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The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's Last Tycoon
Penguin Press
August 2010
On Sale: August 5, 2010
320 pages
ISBN: 1594202583
EAN: 9781594202582
Hardcover
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Fiction Family Life
The son of a Cuban exile recounts the remarkable and
contradictory life of famed sugar baron Julio Lobo, the
richest man in prerevolutionary Cuba and the last of the
island's haute bourgeoisie. Fifty years after the Cuban revolution, the legendary wealth
of the sugar magnate Julio Lobo remains emblematic of a
certain way of life that came to an abrupt end when Fidel
Castro marched into Havana. Known in his day as the King of
Sugar, Lobo was for decades the most powerful force in the
world sugar market, controlling vast swathes of the island's
sugar interests. Born in 1898, the year of Cuba's
independence, Lobo's extraordinary life mirrors, in almost
lurid technicolor, the many rises and final fall of the
troubled Cuban republic. The details of Lobo's life are fit for Hollywood. He twice
cornered the international sugar market and had the largest
collection of Napoleonica outside of France, including the
emperor's back teeth and death mask. He once faced a firing
squad only to be pardoned at the last moment, and later
survived a gangland shooting. He courted movie stars from
Bette Davis to Joan Fontaine and filled the swimming pool at
his sprawling estate with perfume when Esther Williams came
to visit. As Rathbone observes, such are the legends of which
revolutions are made, and later justified. But Lobo was also
a progressive and a philanthropist, and his genius was so
widely acknowledged that Che Guevara personally offered him
the position of minister of sugar in the Communist regime.
When Lobo declined-knowing that their worldviews could never
be compatible-his properties were nationalized, most of his
fortune vanished overnight, and he left the island, never to
return to his beloved Cuba. Financial Times journalist John Paul Rathbone has been
fascinated by this intoxicating, whirligig, and
contradictory prerevolutionary period his entire life. His
mother was also a member of Havana's storied haute
bourgeoisie and a friend of Lobo's daughters. Woven into
Lobo's tale is her family's experience of republic,
revolution, and exile, as well as the author's own struggle
to come to grips with Cuba's, and his family's, turbulent
history. Prodigiously researched and imaginatively written, The Sugar
King of Havana is a captivating portrait of the glittering
end of an era, but also of a more hopeful Cuban past, one
that might even provide a window into the island's future.
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