Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

by Gjelten, Tom

  A friend and admirer of both Emilio and Facundo wrote later that the brothers had “the same sentimentality” but “totally distinct personalities.”

  Emilio was the man of action, almost harsh in the way he imposed his will on those around him, having such confidence in the respect and authority he had earned that he seemed to delight in taking command. Facundo, meanwhile, was soft, almost mystical in his generosity, never calling attention to his many acts of charity.

  Had both brothers been dedicated to religion, Facundo would have been the ascetic in the cave on the side of a steep cliff, deep in prayer, while Emilio would have been the one who went down into the city with a crucifix in hand and the sword of Christ under his robe.

  Emilio, the crusading Bacardi, served as the company president, even while taking little interest in the technical aspects of rum production. He also considered himself poor with numbers, that being the domain of his brother-in-law Enrique. Emilio was the public face of the firm, at a time when its image and reputation were still being established. In the postwar years, with the memories of struggle still fresh and the dream of a free Cuba not yet realized, national pride was still a powerful sentiment, and with Emilio as its head, Bacardi & Compañía could be represented as the most genuinely Cuban of the island’s rum companies. Cubans were regularly reminded that Bacardi rum was served in the bars and nightclubs of Madrid, Paris, and New York. It was “El Que a Cuba Ha Hecho Famosa” (The One That Has Made Cuba Famous), and no one could represent the rum more prestigiously than Emilio Bacardi, the esteemed patriot.

  Apart from his public relations responsibilities, Emilio represented Bacardi in dealings with the governing authorities. During some of the hottest periods of the Cuban insurgency, Emilio was negotiating simultaneously with the rebel high command, big landowners, and the colonial Spanish administration just to keep the family rum business operating. When the Cuban state was reorganized under the U.S. military occupation, the company’s political relations were again important, and with his experience and connections as Santiago mayor, Emilio was well suited to handle that responsibility. His reputation as a troubleshooter was such that other companies also sought his services, and on one occasion in 1901 it even got him in a bit of trouble. Emilio had arranged a payment of three thousand dollars to a New York lawyer who was working to secure a tariff reduction that would benefit a company in which Emilio had an interest. When reports of the transaction caught the attention of War Secretary Elihu Root, Leonard Wood felt compelled to intervene in Emilio’s defense. “He is an honest man in every way,” Wood wrote to Root, “but he is addicted to the business methods of former times in all that pertains to obtaining concessions from the government.” The notion that a businessman might pay a lawyer to obtain “concessions from the government,” of course, did not exactly prove to be an idea without a future. Emilio Bacardi foresaw the role lobbyists would play in a business world where taxes and government regulations affect the bottom line, and their services became as important to Bacardi as to other firms.

  Much of the credit for the success of Bacardi & Compañía in the early years of the twentieth century, however, went to Emilio’s brother-in-law Enrique Schueg, who showed business acumen from his earliest days at the company in the 1880s. It was Enrique, with his commercial training in France, who realized that in order to prosper in the postwar period the company needed to grow dramatically, and he pushed for expansion at every opportunity. He negotiated the opening in 1910 of a factory in Barcelona, Spain, where “Bacardi” rum would be produced using Spanish raw material under a license with a Spanish distiller by the name of Francisco Alegre. Spain was the company’s most important overseas market, and with a Barcelona operation it could eliminate shipping costs and bypass custom duties, thus allowing the company to sell rum in Spain at lower prices.

  Export promotion was always a Schueg priority. Another early sales target was the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico. With extraordinary foresight, Schueg sensed that the island could be a key point of entry into the all-important U.S. market. In 1909 he sent one of his top salesmen, M. I. Estrada, to Puerto Rico to promote Bacardi sales there. Estrada’s letters back to Santiago described the painstaking work involved in building a market in another country from the ground up. “The other day I made a little trip to the island of Vieques,” he wrote in February 1910. “I sold several cases there, and it’s a good place for business, but what work it is to go there! I got terribly seasick on the way over, then nearly crippled myself riding a horse around the island.” He asked for metal advertising signs, because the cardboard signs he had were ruined in the rain or got pulled down by boys. Estrada complained that customers didn’t pay on time, that they refilled his empty bottles with cheaper rum and sold it as Bacardi, and that some merchants told him they wouldn’t sell a foreign rum that competed with the country’s own producers. He fretted about missing his family and having to work out of a hotel room in San Juan. But Schueg kept Estrada there for months on end, and Puerto Rico ultimately became Bacardi’s most important base outside Cuba.

  In 1911 the Bacardis retired the old pot still the company had used for nearly fifty years, replacing it with the latest version of a modern “Coffey” still, which processed larger quantities of fermented molasses far more efficiently. The decommissioning of Don Facundo’s ancient still was a poignant moment for his sons Emilio and Facundo Jr., and they had it set aside as a reminder of the company’s humble origins. The brothers had grown up with the old alembic in the Matadero Street distillery, and they would forever associate rum making with its creaky pipes and hissing tubes and with the heavy, pungent smell of the simmering molasses wash in its pot.

  The new still was invented by an Irishman named Aeneas Coffey and first used by Irish whiskey makers. The fermented wash was processed through a column, with the alcoholic vapors escaping through a series of ports near the top. It worked continuously. Facundo Bacardi Moreau wanted one as soon as he heard about it, recognizing a technology that would help him produce the more refined rums that were his father’s specialty. The company ordered its first Coffey still after Enrique Schueg saw one demonstrated at an international exhibition in Paris in 1889. The Bacardis were the first rum makers in Cuba to use a Coffey still, and they were so pleased by the purity and lightness of the rum it produced that they eventually discontinued the use of pot stills altogether.

  Each of the Bacardis’ rum-making innovations, from charcoal filtration to aging in oak barrels to the use of double-distilling Coffey stills, moved them closer to their goal of developing a spirit that could reach a market not previously associated with rum. When Don Facundo went into the business in the 1860s, relatively few upper-class consumers had any interest in rum. Though flavorful and appealing to hearty drinkers, it was far too heavy to be taken in sophisticated company. By the early 1900s, rum had a whole new status as a light spirit that could be enjoyed by all drinkers, including women, and the Bacardi company could claim a large share of the credit for its transformation.

  These were the early years of the age of cocktails, when consumers were beginning to choose spirits that enhanced other flavors rather than overwhelmed them, and Bacardi rum was well positioned to take advantage. Many competitors at the time were focused on the production of sipping rums or more highly aged añejo products. Bacardi also produced an añejo rum, but from the beginning Don Facundo had concentrated on the production of light rums, and the company soon had the dominant share of that developing market. Bacardi got another boost during World War I, when the fighting in Europe hampered shipments of wine, whiskey, and cognac across the Atlantic and caused North American drinkers to consider alternatives, such as Cuban rum.

  The Bacardis’ innovative filtering technology removed impurities, and their rum was consequently less toxic than other distilled spirits in its effect on the body. For years, the company actually claimed that drinking Bacardi rum was good for one’s health. The pitch got its start in 1892, when the physician to th
e royal court in Madrid prescribed Bacardi rum for the boy king Alfonso XIII, who was so sickened with a high fever that his life was thought to be in danger. The doctor decided an alcoholic stimulant might help him, and from the royal liquor storehouse he selected a bottle of Bacardi rum. According to company lore, the boy took a drink and promptly went to sleep, and when he awoke his fever was gone. The physician wrote the Bacardis a note, thanking them “for making a product that has saved His Majesty’s life.” Needless to say, the royal letter was featured often in Bacardi publicity from then on.

  In later years, the health claims got bolder, allegedly based on medical grounds. An ad from about 1910 declared that Bacardi rum was “highly recommended for home use in cases of pulmonary consumption and debility,” on the grounds that it could “enrich the blood.” A British physician touted the “chemical and physiological merits of rum” in a report to the British West Indies Committee, and as late as 1934 a Cuban doctor published a book entitled El ron Bacardi en terapéutica y dietética (Bacardi Rum in Therapeutics and Dietetics). The good health argument was less well received in the United States, where the American Medical Association passed a resolution in 1917—on the eve of Prohibition—declaring that there was no research to support the argument that alcohol had medicinal properties. Consumers believed what they wanted to believe, however, and in the United States as well as in Cuba there were always doctors ready to say rum was good for you.

  As his company matured, Emilio Bacardi Moreau was able to devote more time to private pursuits. He invested his money wisely, including the inheritance from his godmother Clara Astié, and he became a wealthy man. He built a luxurious mansion outside Santiago on farm property that had once belonged to his parents, calling it Villa Elvira in honor of his wife. In 1912, at the age of sixty-eight, he took Elvira on a long overseas trip, heading first to New York and then to Paris, Jerusalem, and Egypt, an epic journey he described in his book Hacia tierras viejas (Toward Old Lands). Everywhere he and Elvira went, they collected items for the Bacardi museum in Santiago, gathering desert sand, fragrant herbs, and antiquities. What the slightly eccentric Cuban couple really wanted to bring back, however, was a genuine Egyptian mummy. Emilio went from one dealer in Egypt to another until he finally found an antiquarian in Luxor who had a mummy in his house and was willing to sell it. Emilio immediately cabled the Santiago museum director, José Bofill, with the good news. “It’s a young woman,” he wrote. “She was pretty, and she’s well preserved.” On the mummy’s arrival at the Santiago port, the Cuban customs authorities had no idea how to tax it. Some suggested assessing the mummy as a work of art; others said it should be considered “dried meat.”

  Even by the loose standards of their day, Emilio Bacardi and Elvira Cape were unconventional Cubans. Classic freethinkers, they spurned the church and raised their children with heightened social and political awareness. Both were adherents of “theosophy,” a spiritualist movement that contained elements of Hinduism and Buddhism and promoted universal brotherhood and humanitarianism. Determined to stimulate creative thinking in their children, they sent two of their daughters, Mimín and Lalita, to the progressive Raja Yoga School in Point Loma, California, where the guiding principle was “to reduce the purely mechanical work of the memory to an absolute minimum and devote the time to the development and training of the inner senses, faculties, and latent capacities.” When Mimín showed an interest in drawing and sculpture, Emilio and Elvira arranged for her to study in Paris and later in New York, where she became active in the woman suffrage movement. Years later, Mimín’s daughter wrote that Emilio “taught her and molded her from the time she was little to have a wider vision of the world than the one prevailing at the time.”

  Religious dogma in particular bothered Emilio. He did consider himself a Christian in the broadest sense of the term, and in Palestine he was moved to walk where Jesus had walked, but his commentary on the Palestine visit in Hacia tierras viejas suggested that he doubted Jesus’ divinity. “The church that is said to be yours is further and further away from you,” Emilio wrote, “as far as he must be who distorts you by calling you God.” The hostility Emilio felt toward organized religion, however, was rooted less in theology than in his view of the church as a political institution. Palestine to him was the place where there arose “a doctrine of peace and brotherhood between all peoples, in the name of which its presumed interpreters and guardians never tired of spilling blood and imposing [their faith] by force, rather than through the persuasion and love made holy by the martyrdom of their founder.”

  In Cuba, Emilio saw the Catholic Church as an arm of the repressive colonial power. One of his angriest antichurch outbursts came in August 1910, when he wrote to the mayor of Bayamo to protest his decision to involve the local church in a memorial ceremony honoring Francisco Aguilera, a hero of the first independence war who fought alongside his fellow sugar planter Carlos Manuel de Céspedes. “Remember that this Catholic church, from Rome down to the parish priests here on the island, never did anything but condemn the freedom fighters,” Emilio raged.

  Remember they were more implacable than the army itself; remember that they never recommended clemency; remember how they slandered Céspedes and Aguilera; remember that they didn’t offer prayers for them when they fell in battle; remember that they never spoke out against the death penalty and even encouraged it to the end.

  In that same letter to the Bayamo mayor, however, Emilio wrote that some who reject “the official cult” still have a religion of their own “in their internal temple.” He was presumably referring to himself. For Emilio, the issue was always freedom, from the arbitrary exercise of authority and from constraints on individual expression and thought.

  By 1919, with rum production and sales growing from month to month, the Bacardi partners decided it was time to reorganize their firm as a stock corporation, to be known as the Compañía Ron Bacardi, S.A. (Bacardi Rum Company, Inc.). They declared it to be worth an astounding $3.7 million, about two thirds of which ($2.43 million) was their estimate of the value of the Bacardi name and all their trademarks, including their bat symbol and their various rum brands. Such a high valuation of intangible assets as a proportion of total capital was virtually unprecedented at the time. The Bacardi partners had not considered intellectual property in earlier valuations, and their assignment of such a high dollar figure to their trademarks was an indication of how vigorously they intended to defend them.

  Emilio Bacardi Moreau kept his position as company president, though at the age of seventy-five he had mostly retired from business affairs and spent most of his time in his spacious library at Villa Elvira, writing novels and essays, reading, and corresponding with friends and family. Facundo Bacardi Moreau and Enrique Schueg were the first and second vice presidents of the new company. At the incorporation, each of the three partners took about a third of the shares in the new corporation, making them instant millionaires on paper. They later set aside some of their own stock to provide a 10 percent share for the heirs of José Bacardi Moreau, the third Bacardi brother, who had died twelve years earlier (after selling his share of the business to his brothers and to Enrique Schueg). Five other company officers each received shares worth ten thousand dollars, including Facundo Bacardi Lay, one of Emilio’s sons from his marriage to María Lay, Pedro Lay Lombard, a cousin of Elvira’s who had married Emilio’s oldest daughter María, and Alberto Acha, a Bacardi executive known later for being the grandfather of Desi Arnaz Jr. of I Love Lucy fame.

  The family business was surging ahead on a wave of rising revenue. Four years earlier, the company had expanded its distillery and factory on Matadero Street. The old building had become a decrepit fire hazard. The wood siding was half rotten, the roof leaked, and it was far too small for the company’s production needs. The new building was erected carefully around the coconut palm that fourteen-year-old Facundo Bacardi Jr. had planted in front of the distillery in 1862 and that had subsequently become a symbol of the
company’s survival. Another expansion was carried out in 1922 with the construction of an entirely new distillery, just down the street from the original site. The Bacardis’ rum-making enterprise by then comprised more than a dozen buildings, including a boiler house, an aging warehouse holding hundreds of barrels, a bottling plant, an ice factory, a laboratory, and a carpentry shop. The Bacardis employed several hundred workers, and the demand for their rum was still growing.

  The new distillery was inaugurated on February 4, 1922, the sixtieth anniversary of the company’s founding. The facility was capable of processing seventy-five thousand liters of molasses per day, and its opening was an occasion for ostentatious celebration. According to the local newspaper, a crowd of fifteen thousand townspeople turned out for the festivities, including “an uncountable number of automobiles carrying distinguished families.” The inauguration was made official with the raising of the Cuban flag over the distillery by Enriqueta Schueg, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of Amalia Bacardi Moreau and Enrique Schueg, and Marcos Martínez, a retired Bacardi employee who had worked at the distillery in its earliest days. Enriqueta wore an enormous straw hat to keep the bright sun off her face, and she carried a bouquet of flowers under her arm. The elderly Martínez was dressed in his finest gray suit. Emilio stood between them, holding his white straw boater hat in his hands. His thick hair, brushed straight back over his head, was pure white, like his mustache and beard. His wire-rimmed spectacles sat low on his nose. He looked a bit fatigued.

  It was his last major public event. Emilio Bacardi Moreau died on August 28, 1922, at the age of seventy-eight. Suffering from a heart ailment, he was bedridden in the month before his death but still reading and receiving company at Villa Elvira. On the last afternoon of his life, he discussed sectarian violence in Ireland with a visitor, saying he thought the root of the problems there was religious fanaticism and intolerance. A couple of hours later, his heart stopped.