The Sugar King of Havana: The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's Last Tycoon »

John Paul Rathbone was born in New York and raised in England. Currently the deputy head of the Financial Times' prestigious "Lex" column, he is a graduate of Oxford and Columbia universities, and has worked as an economist, at the World Bank, and a journalist. His articles have appeared in many publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Britain's Sunday Telegraph, Colombia's El Espectador, and Esquire magazine, where he was the business columnist from 2002 to 2003. He lives in London.

The son of a Cuban exile recounts the remarkable and contradictory life of famed sugar baron Julio Lobo, the richest man in prerevolutionary Cuba and the last of the island's haute bourgeoisie.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

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.