#237 Julio Lobo (Cuba's Last Sugar Tycoon)

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one-time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories, and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today, and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th.
Cuba has known many rich men since Christopher Columbus first introduced sugar cane to the island.
Thomas Terry, the most successful sugar planter of Cuba's colonial years, left $25 million on his death in 1886
Not bad considering that then the richest man in the world, William Astor, left just 50 million. Yet Cuba does not have to look back more than a century to find extreme riches. In Havana today, to have creases like wealth is referred to be as rich as Julio Lobo.
Julio Lobo was the richest man in Cuba before Castro's revolution did away with such men.
Lobo's life frames the 60 odd years of the pre-revolutionary Cuban Republic. He was born in 1898, the year that Cuba won independence after 30 years of fighting against Spain. And he left the country in 1960, two years after Castro's guerrillas came down from the hills.
In his heyday, Lobo was known as the King of Sugar, not just of Havana, but of the world, with an estimated personal fortune of $200 million, about $5 billion in today's dollars.
Yet he was also a financier of such talent that Castro's government, which was communist, asked Lobo, a full-blooded capitalist, to work for them after the revolution had begun.
So Lobo captures the period's contradictions too.
Lobo's life has the explosiveness of a Hollywood movie. He swam the Mississippi as a young man. He fenced in duels. He survived assassin's bullets, and it was put against the wall to be shot, but pardoned at the last moment. He courted movie stars, raised a family and made, and then lost two fortunes.
That is an excerpt from the book that I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is The Sugar King of Havana, the rise and fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's last tycoon, and it was written by John Paul Rathbone. So it's funny, on the last podcast, I did on the book Beyond Possible, which was written by a very inspiring figure named Nims Persia, this mountaineer and special forces operator from Nepal. Something Nims said in the book where he's climbing mountains and he passes, actually, I'm just gonna read the excerpt for you real quick in case you missed it. He says he's climbing one of the highest mountains in the world. And he says, there's a number of unpleasant reminders of the harsh and unforgiving nature of life at high altitude. I passed at least three corpses along the way, the most unsettling being a man in a bright yellow summit suit, whose jaw was set askew and a grin. I kept thinking of the man in the bright yellow suit. And now you hear Nims' inner monologue. He says, that could be you if you don't take care, brother. I still had plenty of hard work to do. And so I tried to translate that idea that Nims had in his inner monologue to our primary purpose on the podcast, which is to learn from the people that came before us. And what I realized is like, hey, it's a good idea to study dead companies. Please send me book recommendations on entrepreneurs that failed or companies that were once successful and then fell from that perch. And so I got several book recommendations, a bunch of books I ordered for that, but we didn't have to wait long. And this book, I didn't know that going into this book. This book has been on my desk for quite a while, probably for a few months. And I didn't know picking it up that this was actually going to be largely, I didn't know till I got to the end of the book, that this is going to be largely a cautionary tale. And so let's go to the introduction. The author tells us why he is writing this book, why he spent so many years crafting the story. I had been fascinated by those elegant, decadent years all my life. The curiosity was an inevitable outgrowth of my mother's exile. She was born in Havana and raised in a conventional upper-class Cuban world. My mother was a close friend of Julio Lobo's younger daughter. When I was a child and couldn't sleep, my mother would stroke my hair and murmur descriptions of her life in Cuba until I closed my eyes.