The Sugar King of Havana (5 page)

This was the aim of Guevara’s meeting that night. Castro was going to seize Lobo’s sugar mills in a few days and Guevara wanted to convince Lobo to stay—and keep his expertise—in Cuba. Alfredo Menéndez, who administered the revolutionary state’s sugar mills, knew in advance the offer that Guevara was going to make Lobo: a relatively modest salary and the right to keep one of his palatial homes. “We really didn’t want him to leave,” said Menéndez. “All that talent . . . was what Che wanted.”

Lobo’s skill was without doubt. A few months before, the sugar market had tumbled after U.S. refiners had refused to buy Cuban sugar in the hope that it might weaken the revolutionary government. Lobo had found himself stuck with a large cargo of sugar on board the Japanese freighter
Kimikawa Maru
that no one wanted to buy. Lobo had then executed an almost insanely audacious move: he cornered the global sugar market and rammed his prices down the U.S. refiners’ throats. To Guevara, the memory of Lobo’s business daring must have chimed with the military heroism of the revolution’s own rebels.

Lobo first ordered his agents in London and New York to start buying sugar futures to put the price up sharply. In the Galbán Lobo office, telex machines chattered out cables addressed to SUG, Lobo’s code name, which then trolleyed past his desk on a special conveyor belt. As the market began to climb, other producers around the world decided to withhold their raw sugar in the hope that prices would climb higher still. Then Lobo launched his masterstroke. He lifted the phone and reserved virtually all the cargo space available on the charter ships that carried sugar to the United States. He was now in the position of being the only major seller of sugar to the United States. Lobo proceeded to tighten the noose around the necks of the North American refiners by forcing up his price.

At first the U.S. buyers held fast. Then Pepsi-Cola bowed and meekly paid 5.40 cents a pound for sugar that only a few days ago had sold for 5.30. Twenty-four hours later, Pepsi bought again, this time at 5.70. Others followed suit. In two weeks, Lobo pushed up the price by almost a half to 7.58 cents. For the Cuban revolutionary government, this was capitalism fighting capitalism at its best. It was also why Guevara had left Lobo until last.

LOBO’S LEG BOTHERED HIM; he shifted in his seat. He knew that Guevara was laying the ground for a proposition, and readied himself calmly for it. “I will not whine,” he once said, “business is not a kissing game.”

Guevara leaned forward in his chair, still formally polite, firm, and clear. In so many words, he told Lobo that the time had come for him to make a decision: the revolution was Communist, and he, as a capitalist, could not remain as he was. Lobo could either stay and be a part of it, or go.

“It is impossible for us to permit you, who represent the very idea of capitalism in Cuba, to remain as you are,” Guevara said.

Lobo was used to playing all the angles as a speculator. He may have remembered Napoleon saying, “I am sometimes a fox and sometimes a lion, the whole secret . . . lies in knowing when to be the one or the other.” Lobo played fox. He pointed out that Nikita Khrushchev believed in the peaceful coexistence of the two systems of production, capitalism and communism. Guevara replied that that was all very well
between
nations, but not
within
one. Stymied, Lobo asked Guevara how he could integrate himself with the revolution. Guevara laid out his terms.

Lobo would become general manager of the Cuban sugar industry under the revolutionary government. His job would be to nationalize all aspects of the business: commerce, agriculture, and industry. He would lose all his properties but keep an income from Tinguaro—some $2,000 a month, about what Lobo paid the mill’s manager.

In the past, Lobo would have relished the opportunity for modernization that such an offer represented. He had often been frustrated by labor laws that were enlightened, by any American standard, and that had protected Cuban jobs from mechanization, even if there were few such jobs to go around. “Harder to get rid of a worker than of a wife” was the cruel joke told by American businessmen over daiquiris at the Havana Biltmore. (“Harder to find a job than a wife” might have run the workers’ riposte.)

But the offer was also absurd. As León told me many years later, remembering that night: “Julio wasn’t really interested in money. Perhaps he was interested in power, although this was really a by-product of his businesses. What he was interested in was creation—almost in an artistic sense.”

León had just celebrated his ninety-first birthday when I talked to him in his modest three-room apartment on the twenty-third floor of an anonymous-looking condominium that overlooked Miami’s South Beach. His body was thinned by age, and his powerful glasses looked strangely large on his face. Yet León also moved easily around the room when he got up from his sofa to consult a Cuban almanac from the 1950s, and his eyes, magnified by the giant lenses, sparkled with intelligence and vivid memories. The notion that Lobo might surrender his empire, his “creations,” to anyone else, let alone a Communist government, was “impossible,” as León put it, “bizarre.”

Lobo stalled for time. He told Guevara that it would be hard for him to change his ways, having worked for so long, as he had, in a capitalist system. He would like a few days to consider the offer, and would give a definitive answer next week.

“Unfortunately, I leave for Russia in a few days,” Guevara said. “I will send two of my colleagues to discuss the matter with you and see if we can reach an agreement.”

They both stood up. They had been talking for at least two hours. Guevara accompanied Lobo to the door of his office and they shook hands again, still formally polite.

“I look forward to meeting your colleagues” were Lobo’s last words to Guevara as he turned to leave, although Lobo had already made up his mind. Outside on the street, as he got back into the car, Lobo wondered if his refusal to reveal that decision had consigned him to prison, or worse.

 

 

THE CARIBBEAN IS SOMETIMES described as an American Mediterranean. Both seas face a barbarous and modernizing north, and are cupped by patriarchal and older cultures to the south. In that light, Cuba becomes a kind of Caribbean Sicily—an important sugar producer in its own right—and Havana a version of Palermo, another city, as Goethe once said, with an impossible-to-describe beauty. That may be why when I think about Lobo at that moment, leaving the central bank, considering his future but still straddling two epochs divided by a revolution, my mind cannot escape the similar image of Don Fabrizio. He is the Prince of Salinas in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s magnificent novel of Italian revolution and Sicilian decline,
The Leopard
. Specifically, my mind keeps returning to a scene toward the end of the book that with its faded colors and sense of decay exudes a smell of autumn and the sound of rustling leaves.

Don Fabrizio attends a ball that marks the end of the Palermo social season and where the few hundred people who make up the inbred world of aristocratic Sicily are gathered. At his peak, Don Fabrizio had been a model of health and vitality, who governed his province with uncontested authority. Now he is in decline, as is his class.

A mob of young women huddled in an explosion of rustling taffeta on a pouf in one gallery—“incredibly short, improbably dark, unbearably giggly”—remind him of monkeys. He imagines them swinging from the chandelier and throwing nuts and showing their behinds to visitors below. The older women, dressed in waves of silk that smell faintly of violets, do not please him either; several had been mistresses. And the conversation of the counts, princes, and dukes of his generation, all wearing stiff white shirts and black tailcoats, is about money only. Don Fabrizio, who is more interested in mathematics and astronomy, takes this as another sign of the rise of coarser values that have come to permeate Sicily following Garibaldi’s overthrow of the Bourbon kings, the unification of Italy, and the birth of the new Republic. The prince slips away from the gay music to a silent library, where a print of Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s gloomy painting
The Death of a Just Man
catches his eye. He reflects on his own mortality, the passing of one regime for another, the tombs of his ancestors, and makes a mental note to repair their graves. Suddenly the library door opens and Don Fabrizio’s favorite nephew interrupts his reverie. “Uncle, you’re looking wonderful this evening. Black suits you perfectly. But what are you looking at? Are you paying court to death?”

Cuba at the dawn of the revolution is contained in this moment: in Sicily’s dust and oppressive heat, the formal decadence of its parties, the fading seignorial grandeur of the prince’s estates, and his nostalgia for a way of life submerged after years of gentle decline by a heroic leader. That Garibaldi, the first revolutionary to wear a red shirt, also mastered the techniques of guerrilla warfare in a series of military actions in South America, and his romantic rallying cry “
Roma o mòrte
” was echoed by Castro’s own exhortation “Fatherland or Death” many years later, only amplifies the resonance of the image.

Lobo’s life is there too, condensed that night in the distress of the more refined and pessimistic prince. Both men are incompatible with the new age, and shrunken by it. The prince’s ball finds its counterpart in the parties Lobo liked to give at Tinguaro, in the smallness of Havana’s social register that my mother sought to escape, and in the feelings and events that pressed down on Lobo after his interview with Guevara.

When Lobo returned from the central bank, he climbed the stairs of his Havana home and shut himself away in his bedroom above the Napoleon library to think. Only a few months before he had been saturated with power that smelled as pungent as a fox; now the scent had left him. Lobo’s daughter Leonor banged on his door several times that night but her father never let her or anyone else in. Instead, he sat immobilized and silent in a house filled with Napoleonic symbols of demise. There was the letter that Marie Antoinette wrote to her children before she was guillotined: “4-½ in the morning—farewell children, farewell, no more tears to cry!” There were the thousands of books that described the life of Lobo’s hero, including his final years in exile, slowly dying, on the desolate and windswept English prison island of St. Helena. And there was the bronze copy of Napoleon’s death mask that Lobo kept on a special desk by a bookshelf in his library.

Lobo spent hours locked in his room, in a house filled with these morbid reminders of the emperor’s fate, recriminating with himself over plans wrongly laid, miscalculations made, trying to recalibrate his life. That night, and for much of the following day, a man who had once ruled vast swaths of Cuba and had taught himself to sign checks with both hands so as to save time was paralyzed by inaction. Lobo simply couldn’t conceive that his empire had gone.

The great difference between the death-gazing of Lobo and Don Fabrizio is that the Sicilian nobleman understood that his life was coming to an end and was reconciled to his mortality and the new age. He knew, in the book’s famous phrase, that everything was going to have to change in order to remain the same. Lobo had also thought a lot about death, having confronted a would-be assassin’s bullets. But while the prince was prepared to compromise with the new order to save his family’s fortunes, Lobo had just learned that he could not and that he would have to rein-vent everything as he was about to lose it all.

Other planters and businessmen had already taken their money out of Cuba. The powerful Falla Guttiérez family had moved $40 million abroad, fearing revolution, yet Lobo had continued to invest in Cuba to the last. In part, this was sheer hubris. Lobo ignored early warning signs of trouble, such as a bomb that damaged Tinguaro in 1957. In part, it was because Lobo believed, like so many others, that he could somehow control Castro, or that the Americans—only ninety miles away—would. Conversations Lobo said he had had with Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, may have convinced him of that. In part it was because Lobo believed deeply in Cuba and was critical of anyone who did not. And in part Lobo continued to invest in the island because events moved so quickly that it soon became too late to stop. Even in early 1960, the year that followed Castro’s triumph, Lobo had insisted that letters of credit worth millions of dollars for sugar cargos dispatched to the United States should be remitted to Havana rather than to his office in New York. “If I don’t do that, the Revolutionary government will take everything,” he explained to León at the time. Now it was clear that the government would take it all anyway.

Lobo finally regained his composure the following evening. The next day, he went to his office in Old Havana. The building sat atop a network of old tunnels that had been used during the colonial years to store gun-powder and food. Lobo had a vague plan to gather up what he could and use the tunnels as secret storerooms. When he arrived, the building was roped off, guards were posted around the doors, and a former office boy wearing a militia man’s uniform was sitting behind his desk, his feet up, smoking a large cigar.