Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

by Gjelten, Tom

  “Tell me,” Hatuey allegedly responded, “are there any Christians in this heaven?”

  “Yes,” the friar answered, “but only the good ones go there.”

  “Then I’m not interested,” Hatuey said. “Even the best are worthless, and I don’t want to go any place where I will meet even a single one.”

  Emilio Bacardi was fascinated by the story of Hatuey, whom he described in an essay as “the first martyr to die for Cuba.” (Years later, when the Bacardis moved into beer brewing, they chose “Hatuey” as their brand name, with a likeness of the Taino chief on the bottle label.) Hatuey’s heroic defiance of Spanish conquistadores and missionaries, in Emilio’s analysis, was the foundation for a tradition of “constant rebellion” in and around Santiago, where the mountains provided a thickly forested sanctuary, first for runaway slaves and later for the Cuban independence fighters known as the mambises.

  Diego Velázquez founded the city of Santiago in 1514, and as Cuba’s governor he immediately declared it the island’s capital. The municipal government he established there was the first in the New World, and for years Santiago was the most important city in Spain’s territories. Hernán Cortés set off from Santiago in 1518 to conquer Aztec Mexico, having already served as the city’s first mayor. Fellow conquistadores Hernando de Soto, Juan Ponce de León, and Francisco Pizarro all came from Santiago as well. In 1553, however, the Spanish governor of Cuba moved his residence to Havana, effectively ending Santiago’s reign as capital, and from then on the two cities were rivals.

  Havana, anchoring the island on the western end, was as far away from Santiago on the eastern end as Boston, Massachusetts, was from Richmond, Virginia, and the territory between the two cities was rugged and sparsely populated. Santiago developed its own identity, in many ways more attuned to its Caribbean neighbors than to Havana. The city lay just across the water from Jamaica and Haiti, and boat traffic in and out of the harbor was constant. It was to Santiago and its environs that French colonists fled after the 1791 slave uprising and revolution in Haiti, and more arrived a few years later after France lost Louisiana to the United States. Between the Spanish administration, the French influence, and its large population of free blacks, Santiago became the most racially and ethnically mixed city in Cuba.

  Walking through town as a young man, Emilio Bacardi heard greetings shouted in African dialects, English, French, and Haitian Creole, as well as in Catalan and Castilian Spanish. The city had only about twenty thousand people, and more than half of them were slaves or former slaves, but there was an abundance of cultural activity, much of it sponsored by transplanted Spaniards—called peninsulares to distinguish them from the criollos (Creoles) who were born on the island—and by the French planters and merchants who had set down roots there. In Emilio’s day, Santiago sustained a Philharmonic Society and a municipal theater that hosted opera and dance companies, comedic productions, chamber orchestras, masquerade balls, even acrobatic shows.

  Spain’s hold on the city, however, meant the officially sanctioned social life revolved mainly around the affairs of the distant Spanish Crown, the comings and goings of Spanish military officers and their families, and the Catholic Church, which was a strong ally of Madrid. A portrait of Queen Isabella II hung in the local cathedral, and on every notable occasion in her royal life a special Mass would be celebrated and a dance would be held in her honor at the Philharmonic Society. The Spanish military officers who attended such affairs were viewed as potential husbands for young Santiago women, at least for those girls whose fathers’ loyalty was to Madrid. The social dynamic was captured in a sardonic epigram of the day:With turkeys and cakes,

  Gifts and trinkets,

  Gil wants to marry his daughters

  To lieutenant colonels.

  Don’t take this wrong,

  But, oh Gil, they will show you.

  They know the difference between

  The bait and the hook.

  Emilio Bacardi, a lifelong collector of local trivia, found the epigram later in an old newspaper and saved it. He was obsessed with his hometown’s history, partly because he found it so meaningful, partly because it was so immediate. Almost every notable Santiago event had occurred within walking distance of where he lived and worked. The Marina Baja office was just down the street from the house built for Diego Velázquez in the sixteenth century. The Philharmonic Society was only a few blocks away. And the historical narrative that Emilio observed and recorded was epic: What happened around him in those years was nothing less than the painful and inspiring birth of a nation. Among Spain’s colonial territories, Cuba had the reputation of being siempre fiel, the “ever-faithful” island, and the dominant position of the peninsular Spaniards in mid-nineteenth-century Santiago was evidence of that relationship. But Santiago was far too passionate and vibrant a city to exist contentedly as a colonial outpost. Among the city’s native sons was Cuba’s first famous poet, José María Heredia, forced into exile as a result of his involvement in an anti-Spanish uprising in 1823. Heredia, who was born in a house around the corner from the cathedral, was one of Emilio Bacardi’s Santiago heroes, and he and his friends often assembled secretly to read Heredia’s poetry and discuss its significance.

  It would take more than romantic nationalist poetry, of course, to liberate Cuba from Spain. By 1830, Cuba had become the single wealthiest colony in the world, almost entirely because of its booming sugar industry. Spain had lost its other New World colonies and was determined to hold on at all costs to Cuba, an essential source of tax revenue for the Crown. More than forty thousand Spanish troops were based on the island, backed by a vast network of paid agents and informers. Wealthy Cuban sugar planters, meanwhile, were firmly allied with Madrid. The sugar industry depended heavily on African slave labor, and the planters were worried that without the protection of Spanish troops they might not be able to keep their slave population under control. Blacks were in the majority in Cuba, and a drive for independence could result in the establishment of a black republic and an end to slavery, just as had happened in Haiti.

  Spanish authorities were able to move quickly and ruthlessly to squelch any movement in Cuba deemed potentially subversive. Cubans who dared to challenge the Spanish military regime, regardless of their rank or reputation, were routinely deported, thrown into prison with sentences of hard labor, or even executed. In early 1844, a slave revolt broke out and was met immediately with fierce repression. The Spanish military governor ordered the arrest of thousands of slaves and freed blacks and directed a wave of terror across the island. The year of Emilio Bacardi’s birth would go down in Cuban history as “the year of the lash.” Blacks suspected of involvement in rebellious activity were tied to a ladder, or escalera, and then whipped until they confessed to something. The alleged plot became known as the conspiracy of La Escalera.

  All the trends defining Cuba in the middle decades of the nineteenth century came together in Santiago: the flowering of nationalist expression, the oppressive military rule of the Spanish Crown, the cultural sophistication, and the bloody slave revolts. There were also the developments that demonstrated Cuba’s impressive economic and industrial progress during those years: the first installation in eastern Cuba of a steam-powered sugar mill, capable of producing 1,300 to 1,500 gallons of sugarcane juice a day, and the construction of a new railroad connecting the mining center of El Cobre, just outside Santiago, to the coastal port of Punta de Sal. By the time the route was inaugurated, Cuba had more railroads than any other Latin American country.

  Emilio Bacardi, the dreamer, reformer, and revolutionary, was also a novelist and storyteller, and nothing stirred him more than the tale of his hometown. Late in life, holed up in the library of his beloved Villa Elvira and surrounded by the notebooks and clippings he had been hoarding since his teenage days, Emilio set out to string together all his collected Santiago news tidbits, anecdotes, and official notices in a mammoth work that would come to be considered a classic of historical
writing in Cuba. Year by year, month by month, he listed the notable funerals, steamship arrivals, theater openings, political crackdowns, murders, military movements, slave sales, and construction projects of the day. He wrote minimal commentary with this detailed chronology of his hometown, but the events he included in his ten-volume Crónicas de Santiago de Cuba (Santiago Chronicles) revealed the course of Cuba’s national development. “A people’s history can be seen in whatever causes a sensation, awakens enthusiasm, jolts sensitivities, provokes protest, and causes hilarity or rage,” he wrote. By following the notice of a slave killing in Santiago with a report of the inauguration of a piano and singing academy during the same week, he did not trivialize the importance of the former so much as show how awfully ordinary such things had become. “The deed with all its rawness, the brutally uninhibited telling of fact; here is history,” he explained.

  Between his Crónicas and his term as the city’s first Cuban mayor, Emilio was as closely identified with Santiago as anyone during his lifetime. Some Cuban writers have portrayed him as more of a loyal santiaguero than a patriotic Cuban, but that misses the point. For Emilio, Santiago was the purest expression of Cuba, and it was the Cuba he experienced personally. He was an indefatigable advocate of Cuban independence, but his perspective was local above all, and he preferred to work where he could make an immediate and practical difference. Though he served Santiago as a thinker and a revolutionary and a politician, he was also an employer and a business leader. Indeed, were it not for the contributions of his father and the rest of his family, Emilio’s own impact would have been far more limited. The Bacardis’ remarkable story in Cuba was a combination of elements: Emilio exemplified the legendary Bacardi patriotism, Santiago de Cuba provided the setting where it was inspired, and the family’s successful rum business gave it power and influence.

  Chapter 2

  Entrepreneur

  Facundo Bacardi Massó, Emilio’s father, grew up within sight of the harbor in Sitges, near Barcelona, and as a boy he sat on the docks and watched tall ships sail off to the Americas. The cargo holds were loaded with barrels of wine from local vineyards, and waving from the decks were young Catalan men off to seek their fortunes. The old principality of Catalonia, strategically situated at Spain’s northeastern tip, had been a center of Mediterranean commerce for centuries, and the Catalans were renowned as merchants. By the early nineteenth century, a Catalan colony was well established in faraway Santiago de Cuba, and Facundo and his brothers heard from acquaintances that Santiago was a boomtown rich with opportunity. Facundo’s two older brothers, Magín and Juan, soon headed bravely across the ocean, and at the age of fifteen Facundo followed them, full of energy and ambition.

  The Bacardi boys had no trouble finding work among their Catalan contacts. The oldest, Magín, saved enough money within a few years to open a general store, assisted by his brother Juan. They sold everything from hardware to penmanship paper, and in the Spanish tradition of colorful store names that meant nothing, they called their shop simply El Palo Gordo (The Big Stick). When young Facundo arrived, the Bacardi brothers helped get him a job with a business associate and then employed him in their own store as soon as they were able to pay him. A younger Bacardi brother, José, followed the others a few years later. Catalans dominated the Santiago commercial scene at the time and were famous for their work ethic and thrift. As one American visitor to Cuba wrote of the Catalan merchants he met, “They arrive in poverty, begin with a shop six or eight feet square, live on a biscuit, and rise by patience, industry and economy to wealth.” The Bacardi brothers, sons of an illiterate bricklayer, fit the mold well.

  By 1843, Facundo had saved more than six thousand Cuban gold pesos—equivalent to six thousand dollars—and was ready to establish a business of his own. He was engaged to a twenty-year-old santiaguera, Amalia Moreau1, who had been raised by her grandfather on his coffee plantation after her mother and grandmother died from cholera when she was just three years old. She and Facundo were married in August, and three months later Facundo opened a grocery and dry goods business in partnership with an old Sitges acquaintance.

  The store, registered on the town books as “Facundo Bacardi y Compañía,” was stocked with goods of all kinds: buckets, toys, oil lamps, crockery, knives, jars of preserves, and cans of sardines. From the ceiling hung smoked hams, cooking pots, shovels, and coils of rope. Behind the counter were supplies of dried fish and bags of flour, sugar, and coffee. Santiago shoppers wanted nails and candles and ordinary muslin, but also imported chocolates, linens, and fine china, and Facundo had it all. His clientele came from all social classes. Through his contacts back in Sitges, he provided Catalan wine wholesale to other shopkeepers, but he also tended to the peasant farmer who stopped by looking for a new straw hat or machete. Next would come a pair of Santiago’s upper-class women settled comfortably in a volante, an elegantly adorned two-wheeled buggy pulled by a single horse. A black slave wearing a bright red waistcoat and a black derby hat sat astride the horse, guiding it, so his mistress needn’t bother with the reins. The ladies, wearing long ruffled black gowns and thin satin shoes, waited in the volantes while Facundo brought wares out to show them, thus making sure the women did not have to soil their shoes in the dirty street.

  Following their wedding, Facundo and Amalia moved into a modest house at 8 Jagüey Street in the heart of Santiago’s warehouse district, a few blocks up from the waterfront. The view down the street was of ruts and cobblestones and horse-drawn wagons and porters struggling under the weight of trunks. The street ended at the harbor side, an area built up with storehouses, customs buildings, shipping offices, and a railroad terminal. Beyond, the dark waters of Santiago’s bay were dotted by the masts of moored schooners, with other boats gliding slowly in or out of the harbor. On the far side, the eastern section of the Sierra Maestra rose against the sky. Facundo and Amalia’s house, the property of Amalia’s godmother, was a one-story dwelling of brick and plaster with a small patio off the kitchen. It was mostly indistinguishable from other houses on the street. The roof was flat, and when Facundo climbed up there he could see the bay and the ships at anchor. He often began his day with a few minutes contemplating the harbor view, just as he had done as a boy back in Sitges.

  It was in that house that Amalia gave birth to Emilio on June 5, 1844. She cared for the boy largely without the help of her husband, who stayed busy with his commercial activities. Just five days before Emilio was born, Facundo and his partner opened a second store, a retail shop in the mining village of El Cobre, ten miles outside Santiago. Amalia, like most Cuban wives, kept her distance from the businesses. Life on Jagüey Street was hardly luxurious. There was no interior courtyard or garden. The windows in the front parlor opened directly on the street, and the stench from manure was ever present. Not until Emilio himself became mayor of Santiago more than fifty years later was there an organized campaign to persuade residents not to dispose of their garbage simply by throwing it out their front door into the gutter.

  A second son, Juan, arrived in 1846, followed by Facundo Jr. in 1848 and a daughter, María, in 1851. Amalia read to the children every day—often in French, the language of her grandfather, who came from Haiti. Emilio, a quiet and reflective boy, learned to read on his own at an early age and also developed a talent for drawing, which he did for hours on end. The young family was largely shielded from the social and political unrest sweeping across Cuba in those years, but Amalia and Facundo were familiar with all the controversies of the day, including slavery, living as they did in downtown Santiago. Town records show that Amalia acquired title to several slaves from her grandfather as part of her dowry, but whether any attended her personally is unclear; it is more likely that they remained on her grandfather’s plantation. In August 1851, Amalia sold Rachel, a female slave in her late teens with an infant son named José Dionisio, receiving five hundred dollars for her and her baby. Seven months later, she sold a twelve-year-old girl named Licet for three hu
ndred dollars. It was common in Cuba to hold slaves as an investment, and it is possible that Amalia sold the young women in order to raise capital for her husband’s business operations.

  Whatever routine characterized the daily life of Facundo and his young family, it all changed on August 20, 1852. The sky that morning was cloudless, the air fresh, and the landscape cleansed by overnight rains. But at 8:36 A.M., with the streets crowded with pedestrians, the daily rhythm was shattered by a horrifying sound like nothing heard before. “It was not a thunderclap like those that normally precede an earthquake,” historian Miguel Estorch wrote later in an eyewitness account, “but rather a deep earthly groan.” Estorch felt the earth “lift the whole city suddenly up and drop it again, like a child might do with a little toy.” People rushed from their houses and into the middle of streets and other open spaces, where they kneeled, raised their hands to the heavens, and cried for mercy. Though it was daylight, rats were scurrying everywhere in search of new hiding places, and frogs were leaping out of the public fountains. The earth shook violently again nine minutes after the first earthquake and four more times over the next four hours, each time causing more damage in the city. The government house, the customs headquarters, and the military hospital were totally ruined; the cathedral and seven other churches were heavily damaged. From the decks of ships anchored in the bay, a gray powdery cloud could be seen hanging over the city, formed by the dust of collapsing buildings.

  Only two people were killed during the initial earthquake, but a breakdown of the water and sanitation systems in Santiago produced conditions perfect for the spread of disease. Facundo Bacardi closed his shops and volunteered to help with humanitarian relief in his neighborhood, taking charge of the distribution of soup rations in front of the church of Santo Tomás, not far from his home and his main store. The aftershocks continued for weeks afterward, and many residents abandoned their homes to sleep in sturdier public buildings. For solace, many santiagueros turned to their church, but they found little sympathy. The local archbishop, a Spaniard named Antonio María Claret, used the earthquake as an occasion to scold his people for having strayed from the holy path. “God does with us as a mother does with a lazy sleeping child,” he explained. “She shakes the child’s bed to wake him and get him up. If that fails, she strikes him. The good God does the same with His children who are sleeping in their sins. He has shaken their houses by the earthquakes, but He spared their lives. If this does not awaken them and cause them to rise, He will strike them with cholera and pestilence. God has made this known to me.”