Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

by Gjelten, Tom

  An experienced distiller in that era might not have been able to explain exactly what happened chemically during distillation, but he understood enough to discard much of the first condensate to emerge from the still, called the heads, as well as the last portion, called the tails, and to concentrate on the middle portion, called the hearts. The art came in knowing when to make those breaks in order to get the desired flavor and aroma. When the condensate was run through a still a second time, a finer sorting of the elements was possible. Different combinations yielded different flavors, and the distiller could blend the final products to produce a rum pleasing to his taste.

  Impurities and undesirable flavors in rum could also be removed through aging. By the late 1600s, rum distillers had already discovered that when rum was stored in barrels for a period of time, while awaiting shipment or during the long passage across the Atlantic, it darkened in color and improved in taste. A distiller writing in 1757 complained of the “stinky flavour” of his spirit and lamented that “the rum must be suffered to lie a long time to mellow before it can be used.” Why this worked was not understood, but it was a principle that rum makers would apply in subsequent years. In Cuba, wooden barrels used previously to ship wine were reused for aging the rum. Because the barrels sometimes contained mold from the wine residue, rum makers sterilized them by charring the insides. At some point, they discovered that contact with the charcoal seemed to help mellow the spirit.

  After months of experimentation, Facundo Bacardi and José León Bouteiller had improved their rum to the point that they were ready to share it. To test the local market, Facundo sold some of the rum through his brother’s general store, using any container available. Though the rum was unidentified, customers knew it was sold by Magín Bacardi and made by his brother Facundo, and around town it became known as el ron de Bacardi (Bacardi’s rum). Prospects appeared promising, and Facundo and Bouteiller decided they should go into commercial rum production. As it happened, John Nunes, the owner of the “rickety” distillery on Matadero Street, was ready to sell out after twenty-four difficult years. On February 4, 1862, Facundo and Bouteiller purchased the Nunes distillery for three thousand gold pesos.

  The facility was little more than a large shed, with wood plank siding, a floor of bare dirt, and a peaked roof made of tin. Wagons and carts were parked alongside in a yard bounded by a wooden picket fence atop a low brick wall. Inside the building was the pot still and several molasses tanks and a tiny walled-off room that could serve as an office or work area. The still consisted of a copper boiler about three feet wide and three feet high, topped by a tall copper stack and a cooling pipe leading to a condensing chamber. Additional pipes coiled from the condenser back toward the boiler for redistillation purposes. The alembic could handle thirty-five barrels of fermented molasses in a single batch, and four batches could be processed each day, a notable improvement over what Facundo and Bouteiller had been able to do in their operation on Marina Baja.

  With no money of his own to invest, Facundo turned to his younger brother José for the cash to make the deal. Bouteiller contributed his distilling equipment, which was valued at five hundred pesos and brought the total investment in the new company to $3,500, not counting the Marina Baja property. Facundo contributed only his labor and expertise. His brother José immediately gave Facundo a power of attorney to represent his financial share in the company, however, and Facundo was seen from the beginning as the enterprise head. The preceding years had not been easy for him financially. His family had expanded, first with the birth in 1857 of another son, José, and then four years later with a daughter, named Amalia after her mother. Facundo was now embarking on yet another risky business venture, though he had never before been so hopeful about his prospects. A family friend gave the Bacardis a young coconut palm to commemorate the occasion, and fourteen-year-old Facundo Jr. planted it in front of the distillery.

  Later the same month, the Bacardi partners took over another small distillery, also on Marina Baja Street, this one belonging to a Catalan liquor merchant by the name of Manuel Idral. They now had all the distillery equipment and facilities they needed to launch their business. In May 1862, the firm was incorporated under the name “Bacardi, Bouteiller, & Compañía.” To maximize revenue, the company made and sold various sweets, from fruit conserves to guava paste to the candies—Caramelos Carbanchell—for which Bouteiller had long been known, along with Bouteiller’s cognac and wine made from oranges. But it was the new style of rum that attracted the most attention. “It was a light product, almost transparent,” one of Cuba’s rum historians would write, “and free of the foul odors that in preceding versions had produced so many headaches. The lines of people waiting to purchase this aguardiente were longer every morning, especially after the early months when Don Facundo so cleverly gave away free samples.” In the beginning, distribution was limited to the immediate Santiago area, because there were no bottles for the rum—meaning customers had to bring their own containers.

  The distillery was just a short distance from the waterfront, and the business quickly became well known as a quality operation among the ship captains who put into the Santiago port. The sailors would buy their rum by the barrel, and on their next stop in Santiago they would return for a refill. Slowly, the reputation of “Bacardi” rum spread across Cuba, and by 1868 it was being sold in Havana. The operation would not be solvent for years to come, and he would not live long enough to be rewarded with great wealth, but Facundo Bacardi Massó, the indefatigable Catalan entrepreneur, had finally found a path to commercial success in Cuba.

  Rum experts and Bacardi descendants would debate for decades what secret formula Facundo and Bouteiller developed to produce a rum that was milder and more drinkable than anything previously available. One factor is that they used a quick-fermenting cognac-type yeast rather than the slower yeasts used in making heavier rums. More importance should be given, however, to the system that Don Facundo developed to filter the raw distilled aguardiente through charcoal. While vodka makers had been using charcoal filtration for the same purposes since the end of the eighteenth century, Facundo is said to be the first to have done it with rum. Charcoal filtration removed some of the congeners that gave traditional rum its flavor, but because Facundo was deliberately seeking a whiter, nontraditional rum, charcoal served his purposes well.

  Another innovation was the use of barrels of American white oak for aging the rum. Aging was one of the most important stages of rum production, but it was also mysterious and controversial, with virtually every rum manufacturer having his own ideas about how it should be done. The wood in the barrel interacted with the rum, imparting its own flavor but also extracting some of the stronger flavors from the rum. Alcohols and oils in the rum were absorbed by the barrel and then lost to the atmosphere through evaporation. American white oak, hard but still relatively porous, turned out to be an ideal wood for the maturation of rum, and within a few decades almost all rum manufacturers were using oak barrels for aging. But the Bacardis were the first.

  Perhaps the most important factors contributing to the development of Bacardi rum were nontechnical. “It was the end-product of patient trial and error,” one Cuban rum historian wrote, “ better filtering here, more ageing there, total attention to details, temperature, ventilation, light and shade, the degree of the cane’s ripeness and the quality of the molasses, the right choice of wood for the making of the ageing vats and above all the ability to balance all these factors; or rather, more than ability, the art of using them correctly.”

  And then there was perhaps the most innovative element of all: Facundo Bacardi was a brilliant marketer. Coming to the rum business from a background in retail sales rather than sugar production, he knew the importance of promotion and publicity. He carefully monitored the rum production, and as evidence of his approval of each batch he personally signed the label on every bottle that came off the production line. His bold signature, “Bacardi M,” began with a big
B, angled sharply up to the right, and ended with a stylized M (for Massó) and a dramatic dash back down to the left. It became instantly recognizable. Many rums at the time were sold without labels or other identifying characteristics, but Facundo Bacardi Massó instinctively understood the importance of distinguishing his product. He had taken a cue from the customers who asked for “Bacardi’s rum” even before it was bottled under that name. Producing a quality rum was only part of the challenge; he needed to brand it, so that consumers could remember his rum and ask for it. A vigorous defense of the “Bacardi” trademark would forevermore be one of the company’s top priorities.

  Many consumers in Cuba in 1862 were illiterate, of course, so a memorable rum brand needed an image as well as a name. Facundo and Bouteiller chose the symbol of a bat with outstretched wings. They were apparently inspired in part by the bat image on the gallon containers that were recycled by Magín Bacardi as containers for his brother’s homemade rum. Another explanation for the mark’s origin, favored in later years by Bacardi publicists, is that Facundo and Bouteiller found a colony of fruit bats living in the Nunes distillery rafters when they bought it. The creatures would have been attracted by the sweet fumes of fermenting molasses. Like the Catalans, the local Taino Indians had regarded the bat as an omen of good fortune, and Doña Amalia allegedly suggested to her husband that the bat would be a fitting symbol for his new Cuban enterprise.

  Chapter 3

  A Patriot Is Made

  As he was nearing fifty and had no money to hire helpers, Facundo Bacardi launched his rum business with the expectation that his sons would be helping him. The oldest, seventeen-year-old Emilio, was big and strong enough for factory jobs, plus he had the intelligence to handle commercial matters and the charm and manners to deal with customers. Don Facundo put him to work immediately.

  Emilio would rather have stayed in school. He had inherited far more of his mother’s love of literature than of his father’s grim determination to succeed in business. His five-year stay in Barcelona away from his parents, from the age of eight to thirteen, had been a richly formative experience, leaving him with a level of maturity and intellectual curiosity far beyond that of other Cuban boys his age. Europe in the 1850s was in the late flowering of romanticism, and the man who educated Emilio, Daniel Costa, admired the leading writers and artists of the day—men like Robert Browning, Victor Hugo, and Eugène Delacroix. While his father back in Cuba was struggling to stave off bankruptcy, young Emilio was exploring the realms of poetry, painting, and even philosophy. When Amalia went to Spain to fetch her boy after Costa’s sudden death in 1857, she found a broadly educated young man with a worldly self-assurance.

  Back in Cuba, Emilio saw and understood things he hadn’t noticed when he lived there as an eight-year-old. He had grown up around slaves, and members of his own family had been slaveholders, but his time in Europe had left Emilio with ideas of his own, and he now thought slavery was wrong. He also realized for the first time how many Cubans felt that Spain’s rule over their island was no longer acceptable. Emilio had read history in the company of a learned mentor, and he had lived in Europe in the aftermath of the 1848 nationalist revolutions that reshaped the political landscape there. The opposition of tyranny and freedom now meant something to him; he saw the struggle playing out in his native land and realized that Santiago was sharply divided. Some townspeople still identified themselves as “Spaniards,” supported slavery, and defended the joint interests of the Crown, the military, and the church. On the other side were liberals who argued for civil rights, opposed Spanish despotism, held secular values, and favored sovereignty for Cuba, if not full independence. The two views were virtually irreconcilable.

  Upon his return from Barcelona, Emilio’s parents enrolled him in the Colegio de San José, a private secondary school in Santiago whose director, Francisco Martínez Betancourt, was a poet and outspoken Cuban intellectual who encouraged his students to think about controversial issues and even arranged Sunday afternoon get-togethers where he and the boys could review what was happening in their country. Almost every night, Emilio went out to meet with classmates somewhere. They assembled in groups of two or three on a corner under the glow of a gas streetlight or in larger groups on the square in front of the cathedral, quietly exchanging stories of the latest acts of anti-Spanish defiance by Cuban patriots and the chilling reprisals that often followed. On Saturdays, Emilio and his friends gathered at a Santiago barbershop, La Flor del Siboney, where the proprietor was an amiable character who pontificated and sang Cuban ballads and appreciated an audience. The young men entertained themselves by reciting and discussing poetry, with all the bravado and seriousness that boys in other times and places showed in talking about sports. It seemed as if everyone in Cuba was a poet, or wanted to be one.

  Many of the young men Emilio met at the Colegio de San José or the Siboney barbershop remained lifelong friends. There was Pío Rosado, two years older than Emilio, a tall and skinny lad with a long, straight nose and darting, restless eyes that suggested a bit of wildness, as if he could go out of control at any moment. “All nerves,” was the way Emilio described him in a memoir of those days. Rosado tutored young boys in arithmetic, and his combustible energy meant the poor student who crossed him would soon regret it. He later became a rebel commander in the war for Cuban independence, famous for his aggressive, even reckless, actions in combat. José Antonio Godoy, another of Emilio’s friends, was a nonstop talker and jokester. He also went on to join the rebel army, and when he was captured one day by Spanish troops, Godoy tricked them into thinking the rebels had kidnapped him. He embraced the commander and thanked him profusely for “rescuing” him. After the war, he became a professional clown.

  Their adversaries around town were those young men who felt as strongly about defending Madrid’s authority as Emilio and his friends felt about challenging it. Chief among them were the voluntarios, members of shadowy volunteer “militia” units recruited by the colonial authorities for the purpose of rooting out emerging proindependence groups in town, by force if necessary. Many of those who signed up were the sons of conservative middle- and upper-class Spanish immigrants in Santiago, including a few Emilio had known as childhood playmates. Other voluntarios were simply thugs attracted by the opportunity to wear a uniform, carry a weapon, and bully other Cubans, especially those of color. Emilio and his friends worried that they would be pressured to join the voluntarios, and they feared what might happen if they refused to do so.

  Mostly, they saw themselves as propagandists. In the early 1860s, they indulged in what Emilio called a locura de literatura (literary madhouse), publishing a series of broadsheets to entertain their fellow Cubans and incite them to anti-Spanish action. Their “newspapers” were full of self-important prose, amateurish poetry, and provocative commentary. Emilio, devoting himself to literary pursuits at a time when his father was trying to get him into the family business, published his first essay (titled “El pasaporte”) before he turned twenty-one, under the pseudonym Enrique Enríquez. In it, Emilio lamented how colonial authorities made travel impossible for those without political connections or money. No copies of the clandestine newspapers survived, but Emilio kept clippings of his articles, pasting them on the back of the Bacardi, Bouteiller, & Compañía ledger sheets he collected while doing his administrative chores.

  Emilio’s first experience with direct political activism came in 1865, when he was twenty-one. The authorities in Madrid, in a conciliatory moment, had agreed to set up a joint commission to consider possible revisions in Spain’s policies toward Cuba. The Cuban representatives were to be chosen through an election, though the only Cubans entitled to vote were a few dozen male electors selected by the Spanish authorities. In Santiago, the liberals wanted one of the commissioners to be José Antonio Saco, an esteemed Cuban nationalist then exiled in Paris, but they feared the local electors might be intimidated by the Spanish authorities into choosing someone else.

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p; For Emilio Bacardi and his friends, it was the call to action they had long awaited. They spread the word around town for Saco’s supporters to mobilize on the Plaza de Armas, in front of the government building where the commission voting was to take place. Pío Rosado, José Antonio Godoy, and Emilio assumed positions at the front to rouse the crowd. They were joined by seventeen-year-old Facundo Jr., who by then was part of Emilio’s barbershop circle. One of the pro-Saco electors suggested that at the signal of a beige handkerchief waved from the door of the government building, everyone should shout “¡Viva Saco!” The Santiago police repeatedly tried to disperse the crowd, but Emilio and his friends kept bringing the people back together. Again and again, the crowd roared “¡Viva Saco!”—loudly enough that the electors meeting inside took notice. Saco was chosen by a wide margin.

  The promise of new Spanish policies toward Cuba was soon broken, however. A change of government in Madrid brought hard-liners back to power, the commission’s recommended political and economic reforms were summarily rejected, and the Spanish authorities dispatched a new, reactionary captain-general to Cuba. All public meetings on the island were prohibited, and newspapers were once again subject to tight censorship. The crackdown extended even to Cuba’s cigar factories, where the colonial authorities ordered an end to the custom of having “lectors” read to the cigar rollers. The practice had made the Cuban cigar workers, many of whom were illiterate, among the most well-versed artisan workers in the world. In Santiago, Emilio and his friends tried to organize a new newspaper, El Oriente, but the authorities promptly shut it down.