture spelled out “WELCOME SUGAR KING” in the entrance hall of her house, and a Cuban combo played in the background. When Lobo kissed Davis’s hand, she gave a sideways “What the hell is this all about” glance at her daughter B.D. nearby. Lesser men would have quailed. Lobo kept a firm grip on Davis’s arm throughout the evening.

Lobo had long admired Davis from afar, even if she was an unlikely object of his romantic attention. In the psychological thriller
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
released a few months before, Davis answers the film’s question by playing a vaudeville child star, now in her fifties, who lives as a recluse in an old mansion with her invalid sister. It is a chilling display of sibling rivalry and general monstrousness, with Davis running unfettered through all the stages of impending insanity. As the aged Baby Jane, Davis slouches around the house in slippers with a glass of whiskey in her hand, her face caked in chalk-white base, eyes shadowed with kohl, a cupid’s bow painted over her mouth. She delivers dead birds on a silver platter to her sister for lunch, and sings to a wall-sized mirror dressed in the white frilly dress of her successful youth. Davis remembers Baby Jane as one of her favorite parts.

Lobo sent a bouquet of American Beauty roses to Davis the day after the party with a handwritten, almost impertinent card: “To the most important woman in my life. Love Julio.” A few months later, Lobo proposed—he could not resist trying, if only to see how Davis replied. Davis, though charmed, refused. Lobo persisted, and flowers followed Davis wherever she stayed. She traveled to Cannes to promote
Baby Jane
, and on the way back in Paris a handwringing concierge at the Crillon Hotel told Davis that her suite was occupied by an ambassador who had extended his stay. Davis was on the verge of a screaming fit when her daughter suggested they wait a moment in the bar. B.D. telephoned Lobo, as he had told her to call if she ever needed help. Twenty minutes later, there was a stir in the lobby as an overwrought couple with piles of luggage checked out. A bellboy approached Davis. “The manager’s compliments, Miss Davis, but the ambassador has been called home for consultations and the suite you requested will be ready in half an hour.” Davis later cabled Lobo: “Flowers are magnificent and the digs are too much. I will never know how to thank you. Bette.” Even in exile, Lobo still retained some of his old imperial pull.

It sometimes seemed as if nothing had changed. Lobo still had some of his old lieutenants around him: Enrique León, Gerry Ascher—his principal trader—and Gustavo Lobo, a cousin, who ran the Olavarría office in New York. Yet everything was also different. Most of his old team from Galbán Lobo, especially the former mill managers, was scattered around the globe. Three key figures had also stayed behind in Cuba. Due to her agoraphobia, Carlotta Steegers, his personal secretary, could not countenance leaving her flat in Havana. Tomás Martínez, overall manager of Lobo’s mills, remained behind to help run the Cuban sugar industry after the revolution. And María Teresa Freyre de Andrade, chief librarian of his Napoleon collection, became head of Havana’s National Library. Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas remembered her as a “magnanimous woman” who created a cultural aristocracy at the library, and took shelter under her care.

Lobo had avoided the Bay of Pigs, and was only briefly involved in the fund-raising that later led to the prisoners’ release. Yet Cuban events swirled unavoidably around him, as they did all exiles, the island often on his mind, sometimes under strange circumstances. In April 1964, Teófilo Babún Selman, a Cuban exile who operated a shipping company in Miami, contacted Lobo with a gamble no speculator could refuse: a $100,000 “bet” with the Mafia that Castro would die ninety days after the wager was made. Although Cuba was off-limits for the United States after the Bay of Pigs, this did not exclude covert assassination plans. Some of these were hatched by the CIA, bizarre efforts that included poisoned scuba-diving suits and exploding cigars. Others were cooked up by the Mafia and hawked around exile circles in Miami, like this one.

Assassination was not Lobo’s style, though his curiosity was piqued. How would the “bet” work, exactly? Lobo asked. Babún suggested the funds would be put into an escrow account and then be released when the bet was closed. Lobo stalled, and told Babún it would be difficult to get a lawyer to draw up the right kind of contract. According to an interview Lobo had with the FBI, Babún told Lobo, to do the paperwork himself.

Babún had already purportedly tried to rope into the scheme Pepín Bosch, the head of the Bacardi distillery, with a $50,000 contribution. Bosch subsequently told the FBI he would never get involved in a death contract, and that while he knew Lobo, he would never ask him for anything, under any circumstances. When Babún telephoned Lobo a month later, Lobo replied that he did not want to go through with the “bet” either. Babún grew angry and called Lobo a “welcher,” although he later told the FBI that he had never talked to Lobo about any assassination plan, and if Lobo had suggested anything else “he was a liar.”

Such plans and bets, accusations and counteraccusations, and the malice and misunderstandings that followed were part of the hothouse of exile life, the desperate plans of sometimes desperate people. They believed they were fulfilling their patriotic duty, just as so many Cubans on the island did. Yet their stories lead nowhere and leave only doubts. Just as the Bay of Pigs failed, so did all these assassination plans, and when John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas in 1963, all the doubts and frustrating traces the United States had wanted to sow within Cuba blew backward. Who had killed Kennedy? Was it the KGB, Fidel Castro, the Mob, the CIA, or an extreme Cuban exile group still smarting over JFK’s betrayed promise to provide air cover at the Bay of Pigs?

Lobo, the lone wolf of high finance, remained largely aloof from all this, just as he had from political life on the island, although he was openly pleased when anti-Castro rebels burned down one of his mills, Niquero, in May 1964. “I want all the mills to be destroyed if it will help,” he told a reporter from the
New York World Telegram and Sun
. Lobo said he was happiest, though, about what he hoped would happen next. “Later on, I will undertake to have them all rebuilt, mine and others.” This was in character. In exile, as on the island, Lobo was a creator rather than a destroyer, and finance rather than pistols were his tools. Yet even then, at the moment of this boast, Lobo was suffering from the backwash of his own past, by traces of his empire he had left behind in Havana and that now flooded into his present. The personal debts he had taken on to close the Hershey deal returned to haunt him, and by the summer of 1964 Lobo was hardly in a position to pay either his phone bill or expenses at the Sherry-Netherland hotel, let alone fund the reconstruction of a country.

It had all looked so different only a year before. Lobo had boasted then that he would soon be wealthier abroad than he had ever been in Havana. “I left Cuba on October 14, 1960, without even a toothbrush,” he told a British journalist during a visit to London. “In three years I have recovered what was taken from me. I am doing the same volume of business as I was then. And when I return to Cuba and my property is restored to me I shall be much better off than before.” The revolution had robbed Lobo of his sugar mills, but he still had his contacts, his prestige, and his trader’s instincts. The year 1963 was the wildest in the sugar market in four decades. Lobo’s New York office still handled a fifth of all foreign sugar that entered the United States. Lobo’s speculations had gone exceptionally well.

At the start of the year the sugar price had stood at 2.5 cents a pound. By late March it had more than doubled. When North American candy companies, soft-drink firms, and jelly and jam makers also started buying, the sugar price rose further: to 7 cents a pound in April, then 13 cents by the end of May. Some people talked about a “one-way street” for the sugar price. Stories circulated on Wall Street of a dentist who had made $500,000 speculating on the market. In the early summer, the U.S. government started to buy as well. Prices rose by another two cents in a week. Lobo told his son-in-law John Ryan that he was “$25m ahead of the game.”

“We are witnessing history,” Lobo told an interviewer from
Fortune
magazine in March, perhaps thinking back to his own past—the Dance of the Millions, those years of easy money he had witnessed when he first joined the Galbán Lobo office in 1920. Indeed, Cuba was again partly responsible for the rising sugar price. Cuban production had collapsed. Since 1959, some two million tons, about a tenth of world exports, had fallen out of the market. Prices soared.

The sugar price cooled toward the end of year and Lobo stepped back into the market. He bought 100,000 tons at 11 cents per pound, a position worth $22 million. Prices began to rise again in early 1964. León and Gustavo Lobo urged him to sell. “The market could still absorb his position. He could sell, declare a fat profit and give everyone a handsome bonus,” León remembers telling Lobo. But Lobo, ever willing to take the big risk, wanted to let his bet ride. “This market is going higher,” he told León.