When Life in Cuba Was Elegant and Sweet

[El Presidente]

Books of The Times

When Life in Cuba Was Elegant and Sweet

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: August 12, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/13/books/13book.html

The glamorous, slightly risqué picture many of us have of prerevolutionary Cuba comes from the movies or the theater. Havana is the racy, romantic getaway where the prim and proper Sarah Brown begins to fall for the raffish charms of the high-rolling gambler Sky Masterson in “Guys and Dolls.” Havana is also where Michael Corleone in “The Godfather: Part II” goes to meet fellow mobsters to divvy up control of the lucrative casino business. It’s the Paris of the Caribbean, the Monte Carlo of the Americas, a place where, in the words of “The Godfather” character Hyman Roth, the hotels were “bigger and swankier than any of the rug joints we’ve put in Vegas,” where American tourists could down exotic drinks, take in live sex shows and carouse in one of the greatest party towns on earth.

Serenella Cazac

John Paul Rathbone

THE SUGAR KING OF HAVANA

The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba’s Last Tycoon

By John Paul Rathbone

Illustrated. 304 pages. The Penguin Press. $27.95.

Related

As the journalist John Paul Rathbone reminds us in his fascinating new book, “The Sugar King of Havana,” prerevolutionary Cuba was also an aristocratic haven, where the members of the upper class — like the author’s mother, the daughter of a well-to-do department store owner — passed their time at the yacht club, the country club and fashion galas. Street after street was lined with gracious white stucco houses. There was a planter so rich that he traveled from New York by private railroad car and boat, and there were rounds of extravagant debutante parties and even more extravagant weddings.

And then suddenly, with Fidel Castro, everything abruptly changed: “Then all the parties with the men in black tie, the women in cocktail dresses, the debutantes in fluffy confections of white silk and linen and tulle; the extravagant shows at the Tropicana; the Mafia, their casinos, and the famous American actor drunk in a small bar in Old Havana were suddenly over, gone with the wind, and the traces and stories that they left behind grew into legends.”

In this book Mr. Rathbone, a former editor of the Financial Times business column “Lex,” tells the story of prerevolutionary Cuba through the prism of the man who was once known as the Sugar King: Julio Lobo, the country’s richest man in that era, a figure who “has become emblematic of a way of life that existed in Havana before the dictator Fulgencio Batista fled the island on New Year’s Eve 1958.”

Although Mr. Rathbone, who grew up on his mother’s stories about those “elegant, decadent and whirligig years,” occasionally romanticizes Lobo and his world, he gives us a richly detailed portrait of this complicated, conflicted man while deftly weaving a thumbnail history of modern Cuba into Lobo’s story. He leaves the reader with a palpable sense of the glittering and increasingly violent world that this “new sugar magus” and his family inhabited, and conveys both the profound emotional dislocations of exile and the dangers and persistence of nostalgia.

A brilliant businessman who pioneered the hostile takeover, Lobo was thought to have “an almost occult ability to create wealth.” Mr. Rathbone reports that in his heyday, Lobo handled about half of the six million tons of sugar that Cuba produced annually and that he had “an estimated personal fortune of $200 million, about $5 billion in today’s dollars.” Indeed, Lobo’s gifts as a financier were so legendary that Mr. Castro’s government even asked him to come work with it.

Lobo helped finance the Riviera and the Capri, “two of the glitziest casino-hotels to open in the 1950s”; dated movie stars like Joan Fontaine and Bette Davis; and once reportedly filled one of his swimming pools with perfume “so that Esther Williams, the Hollywood starlet of ‘Bathing Beauty,’ could practice her swimming routines when she visited the island.” As depicted by Mr. Rathbone, he emerges as an almost folkloric figure from the pages of a novel: someone who swam the Mississippi, survived assassins’ bullets and was once “put against the wall to be shot but pardoned at the last moment.”

But Lobo was more than a tough-guy businessman. He was also an ardent art collector and Napoleonic scholar, amassing the largest collection of Napoleonica outside of France. And while he identified with the world-conquering ambitions of Napoleon, he was at heart a loner, who cherished the writings of Emerson, Shakespeare and the stoic philosopher Epictetus.

Mr. Rathbone writes that Lobo contemplated finding a way of turning control of his favorite sugar mill, Tinguaro, over to its workers; that he fiercely opposed Batista’s corrupt government; and that he even helped finance Mr. Castro’s rebels before that guerrilla leader’s communist leanings became apparent.

In the small world that was Cuba, where associates of Batista, the Mob and the rebels were often connected to one another through “a dense and complex web of relationships,” Mr. Rathbone says, Celia Sanchez — who would become Mr. Castro’s confidante, personal secretary and rumored lover — happened to be the daughter of the dentist on one of Lobo’s eastern plantations. She worked with Lobo’s daughter María Luisa “on social programs funded by Lobo to help indigent cane cutters” and “remained close to the Lobos throughout the revolution,” despite their political differences.

Unlike some planters and businessmen who got their money out of Cuba early, Lobo “continued to invest in Cuba to the last,” Mr. Rathbone writes. “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 90 miles away — would. Conversations Lobo said he had had with Allen Dulles, the head of the C.I.A., 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.”

In October of 1960, shortly after a meeting with Che Guevara, Lobo caught a crowded airplane flight to Mexico and from there to New York. He took with him nothing but a small suitcase and a toothbrush. He left behind his El Greco paintings, his palaces, his vast fortune.

By the 1970s Lobo was leading a quiet life in Madrid, living off the monthly payments his daughters sent him and the sale of the last of his Napoleon papers that one of them had managed to smuggle out of Cuba. He died on Jan. 30, 1983, and his body, dressed in a guayabera and wrapped in a Cuban flag, was buried in Madrid. By then, Mr. Rathbone reports, most of his friends and enemies were dead or abroad, and “only a handful of mourners attended.”

[CanuckSARTech]

Interesting.

[laficion]

Sounds great Rob, I really enjoy books like that, thanks for the info

[jquest63]

Looks like another addition to my ever growing reading list. Thanks for posting.

[Ryan]

Interesting stuff, I had heard of the Napoleon museum in Havana before but didn't know how it got there.

http://www.webhavana.com/en/napoleonic_museum.html

Another thing to do next February.

[Leopolis Semper Fidelis]

"When Life in Cuba Was Elegant and Sweet" - but not for lots of Cubans. Now Communism, Castro style, has made it even worse for them. On another note, it was the dream of a friend who grew up in Venezuela to go to Havana to celebrate his graduation, with a visit to the Tropicana high on the agenda. Alas for him, the Revolution prevented that happening. He never forgave Fidel for this.

[ajgagnon]

Havana is an urban landscape showing grandeur from several epochs, all rolled into one crumbling beauty. That sounds like a very vivid and thought-provoking book, Rob.

My wife and I got married at the Hotel Nacional, and it was beautiful. We could have gone to the Tropicana but we saw the Parisien show instead (at the Nacional). Perhaps it's not as elaborate as it once was, but they proudly claim those cabarets have been uninterrupted for decades, dating back to before the revolution.

The dining room in the hotel still has the deeply embossed gold ceilings (about 14 inches of elaborate mouldings). It's like nothing else I have seen. One can only imagine that place in its heyday.