by Gjelten, Tom
The resumption of fighting had brought disaster. Hundreds of brave Cuban fighters were killed, including Emilio’s longtime chum Pío Rosado, who was caught and executed by a firing squad. A clerk at the field headquarters where he was taken reported that the fearless Rosado was brought before the commanding Spanish officer with his elbows tied behind his back but holding a half-smoked cigar in one hand and showing total contempt for his captors. Within weeks, all resistance to the Spanish troops was gone. The second revolutionary war did not even last one year, and it went down in Cuban history as La Guerra Chiquita (The Little War).
Chapter 4
A Time of Transition
Emilio Bacardi was held in Spain for nearly four years, first in a prison in Cádiz, then in a penal colony on the Chafarine Islands off the North African coast, and finally under house arrest in Seville. During the time he was away, Bacardi & Compañía nearly went out of business. Years of war and decades of oppressive Spanish rule and colonial mismanagement had left eastern Cuba drained of resources and energy. The municipal government in Santiago, desperate for revenue, raised taxes, even though the burning of plantations had wrecked the sugar and coffee economies. Many of the shopkeepers who sold Bacardi rum were unable to pay their suppliers, the Bacardis included. In October 1880, the company’s debts, largely for the purchase of molasses, barrels, and bottles, totaled more than thirty thousand dollars. Facundo Jr. and his twenty-three-year-old brother José were doing their best to maintain rum production and sales, but with just $260 in cash and about nine thousand dollars’ worth of unsold rum, they had no choice but to file for bankruptcy.
One month later, the Bacardis suffered an even more devastating blow. A fire that started in an adjacent warehouse spread to the company offices and distillery on Marina Baja Street, and much of the property burned. Lost in the blaze was the distillery equipment, the barrels of aging rum that were stored there, and all the company records. The property was not insured. The Bacardis still had their distillery on Matadero Street and were able to boost production at that location to some extent, but with the fire on top of the bankruptcy, their company’s prospects were as bleak as they had ever been.
They got little sympathy; all of Cuba was suffering. The failure to resolve the conflict with Spain left business and civic leaders exhausted and demoralized. Sugar prices were dropping sharply, in spite of decreased Cuban production. Long-term trends were just as unfavorable. Normal trade and banking activities were distorted by Spain’s grip on the island. U.S. timber, mineral, and sugar interests were moving in to take advantage of low land prices and crowding out Cuban capital. Many of the country’s most talented and enterprising young men were dead, imprisoned, exiled, or marginalized by the colonial authorities. It was a time for conscientious Cubans, the Bacardis included, to reset aims, review remaining possibilities, and demonstrate resolve.
Emilio was nearly forty years old when he returned to Santiago, and he came back with the inner calm and strength that the experience of imprisonment can bestow. Many of his fellow Cuban detainees in Spain were poor farmers or workers, and Emilio had shared filthy jail cells with them and endured the same miserable conditions without losing his dignity. He soon earned the other prisoners’ respect, and from the beginning he had played a leadership role, intervening with Spanish authorities to secure better rations for the neediest prisoners at a time when they were forced to purchase their own food.
When he was herded onto the prison boat to Spain in November 1879, Emilio left behind a pregnant wife and two small boys. He returned to a three-year-old daughter, named María after her mother, and Emilito and Daniel were now six and five. He was a stranger to all three. Emilio vowed that his family would come first from then on. Within a year of his return, María gave birth to twins, Facundo (“Facundito”) and José, thus producing a third consecutive generation of Bacardi boys with those names. Another daughter, Carmen, followed a short time later.
Were it not for the joy of being reunited with his family, Emilio would have had reason to be discouraged. The Marina Baja property was still in ruins, nearly three years after the fire. There was no money to rebuild. In 1881, after the bankruptcy and the fire, Bacardi & Compañía had losses of $9,600, and Emilio’s mother had been forced to sell some inherited farmland to help defray outstanding debt. And then there was the political situation. Imprisonment and exile had hardened Emilio’s commitment to Cuba’s independence, and he was now disgusted by the timid Liberal Party politicians occupying the few government positions still reserved for Cubans.
But Emilio was as energetic as ever, and he promptly set out to help his two brothers with the family business, even walling off a makeshift office in the ruins of the Marina Baja property, the place where he had always preferred to work. It would take several weeks for him to catch up on what he had missed in the rum business during his long absence. His father, Don Facundo, had withdrawn from most daily work but continued to provide strategic guidance and technical advice. Facundo Jr. had continued to experiment with yeast strains and filtration technology and was still trying to improve on his blends. José, the youngest of the Bacardi Moreau sons, was in charge of sales. The two brothers had worked long hours, mortgaged the company properties to the limit, and sold just enough rum to buy more molasses and meet their small payroll.
In 1884 the Bacardis hired a new financial assistant, Henri Schueg, whose grandparents on both sides had been French colonists in Cuba. When he was just a year old, Henri’s parents moved the family back to France, leaving their small coffee plantation outside Santiago in the custody of Don Facundo, an old family friend. As a young man, Henri excelled both at learning and in business, and when he finished his schooling he went to work at an import firm in Bordeaux that had trading ties with Cuba. He had picked up Spanish from his parents, and he quickly impressed his superiors with his skills. In 1882, after both his parents died, twenty-year-old Henri headed to Cuba to develop his parents’ properties there. After concluding that the family coffee plantation required too much work, he sold it and invested the earnings in a chicken farm. Cuba enchanted him, and “Henri” soon became “Enrique.” Though a bicycle accident had left him with a twisted leg, he learned quickly to ride a horse, and for a year he managed the farm himself. The Bacardi brothers, who met him through their father, were impressed by the ease with which the gallant young man made the transition from French businessman to Cuban farmer, and they took an immediate liking to him. After Emilio returned in 1883 and rejoined the family business, he and his brothers invited Enrique to work with them, giving him the assignment of managing the firm’s troubled finances.
Enrique Schueg’s arrival in 1884 was a lift for the Bacardis just when it was needed most. Because he had been in France throughout the war, he was unaffected by the agonies of that time and brought fresh energy, new ideas, and a joie de vivre into the Bacardis’ world. Doña Amalia had raised her children to value their French heritage, and Enrique fit snugly into the family. Though he knew nothing about distilling, he was worldly in his tastes and had ideas about ways to market Bacardi rum outside Cuba.
And then came another blow. In the spring of 1885, Emilio’s thirty-three-year-old wife, María, became mysteriously ill. Her condition quickly worsened, and in May she died, leaving Emilio with six children, four of them under the age of five. For the first time in his life, Emilio found himself utterly lost. “It seems like a dream to me,” he wrote to his twenty-four-year-old sister Amalia five days after María’s death. “But what a long dream it is and so painful!” Unprepared to parent his children alone, he asked Amalia to help him. “María was a saint,” he said. “She told me to hug you and say good-bye for her, and she asked that you take her children.” Unable to function at home or at work, Emilio withdrew for a time to a country house belonging to María’s brother. She had been his true love, and for half their marriage they had been separated. Her death only underscored how much his imprisonment by the Spanish authorities had cost him p
ersonally.
Barely a year later, Don Facundo died at the age of seventy-one, worn down by a lifetime of hard work and still unsure whether his company would prosper or fail. He had few assets to his name beyond his share of the renowned but still struggling rum business and a small farm outside Santiago that he called Los Cocos. With his passing, the first Bacardi era in Cuba came to a close, an era that had begun with a penniless immigrant following his brothers to Cuba to seek his fortune. Don Facundo had envisioned his company as a family firm, but his sons would now have to decide whether they had the interest and commitment to keep it going. Commercial rum producers were popping up all over Cuba, and it would have been easy to find someone ready to buy the business. But each of the brothers had a stake in the enterprise. Facundo Jr. had been doing distillery work since he was a teenager and held all the production secrets in his head. He was as valuable an asset to the firm as the “Bacardi” brand or the physical facilities and equipment. José Bacardi Moreau also considered himself part of the company, though he had moved to Havana to direct rum sales in the capital. Finally there was Emilio, the titular president and now the public face of the Bacardis in Santiago.
Still mourning his wife, Emilio did not hesitate in rededicating himself to the family business. He oversaw another reorganization of Bacardi & Compa ñía, with the three Bacardi sons getting equal ownership shares. Family cohesion had been a Bacardi strength in Santiago since the day Don Facundo’s older brothers helped him get started in the retail world. Hard work can take an entrepreneur only so far without a supportive family behind him. No matter how creative and disciplined he was, Don Facundo would have failed in his business ventures without the money that came from his wife’s inheritances. The cooperation of family members helped protect Bacardi company assets again when the firm’s semibankrupt status made it vulnerable to creditors. In 1879 the Bacardis had “sold” the distillery on Matadero Street to José Bacardi Massó, Don Facundo’s brother and the man who provided the cash to purchase the distillery in the first place. José was barely involved in company operations; the transaction was carried out purely for legal reasons, to shield the distillery from being taken over by a creditor or by the Spanish authorities. The family bonds were reinforced each time the business experienced adversity and gave the Bacardi company a character that made their story notable in business annals. Enrique Schueg, the French-Cuban with impressive business smarts, owed his full incorporation into the Bacardi firm in part to his being adopted by the family. He became a partner only after marrying Amalia Bacardi Moreau, Don Facundo and Doña Amalia’s daughter, in 1893.
The Cuban independence cause was by no means forgotten, but in the aftermath of the unsuccessful Ten Years’ War, priorities changed. There were no significant armed uprisings in Cuba against the Spanish presence during the whole of the 1880s. The major Cuban commanders, Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, focused instead on organizing and fund-raising for future efforts, as did José Martí. Though barely thirty, the Cuban writer and organizer was already influential in the exile community, especially in New York, where he settled in 1881. In Martí’s judgment, earlier revolutionary efforts had failed largely because of a lack of strategic coordination and civilian oversight. Before any new uprisings could be launched, he argued, the movement needed to be consolidated politically. The notion of “Free Cuba” needed ideological substance. Martí’s idea was to bring Cuban émigrés together “in one magnificent democratic enterprise” to draft a political program with broad appeal, because the challenge of achieving independence was not only military, “but a most complicated problem in politics.”
The priority Martí gave to popular political education appealed to Cubans like Emilio Bacardi, who always saw intellectual work as a good point of entry into the revolutionary movement. Emilio began to reengage in public activity in Santiago at the urging of his good friend Federico Pérez Carbó, with whom he had been arrested and exiled. Though Federico was eleven years younger, he and Emilio were inseparable companions during their time in Spain. After María’s death, the presence of Federico in Santiago reminded Emilio of what he had already endured, and no one stood more closely with him through his bereavement. Gently, Federico brought Emilio back into the political world, initially by cofounding with him the Victor Hugo Freethinker Group in Santiago, with the idea of promoting the liberal ideas associated with the French author.
On the outside, Pérez Carbó was a mild-mannered accountant, but inside he was an adventurous revolutionary, and as a single man with no family responsibilities, he had taken more chances than Emilio had. He had impeccable revolutionary credentials, with a record of engaging in combat and carrying out secret missions for Antonio Maceo. In 1882 he had actually managed to escape from his imprisonment in Spain, traveling secretly to the port of Cádiz and then stowing away on a French steamer bound for New York, where he spent the next fifteen months working with José Martí at various newspapers serving the Cuban exile community. Back in Santiago, Federico joined Emilio Bacardi in opposing the Catholic Church hierarchy on the basis of Victor Hugo’s ideas. When a census-taker asked Hugo in 1872 whether he was a Catholic, he famously replied, “No. A Freethinker.” For Emilio and Federico, the “Freethinker” commitment to eschew dogma provided an ideological foundation for a democratic and sovereign Cuba, and by promoting their Grupo Libre Pensa dor Victor Hugo, they were defying the tight colonial alliance of the church and the Spanish Crown.
Emilio’s first venture back into the literary world was an essay (under the pseudonym “Arístedes”) titled “El matrimonio civil,” published in the weekly newspaper El espíritu del siglo. Emilio wrote the commentary in response to an edict issued by the archbishop of Santiago in which the church leader denounced as “anti-Christian” a new law that established a civil marriage proceeding in Cuba. The archbishop objected that only the Catholic Church had the authority to join two people in marriage. In the tradition of nineteenth-century liberalism, Emilio saw the church authorities’ rejection of civil matrimony as an attack on liberty and religious tolerance. “They would like to impose on us that era when the conscience did not exist, because only the [priest] confessor ruled,” he wrote, “when bright ideas were smothered before they could be born, and when terrified men went around mindlessly crossing themselves all day and wondered where their God was.”
The burst of energy on Emilio’s part after months of depression was due in part to his having met a young Santiago woman, Elvira Cape, who shared his interests and had worked with their mutual friend Pérez Carbó to get him writing again. Elvira was well educated, well traveled, and bilingual in French and Spanish, mainly because her father, who was trained as a physician in his native France, believed his daughters should have the same advantages that young men could have. In July 1887, Emilio married Elvira and moved with her into his parents’ former house on Trinidad Baja Street, vacated by Doña Amalia after the death of Don Facundo a year earlier. Just twenty-five at the time of their marriage, Elvira became the mother to Emilio’s six young children and filled the void in his life left by the death of María.
A notable irony of the Bacardi story is that while Emilio and his brothers were supporting the struggle for Cuba’s independence from Spain, they were simultaneously courting favor with the Spanish Crown on behalf of their family business. Cuban rum had become popular in Spain, largely due to the number of Spaniards introduced to it while living and working on the island. The Bacardi brand was a favorite, and Spanish colonial officials regularly sent bottles back to Madrid. To them, it was a Spanish product, because it came from one of Spain’s colonies. (The Bacardi rum samples at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia were officially part of Spain’s exhibit at the fair and displayed as such.) In 1888 Queen María Cristina—the regent for her two-year-old son, Alfonso XIII—appointed Bacardi & Compañía as a “Purveyor to the Royal Household,” a term supposedly bestowed on firms that supplied products to the royal family but which in practice was an honora
ry designation that entitled a firm to display the royal coat of arms on its product and advertise its connection to the royal family.
While the Bacardi brothers were openly critical of Spanish rule in Cuba, they took their rum business seriously enough to appreciate the commercial advantage a royal “purveyor” distinction gave them, and they did not hesitate in seeking it. They had no qualms about entering their rums in the 1888 Exposición Universal in Barcelona, where they won gold medals, nor had they questioned their father’s promotion of Bacardi rum at the exposition in Madrid in 1877, at the very time the Bacardi factory in Santiago was being used as a cover for anti-Spanish organizing.
Indeed, the Bacardi brothers were able to justify the promotion of their rum in Spain on patriotic grounds. For romantic Cuban nationalists, rum—along with tobacco—was a quintessentially Cuban product, incorporating the island’s character and experience, from its sun and its soil to its slavery. The Bacardis were eager to underscore this association and prepared their exhibits for the international expositions with the island heritage in mind. For the 1888 Barcelona fair, they constructed a miniature oxcart of the type used on sugar plantations to haul cane from the field to the mill. Bottles and cases of Bacardi rum were displayed on the cart, along with three small oak casks such as those used in the aging warehouse. Before the exhibit was shipped to Barcelona, it was put on public display, and a Santiago newspaper reported that a “huge number” of people went to see it and applauded the presentation.
