What I learned from reading The Sugar King of Havana: The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's Last Tycoon by John Paul Rathbone.
Cuba has known many rich men since Christopher Columbus first introduced sugarcane 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 Croesus 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 1962, 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 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 going to 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, special forces operator from Nepal, something Nims said in the book where he's climbing mountains and he passes.