The Sugar King of Havana
The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's Last Tycoon
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Narrated by:
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Simon Vance
About this listen
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.
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In her moving and insightful new book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.
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California belongs to Joan Didion.
- By Darwin8u on 11-04-15
By: Joan Didion
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My Thoughts Be Bloody
- The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth
- By: Nora Titone, Doris Kearns Goodwin - introduction/notes
- Narrated by: John B. Lloyd
- Length: 19 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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My Thoughts Be Bloody, a sweeping family saga, revives an extraordinary figure whose name has been missing, until now, from the story of President Lincoln's death. Edwin Booth, John Wilkes's older brother by four years, was in his day the biggest star of the American stage. Without an account of Edwin Booth, author Nora Titone argues, the real story of Lincoln's assassin has never been told.
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Wonderful!
- By Tad Davis on 11-30-10
By: Nora Titone, and others
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Lady Bird
- A Biography of Mrs. Johnson
- By: Jan Jarboe Russell
- Narrated by: Andrea Gallo
- Length: 16 hrs
- Unabridged
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A revealing biography of Lady Bird Johnson with startling new insights into her marriage to Lyndon Baines Johnson and her unexpectedly strong impact on his presidency. Long obscured by her husband's shadow, Claudia "Lady Bird" Johnson emerges in this first comprehensive biography as a figure of surprising influence and the centering force for LBJ, a man who suffered from extreme mood swings and desperately needed someone to help control his darker impulses.
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Do not waste an audible credit
- By Sandra B. on 10-15-23
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Light and Shadow
- Memoirs of a Spy's Son
- By: Mark Colvin
- Narrated by: Mark Colvin
- Length: 13 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Mark Colvin is a broadcasting legend. He is the voice of ABC Radio’s leading current affairs program PM; he was a founding broadcaster for the groundbreaking youth station Double J; he initiated The World Today program; and he’s one of the most popular and influential journalists in the twittersphere. Mark has been covering local and global events for more than four decades. He has reported on wars, royal weddings and everything in between. In the midst of all this he discovered that his father was an MI6 spy.
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Probably of most interest to Australian readers
- By Robyn on 04-12-17
By: Mark Colvin
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The Warburgs
- The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family
- By: Ron Chernow
- Narrated by: Jonathan Reese
- Length: 35 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Bankers, philanthropists, scholars, socialites, artists, and politicians, the Warburgs stood at the pinnacle of German (and, later, German American) Jewry. They forged economic dynasties, built mansions and estates, assembled libraries, endowed charities, and advised a German kaiser and two American presidents. But their very success made the Warburgs lightning rods for anti-Semitism, and their sense of patriotism became increasingly dangerous in a Germany that had declared Jews the enemy.
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The Warburg's Dynamic Family History
- By Darwin8u on 10-22-18
By: Ron Chernow
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The President and the Assassin
- McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century
- By: Scott Miller
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 13 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1901, as America tallied its gains from a period of unprecedented imperial expansion, an assassin's bullet shattered the nation's confidence. The shocking murder of President William McKinley threw into stark relief the emerging new world order of what would come to be known as the American Century.
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An Ideal History Book for the Audio Format
- By Nelson Alexander on 09-30-11
By: Scott Miller
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Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica
- By: Matthew Parker
- Narrated by: Roy McMillan
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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For two months every year, from 1946 to his death 18 years later, Ian Fleming lived at Goldeneye, the house he built on a point of high land overlooking a small white-sand beach on Jamaica's stunning north coast. All the James Bond novels and stories were written there. This audiobook explores the huge influence of Jamaica on the creation of Fleming's iconic postwar hero. The island was for Fleming part retreat from the world, part tangible representation of his values, and part exotic fantasy.
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Ian Fleming lead a fascinating life.
- By Allen on 07-02-15
By: Matthew Parker
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Only Yesterday
- An Informal History of the 1920s
- By: Frederick Lewis Allen
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 11 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In this span between armistice and depression, Americans were kicking up their heels, but they were also bringing about major changes in the social and political structure of their country. Only Yesterday is a fond, witty, penetrating biography of this restless decade, a delightful reminiscence for those who can remember and a fascinating firsthand look for those who've only heard.
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Loved this book
- By Matthew M. Kayes on 06-11-07
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Lost Kingdom
- Hawaii's Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America's First Imperial Adventure
- By: Julia Flynn Siler
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean
- Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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A thriving monarchy had ruled over Hawaii for generations. Taro fields and fish ponds had long sustained native Hawaiians but sugar plantations had been gradually subsuming them. This fractured, vulnerable Hawaii was the country that Queen Lili‘uokalani, or Lili‘u, inherited when she came to power at the end of the nineteenth century.
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Fascinating story, sparsely told
- By Great Tutu Kona on 01-17-12
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The Big Rich
- The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes
- By: Bryan Burrough
- Narrated by: James Jenner
- Length: 22 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Best-selling author Bryan Burrough reveals how four Texas oil tycoons transformed America. Rising from humble beginnings through hard work and shrewd dealings, they shifted the balance of power in American politics. While hobnobbing with movie stars and presidents, the Big Rich also created the legend of the swaggering Texas oilman with island hideaways and sprawling ranches.
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Big, Sordid, Fascinating, PoliticallyCorrect
- By Darkcoffee on 11-09-09
By: Bryan Burrough
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American Ghost
- A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest
- By: Hannah Nordhaus
- Narrated by: Xe Sands
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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The dark-eyed woman in the long, black gown was first seen in the 1970s, standing near a fireplace. She was sad and translucent, present and absent at once. Strange things began to happen in the Santa Fe hotel where she was seen. Gas fireplaces turned off and on without anyone touching a switch. Glasses flew off shelves. And in one second-floor suite with a canopy bed and arched windows looking out to the mountains, guests reported alarming events.
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A true American tale
- By Cleo Colorado on 05-29-15
By: Hannah Nordhaus
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The Ambulance Drivers
- Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War
- By: James McGrath Morris
- Narrated by: Dean Temple
- Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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After meeting for the first time on the front lines of World War I, two aspiring writers forge an intense 20-year friendship and write some of America's greatest novels, giving voice to a "lost generation" shaken by war. Eager to find his way in life and words, John Dos Passos first witnessed the horror of trench warfare in France as a volunteer ambulance driver retrieving the dead and seriously wounded from the front line. Later in the war, he briefly met another young writer, Ernest Hemingway, who was just arriving for his service in the ambulance corps.
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Morris always delivers interesting biographies...
- By NMwritergal on 04-08-17
What listeners say about The Sugar King of Havana
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Beatriz
- 07-02-18
Great book
One of the best books about the quixotic island nation. Rathbone looks on as an outsider, but with an inheritance of exile. His desire to understand and to rationalize the Cuban experience is factually informative but also quite heartfelt. He happens to be a very good writer as well.
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- Uber Vita
- 03-14-16
The very best reading of a book have heard thus far
Mr Vance captured not only the various accents/fluency required but also the inuendos, humor and such as though he was the author which is essential to conveying this excellent and fascinating story and a fascinating slice of the history of Cuba and its importance and potential to the world
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- Terry
- 03-26-12
VERY INFORMATIVE
Where does The Sugar King of Havana rank among all the audiobooks you???ve listened to so far?
Absolutely amongst the top 20.
What did you like best about this story?
It had a lot of accurate information about what Cuba was like prior to Castro.
What did you like about the performance? What did you dislike?
Not to be demanding but the Spanish pronounciation of the reader was atrocious. Even the simplest Spanish words were mangled. It was distracting.
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
It made me nostalgic for the Cuba I knew as a child.
Any additional comments?
A
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1 person found this helpful
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- Maria in Pinecrest
- 04-13-24
History as I remember
This rendition of a Cuban historical character resonates far more with the historical facts I lived and learned from as a child…, although the initial history lesson seemed a mirror image of other books the content was rich in the depiction of what the culture was like of a time that will never return!
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- emilio machado
- 12-17-19
Fascinating book
Nothing but a great read from beginning to end,difficult to put down... I strongly recomend it
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