Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... The Sugar King of Havana: The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's Last Tycoonby John Paul Rathbone, John Paul Rathbone
None Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book.
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. He leaves the reader with a palpable sense of the glittering and increasingly violent world that this “new sugar magus” and his family inhabited, and conveys both the profound emotional dislocations of exile and the dangers and persistence of nostalgia.
In this dual history of a man and a nation, Financial Times journalist John Paul Rathbone uses the stranger-than-fiction story of Julio Lobo, a Cuban sugar magnate who controlled the world sugar market throughout much of the first half of the 20th century, to reveal the luxuries enjoyed by the elite class in pre-revolutionary Cuba. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)338.7Social sciences Economics Production Business EnterprisesLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
The book tells of Lobo's rise from his childhood at the time of the Spanish-American War through his the building of his empire in the 1930's and 1940's to the inevitable fall after FIdel Castro came to power in 1959. Along the way he paints a vivid portrait of a country and a way of life that is long gone and now only seen in history books and depictions in the movies.
At times, the book got way too detailed about the machinations of Lobo's speculative deals, but Rathbone's vivid portrait of Cuba in the "old days" more than made up for that failing. ( )