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The son of a Cuban family that had prospered as growers and refiners of sugar before Fidel Castro came to power, Roberto Goizueta was in many ways a likely match for The Coca-Cola Co.--the largest user of sugar in the world.
The 62-year-old chairman and chief executive of the Atlanta-based beverage giant recalls that the company was a major customer of the family in his boyhood years.
Furthermore, Goizueta says that were it not for Castro, his family probably would have wound up in the Coca-Cola bottling business in Havana, and he might have ended up working for his father.
In fact, Goizueta, who joined Coca-Cola in Havana in 1954, would come to the United States, putting in four decades and rising to the top of the . soft-drink company's $14 billion empire, attesting to his competitiveness, his poise in leadership and his gift for surrounding himself with talent.
An honors graduate of Yale with a degree in chemical engineering, Goizueta is considered a man of extraordinary focus and intensity.
"There are very few things that slip under Goizueta's radar," observes Lee Wilder, analyst with Atlanta-based Robinson Humphrey Co.
Indeed, Goizueta is regarded by analysts, shareholders and executive underlings today as the man who leveraged Coca-Cola from financial inertia into one of the best-performing corporations in the United States.
Despite indications by some that he overvalues financial performance--one critic even commented that he places it above religion--Goizueta is credited with powering the company's name to a lofty perch, not only as "the world's best brand," according to Fortune magazine, but as a kind of icon of capitalism.
And for that, Goizueta has apparently been well rewarded in terms of stock grants, bonuses and other compensation.
Last October, Forbes magazine pegged Goizueta's net worth at $360 million--documenting that he...