Free The Sugar King of Havana by John Paul Rathbone Page A

capital five months later. But the country was bankrupt, the treasury empty, and Castro soon summoned Heriberto to the Presidential Palace and asked him to open the Banco de Venezuela’s vaults. When Heriberto refused, saying that would “ruin the bank,” Castro threw him in jail and thirty days later expelled him and Heriberto’s immediate family from the country. The Lobos sailed to the United States, planning to settle, but an American banker read an interview that Heriberto gave to a newspaper on arrival in New York. Impressed by how Heriberto had stood up to Castro, the “Monkey of the Andes,” he offered Heriberto a job in Havana as deputy manager of the North American Trust Company, which acted as fiscal agent for the U.S. troops on the island. (“The American people,” Heriberto commented wryly, “are easily impressed by anyone they believe is a victim of injustice.”) With no better immediate prospects, Heriberto accepted and arrived with his family in Havana on October 21, 1900, the eve of his thirtieth birthday. Leonor, his eldest daughter, was two years old at the time; Julio, one. “I came to Cuba with the new century,” as Lobo later liked to say.
    The Lobos had arranged lodgings in Vedado, now a residential area of stately mansions to the west of the old city, then an almost rural area with cows tethered on vacant lots. Heriberto reported for work at the North American Trust. Shortly thereafter, when the bank’s American manager died of yellow fever, Heriberto was promoted to the top in a macabre leap over his boss’s corpse. This stroke of fortune, along with his Venezuelan experiences, left Heriberto with an enduring sense of equanimity and generosity of spirit; it also made him alert to the possibilities of luck. Vaulted into the commercial world of postcolonial Havana, Heriberto met Luis Suárez Galbán, a gruff and hardworking Canary Islander. Galbán had arrived in Cuba in 1867, aged fifteen, first sleeping on the floor of his uncle’s struggling import business. Several bankruptcies and restructurings later, the diligent Galbán had transformed it into a prosperous merchant house. Heriberto joined in 1904 after the U.S. troops left. He arranged the financing that planters needed to harvest their cane and, after the zafra, with his fluent English, French, and Spanish, sold their sugar abroad.
    Galbán’s business survived the onslaught of the American carpetbaggers, his firm “emerging more powerful than ever from the struggle,” as Galbán put it. And it continued to prosper thereafter, with Heriberto deploying his talents as a prudent and humane administrator alongside Galbán. Virgilio Pérez, later a senior manager and close friend, remembered meeting Heriberto on his first day as a nervous young employee. He reported to Heriberto’s office and grew even more alarmed when he heard shouting inside. The door suddenly swung open and a distressed clerk scurried down the hall. Before him stood Heriberto, smiling broadly and entirely at ease.
    “Come in, don’t worry, mi hijo , my son,” he told Pérez. “Sorry that I made you wait. . . . All those harsh words you heard for that mozo —pure fiction. He thought I was furious. But it’s the only way of getting these youngsters to work. You know the saying, quien bien te quiere, te hará llorar , who loves you well will make you cry.”

    Cipriano Castro in 1913, the year of Virginia’s revenge in Havana.
    From Heriberto, Lobo inherited ambition and humor; from his fiery mother, a sharp temper. “May the mountains fall on your head,” Virginia had shouted at Castro’s Presidential Palace as she left Caracas, shaking a fist at the despot who had run her family out of the country. A small Venezuelan earthquake almost did just that ten months afterward, although Virginia exacted a more satisfying revenge thirteen years later. Castro, by then deposed from power, had arrived in Havana to drum up support for a counterrevolution. He sped