The Sugar King of Havana: The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's Last Tycoon [Hardcover]

One point of the history of the western hemisphere that is rarely pressed to any depth is the relationship the United States has had with the countries of the hemisphere south of its' borders. These relationships are very complicated and probably the most complicated of all has been that with the island nation of Cuba. When the island is mentioned, it is generally in relation to the communist government of Fidel Castro and how the collective opinion of the Cuban exile community will affect an American election.
This book is a history of the island as it relates to one of the richest Cubans, how he made, spent and eventually lost his fortune. Before the Communists gained power in Cuba, the production of sugar was the main industry and Julio Lobo was one of the titans of that industry. He was so powerful that he was even able to stand up and overcome the powerful American corporate interests, cornering the sugar market to his and Cuba's benefit.
While he was extremely wealthy, Lobo was a modest man; he was one of the few sugar tycoons that took a deep interest in his workers. Unlike most other owners he visited his plantations and mills and personally spoke to many of the workers. When Cubans opposed to his interests were criticizing Lobo, the labor union representing his workers issued a strong message of support for him.
However, the real interesting aspect of this book is the downward spiral that the Cuban society was seemingly locked into. The succession of dictatorships was each worse than the previous and semi-open warfare between several factions was taking place. Government corruption increased dramatically so there was a power vacuum when Batiste suddenly fled unannounced from his position as president.
Lobo was caught in that tide of change, all of the good works that he had done for Cuba counted for nothing when he had a late-night meeting with Che Guevara where he was told that his properties were being confiscated by the state. Although Lobo was "asked" to continue to manage some of his sugar holdings, he understood quite clearly that all could be taken at any time. Therefore, he fled the island for the United States with only his clothing, a small suitcase and what he had in his pockets. His "forced" departure from the island may have been the greatest blow to the Cuban economy that Fidel Castro could possibly have dealt.
This is a book about the Cuban society, how it evolved from the time of independence, economically fluctuated according to the price of sugar and ultimately went Communist. It is fascinating to get a glimpse into the life of a man that was one of the most significant people in Cuban society, generally a good man but one that is almost never mentioned in the history books. With that glimpse, you also peer deeply into what Cuba was like from approximately 1910 until Castro imposed his Communist dictatorship.

John Paul Rathbone in "The Sugar King of Havana" has written four different books and woven them into one seamless romantic narrative of great sweep and import which manages in less than three hundred pages, to move as well as to impart much valuable insight about Cuba and its society in the last century. This is an indispensible book for anyone interested in Cuba, Sugar and, of course, Julio Lobo. Throughout, Mr. Rathbone's writing flows easily and lucidly and brings matters into perspective with elements of universal culture that, as in a medieval illuminated manuscript, decorate as well as underline the importance of a given text.

At no time is one strand divorced from the other: Mr. Rathbone, of Cuban maternal descent, gives us a précis of Cuban history with the objectivity yet sentimental attachment of someone born after the time of events which fill out the narrative. His take on the development of Cuba as a political and economic entity are knowledgeable and correspond to the traditional analysis that measures the history of Cuba as falling between one significant fault line: the nefarious coup-d'etat of 04 September 1933. At that time, notwithstanding difficulties, there was institutional and economic development that were propelling Cuba out of its colonial past, whether under Spanish or U.S. hegemony. After the Batista sergeant's revolt in unholy alliance with radical student groups and initially, Communists, the institutional framework of the barely thirty year old republic crumbled, any hope for reform was rapidly betrayed, and Cuba lapsed into a period of corruption, violence, and decadence which, except for a brief period in the 1940's, eventually led to the total failure and collapse of the republic and the onset of communism. Castro's victory in 1959 is less a revolutionary development than the filling of a political vacuum in the making, indeed, magnifying, since 1933.

Within this framework, Mr. Rathbone tells us the story of the great Julio Lobo. An incongruously privately austere man who nonetheless could decorate his life with flamboyant gestures, love affairs, collector of Napoleonica, he was primarily a sugar trader and businessman, who eventually owned mills, but whose feet were always firmly rooted in trade, and drove his firm, Galbán-Lobo, to the most commanding position in the world sugar market. He loved both Cuba and sugar. Though the trader was never absent from his brain, anchored in Havana and Wall Street, his heart seemed to be in Tinguaro, the mill and hacienda he eventually acquired and which became as spiritual a home as he would ever find. His business passion and private delights as well as keen insight into Cuban political reality, developed in him a natural reflex against becoming involved in Cuban political activity. He was not alone in this. In general, the Cuban managerial and professional classes, whether at the magnate or less exalted levels, came to regard Cuban politics with disdain. The hypothetical American academic view of a monolithic business right allied at the end with the corruption ridden, Mafia- influenced Batista dictatorship creating oppressive conditions which eventually led to Castro, was simply not true, and led to much error in American public thinking in the early days of the revolution (I, myself a graduate student at the U. of Wisconsin in the 1960's, had to argue repeatedly the case for the basically politically removed, if negligent, Cuban bourgeosie in many panels against the rhetorical flourishes and self-serving constructs of progressive "true-believers.") More accurate was the attitude reflected by Lobo's statement in the 1950's when some approached him with fears about Castro's political stripes: "Anybody but Batista." Many years later Susan Sontag, with great intellectual honesty and to her everlasting credit, at a conference in New York, publicly apologized for the cuddling American liberals and progressives had given Castro and the ignorance and injustice with which at times she and her colleagues had regarded the diversity of players who were simultaneously anti-Batista dictatorship and anti-Communist during that stretch of Cuban history. By turning his back on politics Lobo presided over the greatest growth of Cuban sugar production and expansion of native control of mill ownership in the history of the republic. His personal role was commanding. As Cuban private investment in the industry grew (earlier in the 20th century, most mills were U.S. owned), so did the controversy as to how to control the instability in sugar prices after World War I, a controversy that was never truly resolved. Lobo was, probably rightly, in favor of increased production even if prices might fall in the short run, so that Cuba would eventually control the sugar market thereby setting the price for the product. Others, particularly in the Cuban and U.S. governments, viewed the issue as sustaining prices by limiting production by all producing countries (beet and cane). For many years, even into the 1950's, Cuba followed this policy, even if other producing countries did not follow. Cuba would try to hedge its position by securing large stakes in the U.S. sugar import quota at subsidized prices. Much to Lobo's displeasure, the Cuban sugar industry became hostage to U.S. sugar purchasing and quota policy, whereas his view of the future had been one in which Cuban comparative advantage in production would have determined not only sales to the U.S., but in the world market. So many years later, in the era of globalization, Lobo's view seems the most prescient and correct. Alas, it is too late.

The third book woven in Mr. Rathbone's rich tapestry is an illuminating but nonetheless personal and perhaps sentimental one, the story of his Cuban family. It is Cuban far older than the Lobo's, whose Cuban roots belong squarely in the twentieth century. By examining, if summarily, but throughout the text as appropriate, the role of his great-great-grandfather, Bernabé Sánchez a sugar planter and mill owner the province of Camaguey, Mr. Rathbone gives us glimpses of life in colonial Cuba and the thinking behind the development of the sugar industry in Spanish times, as well as the development of Cuba itself as a political entity. Initially, Bernabé Sánchez was a committed "independentista", freedom from retrograde Spain as the only means of securing growth and development. Gradually his position shifted, not due in small degree, to fears about U.S. covetousness towards Cuba. Indeed, going back to Jefferson, and at times for varying reasons, there were powerful interests in the U.S. seeking to annex Cuba. Bernabé Sánchez had become skeptical ( like later, arch-imperialist Winston Churchill) of Cubans' ability to manage independence. The only viable alternative he saw was to seek autonomy from Spain, a sort of Commonwealth status like Churchill much later still was forced to accept as the British Empire fell apart. The "tendencia autonomista" gained some currency, but never enough traction. But it is important to establish a more classic, traditionalist point of view in this telling of the Cuba story, with which Lobo's dynamism and innovative thinking is not always in accord. Lobo's uniqueness lies therein. It is telling, given Cuba's sugar production, that prior to Galbán-Lobo's supremacy, the most important sugar trading company in the world was Czernikow-Rionda, based in New York and established by a Spaniard living in New Jersey. Julio Lobo was, until his final mistake, a magnificent businessman. But in a larger sense, as Rathbone concludes: "Lobo made Cuba not only wealthy, but more Cuban.

The fourth book, streaming in and out throughout this magnificent volume, is Mr. Rathbone's own interaction with his Cuban past. After all, Mr. Rathbone is English, his father at one time a Tory MP, his grandmother a militant English Quaker all of whom might make an interesting story on their own. He was born in Britain, after all the main events in this narrative had taken place. His Cuba was the Cuba of the mind, that instilled by his mother's homesickness and romantic memories. She was friends with the Lobo daughters, she remembered her family's Havana department store, Sánchez-Mola, she remembered not only the parties at the Country Club but the tales of Bernabé Sánchez, los Loret-de-Mola, Ignacio Agramonte, the indomitable Camagueyanos, and she passed these stories to her son. One day when the author and his siblings were young they were riding a car with their mother in normally overcast London, when the sun broke through the clouds and shone rather brightly on them. The children complained about the brightness and the heat. Their mother became furious: "don't you ever, in front of me, complain about the sun." Indeed, for a Cuban in London, the sun indeed must sorely be missed. So this book is also an offering of love by Mr. Rathbone to his mother. He is handing back informed, clarified, verified, stripped clean by truth as best he can find it, the precious tales of his mother's youth, no less relevant, romantic, or beautiful, now that the patina of affective memory has been removed.

I have always found it ironic that for me, one of the most revealing images of the traditional, who knows if eventually, perennial Cuban character and disposition is by an American poet who, though always affectionate about Cuba in his letters and work, never set foot on the island notwithstanding several invitations during his lifetime, Wallace Stevens, occurring in his poem "Academic Discourse in Havana." Wallace Stevens : Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America) Rathbone, unlike Stevens, has visited Havana, and Tinguaro, and knows the island at first hand, albeit a very different place and society from what it was in his mother's day. It all seems to be part of himself, that he took his mother's admonition to heart, and that forever in his innermost being, a bit of a tropical sun will shine.

The book is annotated, indexed, has some illustrations and a bibliography. The text is romantic and sweeping, replete with information and insight. It is most exceptionally recommended.

As a descendant of Bernabe Sanchez, and son of a former Galban, Lobo & Co. associate,
I consider "The Sugar King of Havana" the most fascinating biography of Cuba's most peculiar and mesmerizing businessman.

Intertwined with the intriguing story of Julio Lobo's life, this well researched book offers the reader a most accurate and unbiased sequence of historical events that ultimately culminated in Cuba's deceptive revolution.

To readers interested in late nineteenth and twentieth century Cuba, "The Sugar King of Havana" is a must read.

Andrew J. Rodriguez
Award-winning author of "Adios, Havana," a Memoir.

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