travel, taking their youngest daughter, Helena, as a companion. Six years after Leonor died, Lobo’s mother scribbled a chatty and tender letter to Lobo from her bathroom at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York while Helena slept next door. “She went out last night,” Virginia explained, “and did not get back until 1.30 in the morning having danced at the Lido with Menocal,” the former Cuban president. In Havana, Lobo worked hard, Virginia often urging him to take life more easily. “Why unhappy mi corazón , my heart? . . . You are too young to be so pessimistic. Grab life by its better side,” she wrote in one letter after what must have been a miserable message from Lobo himself. But he romanced too. “Helena says you are in love!” Virginia wrote. “Can I ask—with whom?!”
Most of the surviving letters, though, are from his father. They begin offering sage advice to a young man about to begin his career, evolve into sharp business letters during Lobo’s early years at work, and end in tones of respect toward a man he regarded as his equal. “Take care, work with faith, cultivate the spirit and dominate your passions,” Heriberto had counseled Lobo at his graduation. “Do not concern yourself about finding a job,” he added, as “there will be no lack, and it will be well paid.”
He was right. Lobo returned to Havana in the autumn of 1919 and found the city infected by a dreamlike fever. Fittingly, because so much on the island is characterized by music, it was called the “Dance of the Millions.” Sugar prices had risen in the run-up to World War I and then been fixed. After peace was declared in November 1918, the controls were lifted. Sugar prices soared, and Cuba was gripped by a speculative sugar rush that is one of the landmarks in the history of capitalism, the dot-com boom of its day. Money seemed to waltz down from the heavens. Enrico Caruso, the world’s greatest tenor, was contracted for a Cuban opera tour and paid the outrageous sum of $10,000 per performance, even though he was well past his prime. Small-time sugarcane farmers from the deep Cuban country shopped the jewelry stores in Havana in collarless shirts, wearing studs of diamond or gold embossed with their initials. The shops bulged with North American manufactured goods—radios, refrigerators, and sewing machines, all the appurtenances of the modern age. The National City Bank of New York asked: ¿Qué sucederá si no deja Ud. un testamento? What will happen if you don’t leave a will? Cuban women, bored with their Spanish past, meanwhile modeled themselves on the Jazz Age’s independent-minded “flapper girl.”
How times had changed! In 1840 the Condesa de Merlin wrote how she spent all her days closeted inside her house in Havana avoiding the heat, and in the early evening might venture into the city in a horse and carriage for a paseo on the Prado . Now, when the Condesa’s descendants wanted to travel about town, they rode in a luxury North American or European motorcar with a chauffeur outfitted by Montalvo y Corrales, the firm that advertised its smart uniforms in the pages of Social. “Havana,” the magazine had trilled in 1917, “is progressing with giant steps in every field.” Amid the prosperity, Cuba seemed more like a rapidly emerging country than a developing one. Habaneros outdid one another in the lavishness of their parties as if to prove it. “A ball that never ends,” Social described one costumed dance given by Lily Hidalgo during the 1916 season. “An elegance that is enrapturing, a luxury that casts its spell, a beauty that bewitches; the men in their red tails, the ladies in period gowns, all so admirably classical, of exquisite taste, of extreme chic.”
Cuba was gripped by a sugar frenzy. New mills were built at great speed and older mills expanded. At Senado, my great-grandfather Don Pedro, who now managed the mill with Bernabé, tripled the amount of sugar it produced each year. They also
Most of the surviving letters, though, are from his father. They begin offering sage advice to a young man about to begin his career, evolve into sharp business letters during Lobo’s early years at work, and end in tones of respect toward a man he regarded as his equal. “Take care, work with faith, cultivate the spirit and dominate your passions,” Heriberto had counseled Lobo at his graduation. “Do not concern yourself about finding a job,” he added, as “there will be no lack, and it will be well paid.”
He was right. Lobo returned to Havana in the autumn of 1919 and found the city infected by a dreamlike fever. Fittingly, because so much on the island is characterized by music, it was called the “Dance of the Millions.” Sugar prices had risen in the run-up to World War I and then been fixed. After peace was declared in November 1918, the controls were lifted. Sugar prices soared, and Cuba was gripped by a speculative sugar rush that is one of the landmarks in the history of capitalism, the dot-com boom of its day. Money seemed to waltz down from the heavens. Enrico Caruso, the world’s greatest tenor, was contracted for a Cuban opera tour and paid the outrageous sum of $10,000 per performance, even though he was well past his prime. Small-time sugarcane farmers from the deep Cuban country shopped the jewelry stores in Havana in collarless shirts, wearing studs of diamond or gold embossed with their initials. The shops bulged with North American manufactured goods—radios, refrigerators, and sewing machines, all the appurtenances of the modern age. The National City Bank of New York asked: ¿Qué sucederá si no deja Ud. un testamento? What will happen if you don’t leave a will? Cuban women, bored with their Spanish past, meanwhile modeled themselves on the Jazz Age’s independent-minded “flapper girl.”
How times had changed! In 1840 the Condesa de Merlin wrote how she spent all her days closeted inside her house in Havana avoiding the heat, and in the early evening might venture into the city in a horse and carriage for a paseo on the Prado . Now, when the Condesa’s descendants wanted to travel about town, they rode in a luxury North American or European motorcar with a chauffeur outfitted by Montalvo y Corrales, the firm that advertised its smart uniforms in the pages of Social. “Havana,” the magazine had trilled in 1917, “is progressing with giant steps in every field.” Amid the prosperity, Cuba seemed more like a rapidly emerging country than a developing one. Habaneros outdid one another in the lavishness of their parties as if to prove it. “A ball that never ends,” Social described one costumed dance given by Lily Hidalgo during the 1916 season. “An elegance that is enrapturing, a luxury that casts its spell, a beauty that bewitches; the men in their red tails, the ladies in period gowns, all so admirably classical, of exquisite taste, of extreme chic.”
Cuba was gripped by a sugar frenzy. New mills were built at great speed and older mills expanded. At Senado, my great-grandfather Don Pedro, who now managed the mill with Bernabé, tripled the amount of sugar it produced each year. They also
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