Download The Sugar King of Havana: The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's Last Tycoon AudioBook Free
Fifty years following the Cuban revolution, the renowned riches of the sweets magnate Julio Lobo remains emblematic of a certain way of life that came to a abrupt end when Fidel Castro marched into Havana. Known in his day as the King of Sugars, Lobo was for many years the most powerful force on the globe sugar market, controlling vast swaths of the island's sweets interests. Blessed in 1898, the year of Cuba's self-reliance, Lobo's outstanding life mirrors, in almost lurid technicolor, the many rises and final land of the stressed Cuban republic. The facts of Lobo's life are fit for Hollywood. He double cornered the international sweets market and got the largest collection of Napoleonica beyond France, including the emperor's back teeth and death face mask. He once faced a firing squad only to be pardoned at the last moment, and he later survived a gangland taking pictures. He courted movie stars from Bette Davis to Joan Fontaine and filled up the swimming pool at his sprawling estate with perfume when Esther Williams came up to go to. As Rathbone observes, such are the legends which revolutions are created and later justified. But Lobo was also a progressive and a philanthropist, and his genius was so widely recognized that Che Guevara professionally offered him the position of minister of sweets in the Communist plan. When Lobo declined---knowing that their worldviews could never be compatible---his properties were nationalized, most of his fortune vanished over night, and he kept the island, to never return to his favorite Cuba. Financial Times journalist John Paul Rathbone has been fascinated with this intoxicating, whirligig, and contradictory prerevolutionary period his lifetime. His mother was also an associate of Havana's storied haute bourgeoisie and a pal of Lobo's daughters.
