Advanced
Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.
Title details for The Sugar King of Havana by John Paul Rathbone - Available

The Sugar King of Havana

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

by John Paul Rathbone
Simon Vance
Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
2 of 2 copies available
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 swaths 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 he 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 24, 2010

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781400198757
      • File size: 253080 KB
      • Duration: 08:47:14

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      The author details the story of Julio Lobo, billed as "Cuba's last tycoon." Rathbone's rags-to-riches story about a capitalist with incredibly sharp business acumen parallels the history of the island nation as it endures revolutionary growing pains. Lobo comes across as larger than life as he makes astute market predictions in sugar, battles with government and business foes, consorts with American movie starlets, and ends up in exile. Simon Vance, always versatile, always consistent, comes across with an appropriate aristocratic tone. The listener learns about the triumphs and losses of a powerful business magnate as well as a nation's historical evolution. M.B. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from May 17, 2010
      The rise and fall of sugar trader Julio Lobo becomes a window into prerevolutionary Cuba, the mechanics of building an economic empire—and the author’s own personal history—in this atmospheric biography by Rathbone, deputy head of the Financial Times’s Lex column and former World Bank economist. Lobo, "Cuba’s richest man and one of the world’s greatest speculators," is an intriguing subject ("friends nicknamed him El Veneno, the poisonous one, for his charm and sibylline tongue"), and Rathbone handles his volte face, from hobnobbing with Bette Davis to the loss of his fortune and death in exile in Spain, with finesse. Ample drama—multiple divorces, audacious hostile takeovers, assassination attempts—is given gravity by Rathbone’s parallels with and personal connections to his subject: his family traveled in Lobo’s social circle in Cuba during the first half of the 20th century. 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."

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

Loading