The Sugar King of Havana: Summary and book reviews of The Sugar King of Havana by John Paul Rathbone, plus links to an excerpt from The Sugar King of Havana and a biography of John Paul Rathbone.
The Sugar King of Havana The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's Last Tycoon
by John Paul Rathbone
Hardcover: Aug 2010,
320 pages.
Paperback: Jul 2011,
320 pages.
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 pre-revolutionary 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.
What makes this book especially unique is Rathbone's personal relationship to the material... His work takes on a sense of personal importance and inadvertently shows how Cuban exile has the potential to create feelings of displacement in subsequent generations.
There is a beautiful, lost quality to his narrative, his quest to piece together his heritage... But there is also a noticeable idealization of Julio Lobo - perhaps, too, a part of Rathbone's nostalgia - that keeps Lobo's story from appearing as deep or as complex as it might have actually been... At other times, Rathbone's lyricism feels a bit unnecessary for a work of nonfiction, and undermines the strength of his extensive research... Even still, Rathbone does an excellent job weaving together Lobo's story, his mother's and his own, and his descriptions of the effects of Cuban politics on the upper class are more than vivid. There is a sense of loss and reminiscence in his voice that is familiar to me, as I have heard it in my father's voice when talking about the Cuba of his childhood as well. (Reviewed by Elena Spagnolie).
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
Although Mr. Rathbone…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
The Washington Post - Ann Louise Bardach
Rathbone's nuanced blending of familial and national history lends this work poignancy and depth.
Booklist
[The Sugar King of Havana] restores a realistic sense of what 1950s Cuba was like, including the guarded optimism with which many upper-crust Cubans such as Lobo initially viewed Castro's seizing of power. Rathbone's care with social atmosphere lifts his portrayal of Lobo above the usual life-of-a-tycoon and enriches the historical understanding of readers contemplating post Castro Cuba.
Library Journal - Catherine C. McMullen
Rathbone, as both a child of a Cuban exile and an economist, writes with authority on a less covered aspect of Cuban studies...
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. An exceptionally rich portrait not only of an empire and its progenitor but Cuba itself, and the economic legacy of Castro's revolution, the loss of capital, and the end of Cuba's 'great age of sugar.'
Kirkus Reviews
Wide-ranging life of a Cuban Croseus and a graceful history of the island during the last century...Lively, well written....
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by Hortensia The Sugar King Of Havana A must read for every Cuban. An enjoyable reading for anyone who loves to read.
It has been delightful to read about episodes and life styles that were forgotten but brought to life with such amenity and exactitude.
I borrowed the book from... Read More
The Perfect Squeeze: Julio Lobo's Manipulation of "The Good Neighbor Policy"
In The Sugar King of Havana John Paul Rathbone describes one of the most successful and cunning business moves of Julio Lobo's career - a manipulation of FDR's Good Neighbor Policy which, according to Eduardo Kaplan of The Wall Street Journal, "placed [Lobo] in a different league."
As part of the Good Neighbor Policy, FDR enacted The Jones-Costigan Act in May of 1934. This act set up an agreement between the U.S., its sugar-producing "insular territories" (such as Hawaii and The Philippines) and overseas sugar producers - Cuba (headed by Lobo) being of particular importance here. Among other things, this agreement allowed Washington to assess the sugar needs of the US and institute a quota system in which each country would be assured a certain amount of that market. In theory this act would benefit the United States because it would protect its domestic farmers' interests and also prevent other countries, specifically Cuba, from overproducing sugar (as happened during the "Dance of the Millions"*), which drove prices...
A dead Russian is followed by the murders of a Cuban boxer and a prostitute. Although none of them is supposed to be investigated, Arkady cannot be stopped.
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