Ricardo Wolf

Ricardo Wolf (right)

Ricardo Wolf , also Ricardo Subirana Lobo , (* 1887 as Richard Riegel Wolf in Hanover ; † 1981 in Herzlia , Israel ) was a German-Jewish-Cuban inventor, diplomat and philanthropist .

Wolf grew up as one of 14 children of the married couple Marianne (née Neumann) and Moritz Wolf. In 1913 Wolf initially emigrated to Cuba for a while. There he developed an optimization for iron smelting, which was used worldwide and thus helped him to achieve considerable prosperity. He married Francisca Subirana , born in 1900 in Laatzen , in 1924 , a famous Spanish tennis player. Subsequently he called himself Ricardo Subirana Lobo.

In the 1950s he politically and financially supported Fidel Castro in his struggle against Fulgencio Batista's rule . After the Cuban Revolution , Castro had offered him the post of finance minister, but Wolf refused, preferring instead to represent Cuba as ambassador to Israel. He did this from the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1960 to the breaking off of them by Cuba in September 1973, where he financed both the building and the operating costs of the embassy from his private funds. Wolf had not been informed in advance of Fidel Castro's surprise announcement at the summit of the movement of the non-aligned states in Algiers . He then stayed in Israel for the rest of his life, where he and his wife founded the Wolf Foundation in 1975, which has been awarding the Wolf Prize annually since 1976 in six categories “for achievements for the benefit of mankind and friendly relations among peoples” .

Web links

• Short biography on the website of the Wolf Foundation he founded
• Ingo Way: Peter Grünberg: Speicherplatz zum Wohl der Menschheit , In: Jüdische Allgemeine from January 25, 2007, accessed on September 12, 2012

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael Zeuske: Conversos, Polacos, Daitsche: Jews on Cuba. In: The cultural heritage of German Jews: A search for traces in the countries of origin, transit and emigration. Edited by Elke-Vera Kotowski, Walter de Gruyter 2014, pp. 374–395, here p. 393.
2. ↑ Arturo López-Levy: Las relaciones Cuba-Israel: A la espera de una nueva etapa  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF, 58 kB), in: Cuba in Transition Vol. 20/2010 of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (Spanish)