Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

by Gjelten, Tom

  The mayor of Santiago ordered the suspension of all public events for two days, as the city mourned the death of its favorite son. The funeral procession, which began at Villa Elvira, brought the biggest outpouring of people ever seen in the city for such an occasion. The parade was led by the city’s public servants, with one observer noting how “the khaki uniforms of soldiers mixed with the blue uniforms of the police, the gray uniforms of the firemen, and the white uniforms of the municipal band, followed by the fancy suits of the dignitaries.” As the ornate, horse-drawn carriage containing Don Emilio’s body rolled by, ordinary citizens joined in the march, and by the time the cortege reached the main plaza it was ten blocks long. The casket was set down in front of the town hall, and as the band played the Cuban national anthem, the huge flag that flew over the town hall was slowly lowered, falling finally on Don Emilio’s casket.

  With the exception of Don Facundo, the patriarch and company founder, no one looms larger than Emilio in the Bacardi story. Though his name is mentioned in few Cuban history books, Emilio Bacardi Moreau was a rare example of enlightened and responsible civic leadership in Cuba at a time when such men were in short supply. One of his mourners described him as “the ultimate criollo,” the ultimate homegrown Cuban, “rooted in the deepest layer of the Cuban subsoil.” His friend Federico Pérez Carbó, who was imprisoned in Spain with him, served with him in the Santiago government, and stayed close to him as long as they both lived, described Emilio in a eulogy as “a great rebel, above all. Political tyranny, social inequality, human pride, ignorance, misery, vice; he condemned them all.” But Emilio Bacardi was not ashamed to be a capitalist, and he believed that businessmen should be leaders in their community. He advocated policies to foster economic development, and he volunteered to serve on the Santiago Chamber of Commerce. Fernando Ortiz, one of Cuba’s greatest twentieth-century intellectuals, wrote that Emilio Bacardi was “a man of business without being greedy, an idealist without being utopian, generous without being showy, and Cuban, always Cuban.”

  Chapter 9

  The Next Generation

  On the morning of January 17, 1920, Americans woke up in a dry country. Liquor sellers boarded up their shops, and saloon keepers hung signs on their doors advising their customers to go home. The short story writer and lyricist Ring Lardner spoke for millions of drinking citizens:Goodbye forever to my old friend Booze.

  Doggone, I’ve got the Prohibition Blues.

  A lot of people apparently favored Prohibition: The Eighteenth Amendment was approved by large margins in both houses of Congress and eventually ratified by legislatures in forty-six of the forty-eight states. But there were also many who had no intention of abstaining. Enforcement was weak enough that “speakeasy” houses flourished wherever alcohol was still in demand. For every legal bar or saloon that closed, five underground establishments opened, where a doorman would welcome anyone who knew the password.

  People who were ready for a real adventure could always head to Cuba. Train-and-steamer packages brought thirsty Americans from all over the country to the welcoming Caribbean island, where they could drink and carouse and gamble without interference. Between 1916 and 1928, the annual number of U.S. tourists visiting Cuba doubled, from forty-four thousand to ninety thousand. Bartenders who lost their jobs in the United States moved to Havana and found ready work, as the city’s café and club scene was refashioned to accommodate visiting Americans. Some U.S. bar owners crated up their tables, chairs, signs, and mirrors and relocated their entire operations to Cuba, where they reopened under their old names, offering familiar food and drinks. The island was easily reachable from the United States and had a fabulous winter climate.

  In Cuba, visitors were not troubled by nosy, judgmental neighbors or by moralizing authorities. When Americans got stumbling drunk in Cuba, the regular police would look the other way. If intervention was required, special tourist police would escort the offending visitor back to his hotel, or perhaps to the police station to sober up, but almost never would he be charged. There were outlets for virtually every indulgence, from racetracks to brothels to opium dens. And it was not just its libertine atmosphere that made Cuba so popular. The whole tropical setting was carefree and seductive, and women as well as men found Cuba irresistible: the luxuriant warmth and fragrant nights, the sea breezes, the light, exotic cocktails, the soft music that seemed to flow from everywhere, the graceful, sensuous dancing, the beautiful bodies and elegant clothes.

  The favored Havana watering hole was Sloppy Joe’s, an enormous bar that was packed from noon till midnight and never closed its doors. The place catered to Americans fleeing Prohibition, and its advertising motto was “Out Where the Wet Begins.” There was also the Sevilla (owned by the former barman at the Biltmore in New York), the Inglaterra Bar and Patio (popular after a night at the opera), and the Plaza. To accommodate American tastes, all the bars offered whiskey, but in Cuba one was supposed to drink rum, and drinking rum in Cuba meant drinking Bacardi. The noted travel writer Basil Woon reported that the cocktails most in demand in 1920s Havana were the daiquiri, the presidente, and the Mary Pickford. All three featured Bacardi rum. The presidente, half Bacardi and half French vermouth with a dash of either cura çao or grenadine, was “the aristocrat of cocktails,” Woon reported, “the one preferred by the better class of Cubans.” The Mary Pickford was two thirds pineapple juice and one third Bacardi with a dash of grenadine. No one made it better than Constantino, the barman at La Floridita, where Woon watched him prepare six at a time:The drink is shaken by throwing it from one shaker and catching it in another, the liquid forming a half-circle in the air. This juggling feat having been performed several times, Constantino empties the glasses of ice, puts them in a row on the bar, and with one motion fills them all. Each glass is filled exactly to the brim and not a drop is left over.

  Bacardi executives recognized the commercial opportunity that Prohibition presented, and their advertising staff designed campaigns accordingly. One ad showed a Caribbean map, with Florida colored a dry red and Cuba a lush green. A big Bacardi bat with outstretched wings carried an Uncle Sam figure, empty cocktail glass in hand, across the straits to the island, where a young man in a palm tree waited to offer him a drink of Bacardi. The ad was captioned “Flying from the Desert.” Another ad, in art deco style, showed a woman dressed in flapper style with a tight felt hat and a feather boa around her shoulders, sitting saucily on a bar stool and holding a cocktail glass. The caption: “Cuba is great. There is a reason. Bacardi.” Pan American Airways began operating flights to Cuba from Miami to take advantage of the Prohibition-driven tourism, advertising jointly with Bacardi. “Fly with us to Havana,” the airline said, “and you can bathe in Bacardi rum two hours from now.” A Bacardi agent was on hand in the Havana airport with free drinks for all arriving passengers.

  The Cuba travel boom gave Bacardi a huge boost, with tens of thousands of cases of rum sold to the bars and clubs that served American customers in Cuba. The growing international reputation of Bacardi rum, meanwhile, helped export sales, which by 1924 had surpassed a half million liters of rum per year and were still rising, even with Prohibition in effect. Some studies even suggested that overall alcohol consumption may have slightly risen during Prohibition, due perhaps to the “forbidden fruit” effect. With U.S. distillers forced to shut down, however, foreign suppliers and moonshiners had the U.S. market all to themselves. The result was a jump in (illegal) imports of alcohol across the Canadian border or by sea from the Bahamas. U.S. drinkers who previously consumed only American bourbon or whiskey had to settle for moon-shine or buy the foreign-made spirits that were smuggled into the country—Scotch or Canadian whiskey or perhaps Cuban rum. Prohibition actually lifted the Scotch whiskey industry out of a depression, and it similarly worked for the benefit of Bacardi.

  In 1924 the company began construction of an opulent new art deco office building in Havana, with ornamental details designed by the famed illustrator Maxfield
Parrish. The richly decorated black and gold building, with a facade adorned by bronze bats and inlaid glazed panels marked with images of nymphs, promptly became a city landmark. At the top of the central tower was a huge statue of the Bacardi bat with outstretched wings, presiding majestically over the Havana skyline. The Edificio Bacardi became a regular stop for American tourists, who were treated to free drinks in an ornate bar on the mezzanine level. Needing only a fraction of the office space for its own Havana headquarters, the company rented out most of the building, and its architectural grandeur served mainly to showcase the Bacardi name and presence in the nation’s capital. Cuba was in a new phase of its history, and the Bacardi Rum Company was changing with it, with different leadership and an evolving corporate mission. By 1925, it was said to be the largest industrial enterprise on the island.

  Following the death of Emilio, the company directors chose Enrique Schueg as their new president, passing over Facundo Bacardi Moreau, the founder’s second son. It was a momentous decision, suggesting that the directors valued business expertise over Bacardi blood. Amalia Bacardi Cape, Emilio and Elvira’s daughter, wrote in her family memoir that the choice of Schueg “could not have been more just.” Don Enrique, she pointed out, was “the commercial brains of the enterprise, although Don Emilio had ennobled it with his great personal prestige and Don Facundo [the son] with his famed mastery of rum manufacturing.” Amalia, of course, was writing as Emilio’s daughter. Whether Facundo’s children viewed Schueg’s promotion the same way is another question. It was not in Facundo’s character to complain over the decision, but he did leave Santiago shortly after Schueg was chosen as president and from then on spent much of his time at his summer home in Allenhurst, New Jersey, until he died in 1926.

  One of the most significant aspects of Schueg’s selection as Bacardi president was the way the decision was made. The time when anyone could exercise authority in the company merely through the force of his personality had passed. Corporate decisions after the death of Emilio were made by shareholder vote. His 30 percent share in the company passed to Elvira and to his children and when combined with Schueg’s constituted a clear majority. For voting purposes, the Emilio bloc was represented on the board of directors by Emilio’s son Facundo Bacardi Lay7 and by Emilio’s son-in-law Pedro Lay Lombard. A new governance structure was in place. Compañía Ron Bacardi, S.A., was no longer a partnership of individuals; it had become a family-run corporation. Emilio Bacardi was gone, but his wife and children collectively retained his voice in company management. When Facundo Bacardi Moreau died four years later, his heirs were similarly represented on the corporate board as a single group and voted accordingly. This pattern of family bloc representation and voting characterized—and complicated—Bacardi management decision making for decades to come.

  As company president, Enrique Schueg had to respect the positions of the Emilio and Facundo family branches, just as he had deferred to Emilio and Facundo themselves when they were his partners. He was indeed the ideal executive for the management challenge, with the business training and aptitude to handle his corporate responsibilities. Like Emilio, Enrique was well read, though more attuned to French literature than to Cuban. Every year he made a voyage to Paris and returned with a trunk full of books, which kept him busy until his next trip. Though he had been a coconspirator with Emilio and others during Cuba’s war for independence, he was even more deeply a French patriot. He made sure his five children with Amalia Bacardi Moreau all spoke French (his Spanish had a heavy French accent), and he insisted they maintain French citizenship as well as Cuban. When his oldest son, Arturo, volunteered to join the French army at the beginning of World War I, Enrique was immensely proud. An expert horseman, Arturo became an officer in a French cavalry unit and rode into battle wearing a shiny gold helmet with a silver tassel. His experience ended tragically; like many French soldiers, Arturo became ill with influenza during the war and died in Flanders in 1917.

  Whereas his brother-in-law Emilio could be temperamental and given to polemics, Enrique kept his political opinions mostly to himself, focusing on business affairs instead. Unlike Facundo, however, he was neither shy nor retiring. When faced with a business problem, he approached it creatively and then acted decisively. He spent little time on the distillery or factory floor, working instead at his wooden rolltop desk in the offices on Marina Baja Street. He was never seen without a tie, and with his round spectacles and serious expression he looked every bit the sober accountant he was trained to be. The childhood bicycle accident that left him with one leg a couple of inches shorter than the other caused him to limp, but he compensated for the disability by wearing a boot with a special cork bottom, and he even managed to play a decent game of tennis.

  Other members of the family brought a more freewheeling aspect to the Bacardi image in Cuba. The three sons of José Bacardi Moreau, José Jr. (“Pepe”), Antón, and Joaquín, having been given a 10 percent share of Bacardi stock shortly after the 1919 incorporation, were the first of their generation to be fully vested with a portion of the family fortune and among the first to start spending it. Their mother, Carmen Fernández, died in 1910, three years after the death of their father, so the family’s share was all theirs. Pepe Bacardi, a debonair and handsome young man with dark, wavy hair, was the oldest of the three and set the pace for his brothers. His marriage in 1922 to a nineteen-year-old Santiago beauty named Martha Durand lasted only a few weeks before his young wife announced she could not put up with his carousing. Their very public and colorful breakup produced a high-society scandal and provided a glimpse of the social lives of the Cuban upper class in the 1920s.

  Martha Durand was herself from a distinguished French-Cuban family in Santiago, well educated and multilingual, having traveled often to Paris and New York with her mother and father. She grew up socializing with Bacardis of her age, including Amalia Bacardi Cape, Emilio’s daughter, and Enriqueta Schueg, the daughter of Amalia Bacardi Moreau and Enrique Schueg. Martha and Pepe’s wedding was described by one local newspaper as “the loveliest and most sumptuous that Santiago has ever known.” Making the nightclub rounds in Havana on their honeymoon, the young Cuban couple exemplified glamour and wealth: the former national beauty queen in a bejeweled satin frock, carrying an ivory and gold fan and escorted by her new husband, the handsome Bacardi heir, in a dinner jacket cut especially for him by an English tailor in Havana.

  Martha later claimed that Pepe’s philandering doomed their marriage from the start. She laid out her whole melodramatic story in an exposé titled “My Mad Romance with Bacardi, the Rich Rum King, Conqueror of Women,” a titillating (and suitably embellished) tale that ran in ten weekly installments in Sunday newspapers across the United States in December 1923 and January 1924. She claimed in her story to have gone into the marriage with misgivings. “There was a great deal of talk in Santiago,” she wrote, “about Pepe Bacardi and about his young cousins, the new generation of Bacardis who in no way resemble the stiff-spined old men who made the Bacardi name really great. I heard enough to make me know that Pepe was leading a wild, gay life and that he had a decided predilection for pretty girls and for his own rum.”

  Martha went ahead with the wedding anyway, but to be safe she had Pepe Bacardi sign a prenuptial agreement in which he promised not to contest a divorce request on her part and to pay child support if she were left with children to raise. The agreement was witnessed by Martha’s friend (and Pepe’s cousin) Enriqueta Schueg and by Enriqueta’s new husband, José “Pepín” Bosch, another wealthy young man from Santiago with a reputation as a partyer, but who as a Bacardi son-in-law was destined to play a big role in the family business in the coming decades.

  Martha Durand’s description of her honeymoon provided her U.S. readers, four years into Prohibition, with a tantalizing peek into the Havana of the early 1920s. She described visits to posh private dinner clubs where young women in various exotic costumes, or nothing at all, paraded before the patrons. But her
marriage soon crumbled. Martha said it was finished the night Pepe Bacardi dragged her out of bed and insisted she come downstairs and entertain him and his drunken friends. Pepe initially refused her request for a divorce, however, saying it would bring dishonor on his family. When Martha asked him for money, he told her to get it from Enrique Schueg, the Bacardi president, or Pedro Lay Lombard, the general manager, but they said she would get nothing until she returned the new automobile Pepe had given her as a wedding gift. “At last I realized that I was engaged in a war,” she wrote, “that I was really being persecuted by the whole Bacardi family, which had constituted itself a sort of ’general staff’ in this campaign against one poor, lone, defenseless girl.”

  The Bacardis were indeed loyal to each other, and Martha Durand was not the last Bacardi spouse to feel like an outcast after a marital breakup. But they were also generous and good-hearted, and when young Bacardis partied, they made many friends. Basil Woon reported during his travels in Cuba that the Bacardis were “famous throughout the island for their charity and benevolence.” In Santiago he was entertained by “Facundito” Bacardi, the fun-loving son of Facundo Bacardi Moreau and a party companion of his cousin Pepe. After his father retired from the rum business, Facundito became a Bacardi vice president, but he still found time to entertain friends in Santiago and Havana. When he died tragically a few years later, the New York Times reported that the charismatic Facundito was “one of the most popular men in Cuba.”