Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

by Gjelten, Tom

  Emilio and his family returned to Santiago in August 1898. The American flag by then was flying over the city hall, and the town was ruled by a U.S. military governor, Brigadier General Leonard Wood, promoted to brigadier rank for his role in the Battle of San Juan Hill. No sooner had Emilio moved back into his house on Marina Baja Street than old friends began stopping by to air their complaints about the new U.S. administration. After writing his “open letter,” however, Emilio had calmed down. Cuba was finally free of Spain’s suffocating colonial grip. The United States, though temporarily occupying the country, had pledged under the Teller Amendment to abandon Cuban territory at some point and recognize the country’s independence. In the meantime, there was much work to do. Emilio immediately went to see his brother Facundo and Enrique Schueg to review the condition of Bacardi & Com pañía. Miraculously, the factory had survived the war intact, and while at times rum production had slowed to a trickle, it had never stopped completely. Emilio was still the president of the firm, though once again it had operated without him a long time, and after his return he left it largely in his brother’s hands, concentrating instead on the reconstruction of his hometown.

  The beneficial side of the U.S. military occupation of Santiago soon became clear. For all their domineering ways, their insensitivity, and even their racism, the Americans were unmatched in their capacity for getting things done, and quickly. The U.S. Army was precisely what Santiago needed at that moment. No one, in fact, better personified the U.S. military’s talents, as well as its narrow-mindedness, than Leonard Wood himself, Santiago’s appointed governor. A native New Englander, Wood grew up with Yankee values of hard work, frugality, athleticism, and patriotism. He was trained as a physician at Harvard only after failing to gain an appointment to West Point, and shortly after graduation he signed up for a career in the army. He was sent to the western frontier during the final years of the Indian Wars and so distinguished himself in the pursuit of the Apache chief Geronimo that he was awarded a Medal of Honor for his role.

  Assigned later to the White House, he served as an attending physician to Grover Cleveland and William McKinley but yearned for another battlefield assignment. While in Washington, he met Theodore Roosevelt, with whom he shared a passion for strenuous outdoor activity. Both had high-level political connections and used them without hesitation to secure their command positions with the Rough Riders in Cuba. With a rigid, barrel-chested physique and short, dark hair combed straight back, Wood could intimidate with a single glance, and he needed no weapon to convey authority, only the riding crop he carried everywhere. He took on the mission of administering Santiago with characteristic efficiency and determination.

  Emilio Bacardi had not seen Santiago at its worst. Leonard Wood had. Having been neglected and besieged, the city of fifty thousand was without food and sanitation, and two hundred people were dying from starvation or disease each day. In an account he wrote later, Wood described his first trip into the city on July 20:Long lines of wan, yellow, ghastly looking individuals dragged themselves wearily up and down the filthy streets, avoiding the dead animals and heaps of decomposing refuse, or sank wearily in some friendly shade, seeking to recover strength in sleep. Frightful odors poured out of the abandoned houses, speaking more strongly than words of the dead within. The very air seemed laden with death.... Men could not bury the dead fast enough, and they were burned in great heaps of eighty or ninety piled high on gratings of railroad iron and mixed with grass and sticks. Over all were turned thousands of gallons of kerosene and the whole frightful heap reduced to ashes. It was the only thing to be done, for the dead threatened the living, and a plague was at hand.

  As governor of Santiago, Wood immediately took charge of feeding the hungry and caring for the sick as well as burying the dead. He had no tolerance for laziness; men who resisted a street-sweeping assignment could face a public horsewhipping. He was Santiago’s virtual dictator in those first weeks, but he impressed many who came into contact with him. On the job at the break of dawn, he would ride through the streets personally supervising the cleanup efforts, getting off his horse occasionally to show a workman it was easier to sweep downhill than up or move his cart toward a pile of trash rather than carry the trash to the cart. At night, he would stay at his desk working after everyone else had left. “The passion for ’the job’ had taken possession of him,” his biographer Herman Hagedorn wrote. “For the first time since the Geronimo days, he had found an undertaking commensurate with his powers.” While representing Yankee energy and efficiency at their best, however, Leonard Wood also exhibited the imperiousness and condescension that would ultimately sour U.S.-Cuban relations. Even while helping Cubans, he belittled their readiness to assume responsibility. “With one or two exceptions,” he wrote to his wife, “not a Cuban has come forward to do anything for his people.”

  In September, Emilio Bacardi and other prominent proindependence santiagueros assembled to discuss what position they should take with respect to the U.S. military occupation, given its positive and negative aspects. Emilio argued that they should cooperate, offer assistance, and trust the United States to comply with the commitment it had made to Cuban independence. With his steady manner, his enormous prestige in the community, and his idealistic vision, Emilio was bound to come to Leonard Wood’s attention, and he soon did—for his reputation and also for his family’s rum. In November, a group of Santiago citizens who had been advising Wood suggested it was time they have one of their own as their mayor, and they asked him to appoint Emilio Bacardi. Wood agreed, concluding he was one of the most talented men available.

  “If that man is as good at being mayor as he is at making rum, there’s no one better,” Wood said. On the other hand, he told an aide, “I don’t know what my puritanical friends in Massachusetts will think when they learn I have selected Mr. Bacardi.”

  Chapter 7

  A Public Servant in a Misgoverned Land

  Havana’s Prado, the wide and shady boulevard leading from the city’s central park down to the harbor, became a tent city when the U.S. Army set up camp in Cuba’s capital at the end of 1898. Space was tight, and soldiers had to pitch their tents snug against each other. They drove their stakes into the patches of dirt around the trees that lined the broad sidewalks and strung laundry lines between the lampposts. On the balconies of the mansions that flanked the boulevard, Cuban women with fluttering fans and Cuban men in white straw hats stood watching the activity below with amazement and a little horror. On New Year’s Day 1899, with the formal transfer of sovereignty, the Spanish flag that flew over the old fortress at the harbor entrance came down, and the Stars and Stripes went up in its place. The Cuban flag was nowhere to be seen.

  Police patrolling duties in the capital were taken over by the U.S. Army’s Eighth and Tenth Infantries. The U.S. military governor of Cuba moved into the Havana palace previously occupied by the Spanish captain-general, though not until American soldiers hauled more than thirty wagonloads of trash out of it. Nearly four centuries of Spanish dominion over Cuba were being quickly undone by an American military administration determined to teach Cubans to speak English, enact U.S. laws, adopt American management practices, buy made-in-the-U.S.A. products, and turn their attention from bullfighting to baseball (something they were anxious to do anyway). U.S. commanders and their superiors in Washington felt free to reshape the country, literally, as they saw fit. Not only were Cuba’s educational and tax systems changed; even the maps were redrawn. The Isle of Pines, just off the southern coast, had been part of Cuba as long as Spain had ruled, but the U.S. government—without notifying the Cubans—claimed the island for itself under the Treaty of Paris. In the spring of 1901, as U.S. military commanders pressured Cuban lawmak ers to give the United States a standing right to intervene in their country, the territory became a bargaining chip. “The Isle of Pines I think we can afford to drop if necessary,” General Leonard Wood suggested in a letter to U.S. secretary of war Elihu Root, noting
that the island didn’t have a good harbor. Having first thought they were on the winning side in the war, Cubans learned they had to negotiate with the United States just to keep their country intact.

  The U.S. occupation disoriented Cubans, confusing them about who their enemy was and what progress meant. They despaired when American politicians and military commanders openly boasted that the U.S. flag would never come down in Havana, but at the same time they marveled at how their island was so quickly transformed. During the occupation years, the United States paid and supervised crews to clean and repair Cuban streets, build new highways and bridges, install water and sewer systems, and lay telegraph lines linking towns from one end of the island to the other. Cuban patriots faced a difficult choice: Support the occupation, even as it diminished their nation’s sovereignty, or oppose it, even as it took their country into the twentieth century as fast as it could be taken. For decades, the fight for freedom had simply meant a military struggle against the Spanish army. But the achievement of full Cuban independence was now a political challenge, and in the new era the nation needed leaders with common sense and sound judgment more than it needed men who were good with guns and machetes.

  The U.S. military presence was first felt in Santiago, and as the new mayor, Emilio Bacardi was among the first Cubans to consider the advantages and disadvantages of the American occupation. As long as he lived, Emilio was never accused of halfheartedness in his advocacy of a free and independent Cuba. Years later, the Santiago veterans of the “Liberation Army” made him their honorary president, even though he had never held a weapon. But Emilio was a forward thinker and believed in modernization, and he identified those principles above all with the United States. He wrote later that his favorite phrase in American English was “Go ahead,” because it suggested a sense of “absolute freedom” that in any other language lost the element of directness it had when an American said it. When Leonard Wood came charging into Santiago in 1898 with an energy like no one there had seen before, Emilio was immediately drawn to him. The challenge would be to work with him in the reconstruction of Santiago despite Wood’s lack of support for the independence cause to which Emilio had dedicated his life.

  As Santiago’s mayor, Emilio Bacardi represented the native criollo leadership Cuba desperately needed in its postcolonial period but mostly lacked. The issues he faced in his own dealings with the Americans mirrored his country’s experience with the occupation, and the wisdom he demonstrated as mayor and later as a senator in Havana earned him a place among Cuba’s esteemed sons. Within the Bacardi family, Emilio set an example of civic responsibility that later generations could follow as they also struggled to define what their Cuban nationality required of them during difficult times.

  On his first day as mayor, Emilio Bacardi called local reporters to the Santiago city hall and laid out his goals: “To promote the material development of the population, to provide employment to those who need it most, and to attend to all local needs, to the maximum extent possible. If I do not meet these goals,” he said, “it will not be for a lack of trying but rather for a lack of competence on my part, and I will correct that by dutifully giving up the position I accept today.” It was a typically straightforward declaration for a man who always gave priority to local action and sought immediate results. His predecessor as mayor was a U.S. Army major named McLeary, and on the day McLeary stepped down, Emilio persuaded the U.S. soldiers serving with him in the municipal government to abandon their positions as well, so their jobs could go to unemployed Cuban war veterans. With that one move, Emilio not only met a pressing community need but also signaled his loyalty to the Liberation Army, an institution U.S. commanders were determined to discredit. He further underscored his political leanings with his first mayoral appointment, choosing his close friend Federico Pérez Carbó, the accountant-turned-revolutionary, to serve as city clerk. Federico had just come home after almost two years in the United States arranging arms deliveries for the Cuban rebels, and his presence in the government would remind Leonard Wood and the other U.S. authorities that Santiago remained a ciudad héroe, as it had been in one insurrection after another.

  Emilio made no major political decision or budgetary commitment, however, without checking first with General Wood, who as the U.S. military governor was the supreme authority in the Santiago district, and he encouraged the city residents to support Wood, no matter their feelings about how the war had ended. On the night he took office, he stood on the city hall balcony, bare-headed, facing a huge, cheering crowd in the square below. The gathering might have become riotous, given the population’s frustration over not yet having gotten a government they could call their own, but Emilio was determined to keep his people’s patriotic energy in check. He invited a U.S. Army officer and a Cuban rebel general to join him on the balcony, placing one on each side of him. “We have three parties represented here,” Emilio told the crowd in his booming voice: “the intervening government, in the form of the U.S. Army; the Cuban Army, to whom we owe our freedom; and the Cuban people, whom I represent as mayor. It is on the partnership of these three entities that our future will depend during these critical times.”

  Emilio was not naive. He knew the depth of the American military’s prejudice against Cubans, especially those of color, and he realized that U.S. commanders doubted the country was genuinely capable of governing itself. His goal as mayor was to prove them wrong, at least in Santiago, where he could personally demonstrate effective Cuban leadership. With no city council to assist him, Emilio convened an asamblea de vecinos (assembly of neighbors) as his advisory body, in order to address local issues and projects with “public value.”

  At the time, U.S. and Cuban political leaders still had serious disagreements. The U.S. government had refused to recognize the “Republic in Arms,” which the civilian leaders of the revolution, including Emilio, viewed as an authentic Cuban government that could be institutionalized as soon as Spain relinquished sovereignty. The “Republic” gave rise to a Cuban Constitutional Assembly that began provisional work shortly after the war. General Calixto García, the former Cuban army commander in the Santiago area, proposed free elections with suffrage extended to every Cuban male over the age of twenty-one, a reform that had long been part of the revolution’s political program. But U.S. officials ignored the Assembly and refused to consider its recommendations. When the Assembly sent a commission, including General García, to Washington in November 1898 to discuss the situation in Cuba, President McKinley and other U.S. officials agreed to meet with the delegates only as individuals and only to discuss one subject: the dissolution of the rebel army. Frustrated and angered by the hostile reception given his group, Calixto García fell ill while in Washington and died there.

  Cuban leaders had been hoping to keep their army intact as a symbol of their nation. While the new Constitutional Assembly struggled to achieve some small measure of sovereignty, the existing Liberation Army units remained encamped around the country, awaiting word on their disposition. Emilito Bacardi Lay, having risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel at the age of just twenty-one, was in charge of a unit in Consolación del Sur, in the province of Pinar del Río at the western end of Cuba. Weary and restless and bothered by conflicts with fellow officers and soldiers, Emilito wrote to his father in December 1898 to complain. As Santiago’s new mayor, adjusting to the reality of the U.S. military occupation, Emilio could only counsel patience. “I am surrounded by the same difficulties you face,” he wrote, “and I resolve them by forcing myself to be strictly impartial.... As for your own matters, determine what’s best for you, but you must put the public interest, the interest of the Nation, above all else.”

  A photo taken during Emilio’s initial months as mayor shows him and Leonard Wood, the military governor, during a review of Santiago street-cleaning operations. The two men are seated on a park bench along a walkway near the bay. Wood is in his Rough Rider uniform, pressing slightly forward, intense as ever. Em
ilio, in a gray suit and vest and loosely knotted bow tie, leans back confidently, one arm resting on the back of the bench. He wears a white straw boater hat with a dark ribbon around the flat crown, as he does in almost all photos from that time, and he appears altogether relaxed, as if he were watching a parade.

  Mayor Bacardi and General Wood were able to work together harmoniously on behalf of many causes in Santiago, from clean streets to public education. Barely a third of the school-age children in large cities such as Santiago were enrolled, and a much smaller proportion in rural areas. Within months of taking charge, Wood and Emilio had together opened twenty-five new kindergartens in the city of Santiago, and they were organizing new teacher training schools, one for men and one for women. After he discovered that three hundred girls in one school were sharing a single instructor, Emilio ordered the provincial school board to hire additional staff. When the board balked, Wood intervened on Emilio’s behalf, and the teachers were hired.

  The two men even developed a friendship of sorts, complicated by their political relationship but still genuine. They continued to correspond for many years after Wood left Cuba. For a time, each served the other’s purposes. Emilio praised Wood’s initiatives, such as his efforts to fight yellow fever and reconstruct the water and sewer system, and as mayor he always showed Wood the respect and deference a general officer expects. Wood was generous in return. Early in his term, Emilio decided Santiago needed a municipal museum for a display of relics from the city’s heroic history, beginning with the early colonial period and extending through the days of slavery and the independence struggles. Rather than bypass Leonard Wood on the project, which he probably could have done, Emilio went to him first with the proposal. As a result, he won the governor’s support, plus a two-hundred-dollar monthly appropriation, enabling him to establish Cuba’s first city museum in February 1899.