by Gjelten, Tom
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Preface
Chapter 1 - Santiago de Cuba
Chapter 2 - Entrepreneur
Chapter 3 - A Patriot Is Made
Chapter 4 - A Time of Transition
Chapter 5 - Cuba Libre
Chapter 6 - The Colossus Intervenes
Chapter 7 - A Public Servant in a Misgoverned Land
Chapter 8 - The One That Made Cuba Famous
Chapter 9 - The Next Generation
Chapter 10 - The Empire Builder
Chapter 11 - Cuba Corrupted
Chapter 12 - Cha-Cha-Chá
Chapter 13 - A Brief Golden Age
Chapter 14 - Rising Up
Chapter 15 - Giving Fidel a Chance
Chapter 16 - The Year Cuba Changed
Chapter 17 - Exile
Chapter 18 - Counterrevolution
Chapter 19 - Socialist Rum
Chapter 20 - Family Business
Chapter 21 - Havana Club
Chapter 22 - Rum Politics
Chapter 23 - Who Gets Cuba
Photographs
Acknowledgements
NOTES
SELECTED SOURCES
INDEX
ALSO BY TOM GJELTEN
Sarajevo Daily:
A City and Its Newspaper Under Siege
VIKING
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First published in 2008 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Tom Gjelten, 2008
All rights reserved.
Photograph credits appear on page 413.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Gjelten, Tom.
Bacardi and the long fight for Cuba : the biography of a cause / by Tom Gjelten.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-0-670-01978-6
1. Bacardi Corporation (Puerto Rico)—History. 2. Rum industry—Cuba—History.
3. Cuba—History—Autonomy and independence movements. I. Title.
HD9394.C94B334 2008
338.7’66359097491—dc22
2008015565
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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For Jake, Greta, and Martha
A NOTE TO THE READER
Cubans follow the Spanish-language custom of using both paternal and maternal surnames. Emilio Bacardi’s six children with his first wife, María Lay, were named Bacardi Lay, while his four daughters with Elvira Cape were named Bacardi Cape. In everyday usage Cubans normally drop their mother’s name unless it is needed for identification purposes. Facundo Bacardi Lay used his maternal surname to distinguish himself from his cousin Facundo Bacardi Gaillard, his uncle Facundo Bacardi Moreau, or his grandfather Facundo Bacardi Massó. But Fidel Castro Ruz is simply Fidel Castro to most of the world.
I have used Spanish spellings for all names in this book with the notable exception of Bacardi, which in Spanish is accented on the final syllable and spelled Bacardí. The rum brand name, however, has become so anglicized that the accent is dropped in contemporary English usage and among most U.S. based members of the Bacardi family. For consistency purposes, I use “Bacardi” without the accent throughout the book. I apologize to those family members who maintain the old spelling.
THE BACARDI FAMILY TREE
Preface
A bottle of white Bacardi rum sold in the United States bears a small logo—mysteriously, a bat—and a label that says “Established 1862.” Just above the date are the words “PUERTO RICAN RUM.” There is no mention of Cuba.
The Bacardi distillery in San Juan is the largest in the world, but the Bacardis are not from Puerto Rico. This family company for nearly a century was Cuban, cubanísima in fact—Cuban to the nth degree. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Don Facundo Bacardi, the company founder and family patriarch, pioneered Cuban-style rum, lighter and drier than the rough spirit that preceded it. Bacardi rum became the drink of choice on the island just as Cuba was becoming a nation. Bacardi sons and daughters were famous for their patriotism, standing up first against Spanish tyranny and then, in the next century, against the island’s homegrown dictators. The family company played another supporting role as Cuba established its cultural identity, becoming the leading corporate patron of Cuban baseball and salsa music. Bacardi was Ernest Hemingway’s rum and the rum of the Cuban casino crowd. When Fidel Castro launched his uprising in the mountains outside Santiago de Cuba, their hometown, the Bacardis cheered him on. They did not abandon Castro so much as they were abandoned by him; they left Cuba only after the revolutionary government expropriated their rum business. Nearly fifty years later, the family name is still revered on the island, and the Bacardis are thinking about making rum there again.
Over many tellings, the Cuba story has hardened around a few stale themes—Havana in its debauched heyday or Fidel Castro and his dour revolution—and it has lost much of its vitality and wholeness. This book originated in my search for a new narrative, with new Cuban characters and a plot that does justice to this island that produced the conga line and “Guantana mera” as well as Che Guevara’s five-year plans. I have tried to give a nuanced view of the nation’s experience over the last century and a half. Cuban history was not preordained. There were choices made and paths not taken, and the men and women who were excluded and then exiled deserve to have their contributions recognized, if only to understand why so many became so angry. The Bacardi saga serves all these purposes.
For Cubans, patriotism began with the effort of poets and intellectuals to define the idea of a distinctly Cuban people out of the mix of Europeans, Africans, and natives who inhabited the island. Cuba then needed to free itself from three centuries of harsh Spanish rule and suffocating U.S. attention and become a sovereign, viable, and honorable country. Given the island’s cultural mix and plantation-based social structure, this fight necessarily incorporated a struggle for racial equality and economic
justice, but it cannot be reduced to a story that ends inevitably with Fidel Castro’s socialist revolution. Other threads can guide us, such as that of the Bacardi family in the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba, the cradle of Cuban nationalism.
There was a time when no name in Santiago carried more prestige. Emilio Bacardi, the son of Don Facundo, spent much of his adult life conspiring against Spanish rule and later served as Santiago’s first Cuban mayor. Emilio’s own son Emilito fought heroically in Cuba’s war for independence. But the Bacardis were also remembered in Santiago for their class and character. While they lived in elegant homes, rode in chauffeured carriages, and sent their children to exclusive private schools, they were also known as good Santiago citizens, generous and warmhearted and fair. And they loved to party. The Bacardis probably contributed more than any other local family to Santiago’s reputation as a playful, joyous city with a vibrant nightlife. There was no festival in Santiago without Bacardi rum.
In Fidel Castro’s revised version of Cuban history, the era before his revolution was characterized mainly by decadence, and the country’s elites were corrupt. The Bacardis are barely mentioned, because their record of patriotism and integrity does not match the Castro stereotype. Their family business was widely recognized as among the best-run enterprises in Cuba, and the company management was known for progressive policies and good labor relations. The Bacardi chairman in the 1950s, José “Pepín” Bosch (married to the founder’s granddaughter), served for a time as Cuba’s finance minister and broke precedent by pursuing wealthy tax cheats. When Castro went to Washington, D.C., shortly after taking power, Bosch was the one Cuban businessman he brought with him. Their break came after Castro embraced socialism; the Bacardi example had inconveniently demonstrated that there actually were capitalists who could play a responsible role in a democratic Cuba.
I do not, however, propose the Bacardis as would-be saviors of Cuba. The Bacardi story appeals to me in part simply because it contains so many critical but unfamiliar elements of the modern Cuban drama. At every stage of the nation’s development over the past century and a half, there is some Bacardi angle, some family member who is a key witness or behind-the-scenes player, or some Bacardi-related episode that epitomizes the historic moment. Countless families in eastern Cuba, for example, shared the Bacardis’ Catalan and French roots, and by making and selling rum from Cuban molasses, the family pursued an enterprise tied directly to the country’s social and economic development. They came of age with the Cuban nation, and the epic tale of their lives and adventures across several generations features classic Cuban themes: revolution, romance, partying, and intrigue.
After Fidel Castro ordered the confiscation of their property and made clear they and others like them were no longer welcome in the new Cuba, the Bacardis left the island, rebuilding their rum enterprise through their operations in Puerto Rico and Mexico. In exile, they took on a new leadership role, this time as organizers and financiers of the anti-Castro opposition. Fidel lost an important ally when he pushed the Bacardis out, and he gained a determined adversary. The Bacardi-Castro conflict came to symbolize the division of the Cuban nation and the rival claims on the country’s history. In the first years of the twenty-first century, when the burning Cuban question was what would follow the Castro era, the Bacardis were once again players. Few products are so associated with Cuba as rum, and the family that made Cuban rum famous was anxious to reclaim a piece of that industry, one of the few on the island with promising growth prospects no matter who was in charge.
There is another story buried in this tale, too. Just as Bacardi history helps explain modern Cuba, the company’s Cuba connection helps us trace the evolution of this unique family firm. Bacardi Limited entered the twenty-first century as a genuine multinational, headquartered in Bermuda, with a product line that included whiskey, gin, vermouth, vodka, and tequila, as well as rum. It nevertheless remained a private business wholly owned by a single family still feeling its Cuban identity. Its evolution reflects the strengths—and also the risks and challenges—of a closed, dynastic enterprise in an interconnected global economy. The company’s sense of heritage helped it survive after the loss of its Cuban headquarters, but there was inevitable tension between the old political values and the new focus on investment returns. On the eve of the post-Castro era, the Bacardi-Cuba connection set up a test that would reveal how the company had changed over the years: If it went back to Cuba—as it said it would—would it prove to be just another big, soulless corporation vying for a piece of the action, or would it return as the family company playing a patriotic role?
The most distinctive element on a bottle of Bacardi rum is the peculiar icon at the top of the label: a black bat inscribed in a red circle. The bat’s wings are outstretched, and its head is turned slightly to one side, highlighting its big eyes and pointy ears. No marketing executive today would allow such a creepy image to identify a popular brand. But the Bacardi symbol dates from an era when bats were viewed more tenderly, and the story of its adoption reflects the company’s humble Cuban origins. Santiago was a small city full of merchants, slaves, and traders. Don Facundo’s homemade rum was occasionally sold in recycled olive oil containers that came with a picture of a bat on the wax seal. As Bacardi rum gained in popularity, some customers in Santiago referred to it as el ron del murciélago (the rum of the bat), and the association took hold.
For good reason. The bat was a symbol of good fortune, and it figured prominently in the heraldry of Don Facundo’s native Catalonia. As creatures, bats exemplified the ideal of brotherhood, because they lived and flew together; they symbolized self-confidence, because they could fly in the dark without hitting anything; they stood for discretion, because they kept silent; and they represented faithfulness, because they always returned home.
Chapter 1
Santiago de Cuba
Marina Baja Street began in Santiago’s harbor area and ran uphill to the town square, where the Spanish governor had his palace. Along the way, it passed through the commercial district, and every day it was filled with oxcarts, men on horseback, and trains of heavily loaded mules. The stench from the waste was strong and the noise constant: the clop-clop-clop of hooves on cobblestones, vendors hawking their produce, dogs barking, mule drivers shouting at their beasts, Spanish sailors being boisterous.
In those years, the 1860s, the brick and stucco building at 32 Marina Baja, two blocks below the square, belonged to the Bacardi family. A fairly elaborate structure for the neighborhood, it was set back from the street by a portico and a row of curbside columns. A series of arched windows ran along the front. Facundo Bacardi, a Catalan merchant, had started a little rum business there and in an adjoining house in 1862 with the help of a French confectioner and experienced licorista named Bouteiller. A short time later, they acquired another distillery near the harbor, but they continued to make rum on Marina Baja Street, and the house at number 32 served as their headquarters.
The young, dark-haired man often seen at a desk near an open window was Emilio Bacardi, Don Facundo’s eldest son. Usually he was hunched over his books and papers, deep in concentration, his straight hair falling limply across his forehead. Emilio had cut short his formal schooling in order to help his father in the family business, but he remained a man of letters and ideas. In between his work on Bacardi company accounts and rum sales, he stole opportunities to write essays, study Cuban nationalist poetry, and review sub-missions for an underground newspaper that he and some friends published in defiance of the Spanish authorities’ stringent censorship. Emilio was the first Bacardi born in Cuba, and it was his destiny to be the family patriot.
Always a modest man, Emilio explained his political activism as a product of the epoch into which he was born and the Cuban environment in which he was raised. He grew up at a time when Spanish authorities were relying on brute force to maintain their colonial grip on Cuba and claim its bounty. Slavery was degrading Cuban society. Sugar and coffee pl
anters stood in the way of change, but courageous Cubans were calling for democratic freedoms and an end to the slave trade. It was from Emilio Bacardi’s generation that the heroes of Cuban history emerged, and he was among the conspirators for the national cause. Though his father’s rum eventually brought him great wealth, he drank only on rare social occasions, and he mostly left it to his younger brother to master the art and craft of distilling. He saw his position in his father’s rum business first as a cover for clandestine work on behalf of the Cuban independence movement. Who could know whether the slightly dishev eled young man behind the desk was writing receipts for rum buyers or passing coded messages to fellow revolutionaries?
In part, he was inspired by the unique heritage of his hometown. By the time of Emilio’s birth in 1844, Santiago de Cuba was well into its fourth century. Christopher Columbus, exploring Cuba’s coast in 1494, was the first white man to notice a narrow opening in the Caribbean shoreline and sail inland to discover a deep and well-protected bay, with the rugged green slopes of the Sierra Maestra mountains rising up on all sides from the water’s edge. Columbus did not establish a settlement there, however, because the area was so thickly populated by Taino Indians. It was not until 1514 that one of Columbus’s original conquistadores, Diego Velázquez, finally subjugated the natives. The Taino leader in the area, a chief named Hatuey, put up fierce resistance until he was finally captured by Velázquez and his men and burned alive at the stake. Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish priest traveling with Velázquez, reported that a friar tried in vain to convert Hatuey to Christianity in the moments before his execution, telling the chief that if he accepted the faith he would go to heaven and enjoy eternal life, while if he rejected it he would go to hell and suffer eternal torment.
