Free The Sugar King of Havana by John Paul Rathbone

owner.” The weather still seemed bent on ruining his enterprise: after the rain came drought and fires that crackled through the cane. Mortgaged, sick, and without enough money to attend his eldest son’s wedding in Havana, Bernabé wrote in a moment of despair: “The life of an hacendado is hell.”
    Yet Bernabé did dig his mill out of the mud and eventually prosper. For this, the “enemy of the revolution” was lauded as a patriot. It was a sign of how fast Cuba had changed. The new Republic had many deficiencies. The first president, General Tomás Estrada Palma, was honest but ineffective, drawn from the rebel ranks like the Cuban presidents that followed him, and all better warriors than governors in times of peace. Worst of all was the new constitution’s hated Platt Amendment, by which Washington arrogated the right to intervene after U.S. troops left in May 1902—they would twice return. Even so, Cubans, bored with their colonial past, turned to the future with excitement, and the first decades of the century were optimistic years, the time of the self-made man as he was referred to in English; adroit, hardworking, and socially mobile. The island glittered with promise. After independence, some 100,000 exiles returned to the island with small amounts of capital or credit and valuable work experience gained in the United States. Despite the ferocity of the war, half a million Spaniards also came to try to make their fortune. Then there were men like Heriberto Lobo, Julio Lobo’s father, the epitome of the self-made man, who had recently lost one fortune in Venezuela and arrived in the new Cuban Republic at the start of the century, like so many others, to start again.
     
     
    IN FACT IT was a quirk of fate that brought Don Heriberto, his wife, Virginia, and their two young children to Cuba in the autumn of 1900. A tall and moderately good-looking man with a broad forehead, aquiline nose, and deep dark eyes, Heriberto was born in 1870 in Puerto Cabello on Venezuela’s Caribbean coast to a long Sephardic line that almost embodied the medieval image of the wandering Jew. Since the Jewish expulsion from Spain in 1492, Heriberto’s ancestors had lived in Portugal, Amsterdam, London, Amsterdam again, then Saint Thomas, Venezuela, and now Cuba. Arriving penniless in Havana, Heriberto had already pulled his life up by the bootstraps once before. Just fourteen when his father died, Heriberto joined the Banco de Venezuela, the national bank, working as a clerk to support his mother and family. Six years later, after learning accounting, French, and English in his spare time, he was appointed chief accountant. By the time he was twenty-two, Heriberto had joined the board of directors. Three years later he ran the bank; it was a remarkable achievement.

    Heriberto and Virginia in Caracas, 1899. Leonor stands at the front, Julio on the table.
    Virginia Olavarría, his wife, was six years older. The eldest daughter of an aristocratic Basque family that had settled in Venezuela in the sixteenth century, she had wavy dark hair and was handsome rather than beautiful. They married in Caracas in 1896, after Heriberto converted to Catholicism; their first child, Leonor, was born the following year and Julio the year after. Life seemed to be full of promise for the young couple in Caracas on the eve of the new century, until President Cipriano Castro threw them out of the country.
    Castro was an andino , a native of the mountainous Venezuelan state of Táchira near the Colombian border. A brave military leader, like his unrelated Cuban namesake, and a vain man, Castro had a shock of dark hair and burning black eyes that many commented on; he was “a cockerel,” as his father described him, “made for fighting and women.” In 1899, he marched on Caracas from the Andes with a thin column of sixty men—“whistling, happy, clean dressed, as if for a party.” Armed, ironically, with rifles called cubanos , they took the