The Sugar King of Havana (38 page)

The year before his death, Lobo wrote to Carlotta in Havana, sensing the end. “I want to go back to Cuba, to die there and be buried alongside my mother and father,” he said. “My history and my love of this country are calling me. . . . So I’m asking you, as an old employee and almost family, to find out what I have to do to go to Cuba as soon as possible—perhaps by the middle of this year.” He copied the letter to the Cuban ambassador in Madrid. Vain hope: he never saw the country again.

Lobo died on January 30, 1983, a Sunday. He was buried two days later in the crypt of the Almudena Cathedral in Madrid, a building then still unfinished, although Lobo had donated some funds toward its completion. His body was dressed in a guayabera, as he wished, and wrapped in a Cuban flag. He had collected more enemies than friends during his life, most of them were dead or abroad, and only a handful of mourners attended.

Around him lay the mortal remains of several princes and princesses of the Spanish royal family, distant relatives of the same monarchs that had exiled Lobo’s forebears from Spain almost five centuries before, when Columbus had sailed to the Americas and first introduced sugarcane to the New World. Ten generations of Lobos had since successively transplanted themselves around the world. Expelled from the Madrid of Spain’s Golden Age, they had traveled to the Amsterdam of Rembrandt; expelled from the Caracas of Cipriano Castro, they had arrived in the newly founded Republic of Cuba; and expelled from the Havana of Fidel Castro, Lobo had returned to Madrid, the city of his earliest forebears. Julio Lobo Olavarría died thousands of miles from the city he considered home, yet his final resting place represented a circling return, of sorts, for the last of Cuba’s great Sugar Kings.

—CUBAN PROVERB

 

 

I
would like to bring this story to a valedictory close. It has been such a long journey that I cannot say for sure when I actually set off. Perhaps it was when my mother spoke to me as a young child and seeded me with recollections that left me with a strange nostalgia for a place that I had never seen. Or perhaps it was later, when I first opened her photo albums, and I was captivated by the glamour of the images that fell loose from their bindings and spilled onto my lap. Or maybe it was in Miami, when I first began to understand the weight of words such as
revolución
and
exilio
and Cuba became more than the fairyland pirate island that it could seem in London. That was when I first wondered seriously about the island’s past, and its present and future—preoccupations for which there can never be a tidy, final farewell. I felt sometimes that I might have been less concerned by such ideas if I had grown up in the United States, surrounded by Cuban stories which would then have become so familiar that I would have taken them for granted and then left them behind. But almost everything about the pairing of England and Cuba seemed to me like a contradiction requiring my own personal, internal reconciliation. And then there was the reconciliation that Cuba itself so obviously lacked.

By the late 1970s, many of my cousins lived on New York’s Upper West Side, on streets in the low hundreds. In the summer, loosed fire hydrants sprayed water over the pavements to cool off the heat. Other relations lived in Miami, in homes that ranged from my grandparents’ two-room apartment by the airport to the art-crammed space of my sister’s godmother, an astonishingly generous and statuesque woman named Dolores, who held court in great style fourteen floors above the Miami bay. Not everyone—indeed, very few—had prospered in exile, although some did.

We went to Miami most summers. My mother ran a toy shop in London and saved through the year for the cost of the flights and the rented bungalow. At home, we spoke English. In Miami, the language switched to Spanish as soon as the plane landed and stayed there. Lobo, in his way, had foreseen this. “Soon we, as Cubans, will probably have annexed Miami as our own and Florida will soon become a Spanish American or Latin American state again,” he had written in the 1970s from Madrid. It was a perceptive comment that reversed the usual idea of the United States as a towering colossus that dictates all Cuban events, an attractive David versus Goliath setup, long supported by North American bully-boy tactics, which boosted Cuban self-esteem and earned Cuba sympathy around the world. It was also a true comment, and by the 1970s one with which few Anglo-Americans then living in Miami would disagree. Cuba’s exiles did seem to have captured the city, especially after the 1980 Mariel boatlift, when Cubans really
did
invade Miami after Castro said that anyone who wanted to leave the island could, and more than 100,000 did. During the Reagan years, Cuban exile politics also often captured Washington’s agenda.

I remember one Miami evening in particular. My grandfather, fragile from the tuberculosis from which he never fully recovered, raised himself from a deep chair after a family dinner, typically boisterous with the usual reminiscences of Havana life: the time Tía X had done
this,
the moment Don Y had done
that
, the party when my mother had leapt from a high wall into a crowd, shouting with glee, “Catch me!” and broken her leg. All these stories were told with a feeling that they illustrated certain family traits, however eccentric, and so formed part of a tradition that was worthy of respect. Silence fell as my grandfather stood up. First he toasted his assembled descendants, eighteen of us then, later rising to thirty-eight cousins, uncles, and aunts. Then he declared, no shouted
,
that the best way to accelerate Castro’s downfall would be to sell Levi’s jeans in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución. No—tighten the embargo! No—loosen it! Castro and his
barbudos,
as I learned each year, were always
about
to fall; as the perennial joke went, probably by Christmas.

In the popular imagination, Cuba’s exiles have spent the past fifty years furiously plotting and scheming about the day they can reclaim their supposedly ill-gotten gains and turn back the clock in Cuba to more wretched, prerevolutionary days. Growing up in phlegmatic England—going to English schools and eating English food—I sometimes thought of Miami exiles in a similar way. I certainly recognized anger in the high emotion of family conversations that went on in rapid Spanish long into the night; in the often hysterical denunciations of Castro I heard on exile radio shows in Miami; and in the bomb threats against those who believed in the possibilities of rapprochement, as well as the rival governments-in-waiting with their self-appointed ministers of this and ministers of that which I read about in the local newspapers. The violent traditions of the
bonche
days continued, on both sides of the Florida straits.

My mother’s propertied background made my family, like the Lobos, a member of Cuba’s exiled moneyed class. Yet I always struggled to reconcile the image of revanchist exiles with my grandmother, who spent the last twelve years of her life bedridden in a room whose blinds were drawn against the light that bothered her eyes. Her darkened apartment was the first port of call for any grandchild who came to town. Sometimes, she would pull herself up in bed to pencil
X
’s on rough maps of her Havana home that she drew on the back of old telephone bills. She claimed that treasure was buried there, and urged us to find it. No one believed that real gold lay under the roots of the mango tree in her old patio in Vedado, though. Rather, the task of reclaiming lost emotional treasure, and the burden that that implies, was the crux of the issue, it seemed to me—the real heart of the matter.

 

 

MARÍA LUISA LEFT LONDON shortly after her father died and made Miami her home. She had been traveling frequently to Cuba, which made her a suspicious figure in England, even though London generally maintained good relations with Havana. After one such trip, she came to my mother’s home, and a lanky man dressed in a blue suit jumped over the wall and approached our house through the garden. All elbows and knees, this Wormold-type character from MI6 sat in the kitchen to drink a mug of tea while María Luisa told my mother of her latest visit to Havana. On another occasion, the Cuban consul came around for supper. The strained conversation took a surreal turn when my mother brought out her photo albums and opened the pages to show pictures of a party held at the Country Club decades before. María Luisa recalled she had been there too, and then the consul exclaimed, “So was I!”—although, he added, he had watched the festivities hidden among the high branches of a tree.

Leonor, meanwhile, lived in Vero Beach, 150 miles north of Miami. The two sisters were barely on speaking terms, their characters as opposed as they had always been, and they argued, latterly through lawyers. After Lobo’s death, a complex case sprang up over claims to one of his confiscated properties in Cuba, the old Hershey mill. As this might one day be theoretically worth millions, or more likely nothing at all, to outsiders the fight often seemed to be less about money than over a lost past, perhaps the “emotional treasure” of my grandmother’s pot of gold. But then Cuba as a bitter family feud is an apt metaphor for the revolution. Indeed, its legacy is much like the jagged emotional hinterland of a bad divorce that, like all such divorces, has generated terrible enmities that can be hard for outsiders or even its children to understand. The most dramatic example of this is the tragic tale of Elián González, the five-year-old boy fished out of the waters between Cuba and Florida in 1998 after his mother and her boyfriend perished on a raft in the straits. When the boy’s father, divorced from his mother and living in Cuba, demanded Elián’s return, so was launched the most intense passion play between Miami and Havana since the revolution first began. Elián was subsequently returned to Cuba, and the government erected a statue of José Martí to celebrate this “victory.” Cast in bronze, it stands on the Malecón opposite the U.S. Interests Section, Martí pointing with one hand at its blank windows while with the other he clasps a boy protectively to his chest. It is supposed to be his own son rather than Elián, which is a lie that points to a bigger truth, because Martí, of course, chose revolution over his son.

Living in the United States, Leonor rooted herself in the present and looked to the future. Her father had been proud when she first became head of the English department at St. Edward’s, a large local school in Vero Beach. Subsequently, she helped set up the Vero Beach Museum of Art, which grew to become an important arts center, and worked with her husband to make a success of the Moorings real estate development, eventually working off the old Hershey debts. María Luisa looked more to the past. She continued to travel to Cuba, following the trail of her father’s life, and began researching the life of the Condesa de Merlin. She eventually produced a beautiful book about Havana’s architecture, and visitors to Cuba’s National Library reported seeing her bent over a reading desk for hours as she searched for
temps perdu
. Back in Florida, María Luisa became an important figure in Miami’s secret life, and she turned her beachfront house on Key Biscayne into one of the few places where Cubans in exile and from the island could talk freely, whatever their political beliefs. Like her ancestor the Condesa de Merlin, María Luisa presided over a salon of artists and intellectuals.

Such exile nostalgia might seem self-indulgent, or simply irrelevant given the time that has passed and the decrepit condition of much of the island today—so different from that remembered. Yet I came to realize that many Cubans who live on the island suffer from a similar nostalgia. When María Luisa died of cancer in 1998, her four children traveled to the island and, after a funeral held in Havana’s cathedral, arranged to scatter her ashes at Tinguaro. When they arrived at Lobo’s old mill, the workers seemed to have fallen under a melancholy spell. They told Lobo’s grandchildren that they missed the 1950s, when the harvest was double what it had shrunk to and the mill had worked at full tilt under Lobo’s direction. They remembered that Lobo gave scholarships to promising students, and recalled María Luisa as a young woman, following her father on his rounds, supervising the schools and clinics on his plantations. That evening, as dusk settled over Tinguaro’s waving fields of cane, María Luisa’s children spooned some of her cremated remains into the giant rollers of a cane-crushing mill. They asked the manager if he would like to do the same. He said he would, placed the box of ashes nearer the slow-grinding mechanism, and then, to everyone’s amazement, plunged his hands into the box and—quickly, furiously—smeared María Luisa’s ashes over his face and chest and white shirt.

“I never asked him why he did that,” Victoria Ryan, María Luisa’s eldest daughter, told me. “I was too shocked. But I always regret not asking. Was it because he wanted to try and imbibe some of Lobo’s old power, in a voodoo sense? Did he want to turn back the clock? I imagine all these things, but I’ll never know for sure.”