by Gjelten, Tom
In after-dinner remarks at a Rotary Club banquet shortly before leaving for his new job, Bosch said he was going to Havana with “no political ambitions whatsoever.” He said he would work for “whatever is best for the country, not acting to enrich the rich or abandon the poor but trying in every way to raise the economic level of all Cubans and especially of those who for lack of opportunity have not been able to gain a good living.” Though he was not a party activist, Bosch still identified with the auténticos and their left-of-center social welfare platform. At the same time, he made clear to his fellow businessmen that he considered himself one of them and that as finance minister he would pursue probusiness policies.
Bosch moved into his office on the seventh floor of the Finance Ministry in downtown Havana on January 9, 1950, to great acclaim. So many friends, family members, and business associates showed up for Bosch’s swearing-in ceremony that even the hallway outside the minister’s office was packed with people. Bosch arrived with his twenty-four-year-old son Jorge, Santiago mayor Luis Casero, and his wife’s cousin Emilito Bacardi, the family’s celebrity war veteran from the previous century. At seventy-three, white-haired and a bit grizzled in appearance, “Colonel” Bacardi was still loath to let pass an opportunity to mention his exploits in the independence war, even when it was someone else’s occasion. “I was an aide to Maceo and made the western march with him,” the colonel reminded the Bosch crowd, before adding that he was “happy to see Bosch in such a high place of honor.”
The reluctance with which Bosch had accepted the ministry job turned out to be a factor he could use to advantage. Because he was already wealthy, he was able to turn down the minister’s salary ($595 monthly), as well as the offer of a government car, thus sending a clear signal that his services were not for sale. Because he came into office without political debts to pay and because he had no further political ambitions, he was free to ignore the patronage demands that plagued other government ministers. Bosch genuinely wanted to return to Santiago and his Bacardi responsibilities as soon as he could, which motivated him to reform Finance Ministry operations as quickly as possible. “I’m a working businessman, and I like to speak more with actions than with words,” he said. His objectives were threefold: to secure financing for Prío’s planned two-hundred-million-dollar public works program, to eliminate the fiscal deficit, and to put a halt to corrupt practices in his ministry. Reassured by Bosch’s appointment, officers at the World Bank in Washington within a few weeks approved loans to cover the public works program.
Bosch’s other challenges would not be met so easily. As one newspaper columnist noted later, “Dodging taxes, next to night baseball, was the most popular and highly skilled sport in Cuba,” with Cuban businessmen routinely colluding with crooked treasury inspectors to evade their obligations. Bosch resolved to end that practice. “Everyone will pay,” he insisted, “without exception or privilege.” On the day he took office, Bosch put his tax collectors on notice that he would monitor their work, and he shocked his subordinates by working eighteen or nineteen hours a day himself. Within three months, tax receipts were running at an unprecedented rate of one million dollars a day or more, and the Finance Ministry was on target to produce a six-million-dollar surplus in the state budget by the end of the fiscal year. The previous year had ended with an eighteen-million-dollar deficit. Prío was delighted, happily acknowledging that some of his own family members were found to have tax delinquencies.
Bosch, however, faced an uphill struggle. The custom of using government spending for political purposes was deeply rooted in Cuba, having been established in the Spanish colonial administration, and Bosch’s reform efforts soon ran into fierce opposition from Cuban politicians. Congressmen repeatedly called him before investigating committees to harass him, in one case questioning him until three in the morning. Though Bosch theoretically had the support of President Prío, he often found himself politically isolated. The only Bacardi colleague he brought with him to the Finance Ministry was his personal secretary, the twenty-nine-year-old lawyer Guillermo Mármol. Most of the deputies who worked with Bosch in the ministry were allied with prominent Cuban politicians, and Bosch was not convinced of their loyalty to him. Though there was less gangsterism surrounding government dealings than there had been in the 1940s, it had not entirely disappeared.
In September 1950, one of Bosch’s top deputies, Tulio Paniagua, was shot and killed in his law office. Paniagua had taken a leave of absence from his ministry post in order to work with the president of the Cuban Senate, Miguel Suárez Fernández, his political patron. Though there was no evidence the assassination was related to Paniagua’s position at the Finance Ministry, the murder underscored for Bosch the seriousness of having political enemies in Cuba. When Carteles magazine subsequently reported that Bosch aspired to be Cuba’s next president, he marched into the magazine offices and demanded a retraction. “I don’t want to be president,” he said. “What I want to do is go back to Oriente [province] and attend to my business. I’m tired of this.”
Enrique Schueg had died in August at the age of eighty-eight. In his final months, Schueg was largely incapacitated as a result of the stroke he had suffered earlier, but his death was still a Bacardi turning point. He was born the same year the rum company was founded, in 1862, and went to work for the Bacardis at a time when Don Facundo himself was still alive and nominally in charge. After helping Emilio and Facundo Jr. manage the company through the critical wartime years and into the twentieth century, Enrique Schueg steered the company almost single-handedly into the modern era. He was the key link between the small family firm and the big corporation it subsequently became; without his business vision, the company would not have prospered as it did. Santiagueros knew Schueg as the man who saved many French-Cuban citizens during the city siege in 1898 and as the patriarch whose charity and patronage supported the city for decades. His funeral was a huge event, reminiscent of that of his brother-in-law Emilio twenty-eight years earlier. Santiago’s church, civic, political, and military leaders walked behind the casket in a procession to the town square, along with trucks loaded with floral displays. Hundreds of Bacardi workers, given the day off, joined in the procession. At the head of the parade were Don Enrique’s sons Víctor and Jorge and his son-in-law Pepín Bosch, who was also there as Schueg’s successor as Bacardi chief and as a representative of President Prío and the Prío cabinet.
Seven months later, shortly after the Bacardi directors formally elected him the new company president, Bosch resigned as finance minister. He had held the ministry job for fourteen months and managed in that time to turn the budget deficit into a fifteen-million-dollar surplus. He gave ill health as his official reason for quitting, though Time magazine speculated that Bosch “realized that as the 1952 presidential campaign drew nearer, pressure would grow to finance the government campaign out of the Treasury, as it was financed more or less in 1948.” The magazine quoted a Havana newspaper’s commentary on his departure: “Bosch took office to the profound disgust of the politicians, and leaves accompanied by their broad smiles as they wait outside the ministry doors to assault the Treasury he guarded.”
In the twelve months after Bosch left Havana and returned to Bacardi, Cuba was shocked by a series of events from which it would not recover. Eddy Chibás, having grown ever more strident in his denunciations of corruption and the Prío government, made a final effort to get Cubans’ attention with a frenzied radio broadcast on August 5, 1951. “Sweep away the thieves in the government!” he screamed into the microphone. “People of Cuba, arise and walk! People of Cuba, wake up! This is my last call!” He then shot himself in the stomach. Ten days later, he died. His successor as the leader of the Orthodox Party, Roberto Agramonte, became a favored candidate to win the June 1952 presidential election, with the support of a strong segment of the Cuban Left, including the lawyer-activist Fidel Castro, who was himself running for a congressional seat on the Orthodox ticket. The auténticos, stil
l struggling to overcome their reputation for corruption, nominated Pepín Bosch’s old friend Carlos Hevia, who had been president in 1934 for seventy-two hours. Hevia had remained close to Bosch and was running the Bacardis’ new Cotorro brewery outside Havana at the time he was nominated. The third presidential candidate—and least likely to win—was Fulgencio Batista, who had returned to politics in 1948 as a senator.
Faced with the prospect of losing the election, Batista staged a coup d’état three months before the scheduled vote, overthrowing the Prío government with the help of the Cuban army. Democracy in Cuba was finished.
Chapter 12
Cha-Cha-Chá
Cuba entered 1952 on a wave of prosperity, thanks to booming sugar production and a resurgence of tourism. Foreigners came for the marlin fishing, the horse racing, the beaches, and glitzy nightclubs like the Sans Souci and the Tropicana. The Tropicana had a new glass-walled Arcos de Cristal performance space, built around palm trees with openings in the ceiling for the fronds. In the adjacent outdoor Bajo las Estrellas cabaret, guests dined and danced the rumba under a starry sky to the spirited salsa strains of top Cuban orchestras. Lavishly produced Afro-Cuban floor shows featured thunderous batá drumming, chanting choruses, and showgirls in skimpy, feathered costumes. Cubans boasted the best tobacco and rum in the world, the most beautiful women, and the hottest music—and, unlike the foreign tourists, they enjoyed such pleasures all year long. The Bacardi Rum Company summed up the prevailing national spirit with an advertising slogan introduced in the late 1940s—“¡Qué Suerte Tiene el Cubano!” (How Lucky the Cuban Is!)13
Fulgencio Batista’s coup early on March 10 took the country entirely by surprise. Shortly before 2 A.M., Batista pulled up to the main gate of the Cuban army headquarters at Camp Columbia in a car driven by a uniformed army officer. A sympathetic sentry waved them through, and minutes later Batista had the army chief of staff out of bed and under arrest. Army regiments outside the capital surrendered soon after. Cubans woke up that morning to military music on their radios and learned, to their astonishment, that Carlos Prío had been pushed out of the presidency, that Batista was once again their ruler, and that there would be no election in June.
The coup provoked virtually no public protest. A group of students, responding to rumors of Batista’s return, came to the presidential palace at dawn to ask Prío for weapons and ammunition to defend his government, but Prío did not respond, fearing the students would be slaughtered. After a short-lived attempt to find a military unit somewhere willing to back him, Prío gave up and took refuge in the Mexican Embassy. Eusebio Mujal, the head of the Cuban Workers’ Federation, called for a general strike, but his order went unheeded, and within twenty-four hours he made his own peace with Batista. After a few days, Prío left Cuba for Mexico and later Miami.
The resignation with which most Cubans accepted Batista’s coup was partly due to their disgust with Prío, who had failed to inspire public trust or end the corruption that had prevailed for so long. But their passivity also reflected a national sense of embarrassment. Many Cubans regarded themselves as politically superior to their Latin American neighbors. Only Argentina, Chile, and Costa Rica had a higher literacy rate. In May, the nation was to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Cuban Republic. Their 1940 constitution was considered exemplary, and many Cubans were ashamed that the weakness of their political system had now been exposed before the whole world. Writing three months after the coup, the columnist and historian Herminio Portell Vilá lamented, “The foreign visitor departs from our country thinking that the gloss of civilization has not penetrated very deeply.”
The 1950s would be seen simultaneously as Cuba’s best and worst years. The country’s irresistible sensual pleasures were on full display, but it also became clear that the overripe fruit was due to burst. The good life would succumb to ills that had gone untreated for too long. There were Cubans skilled enough to lead their country through those difficult years, and there were Cuban enterprises, such as Bacardi, with the outlook and the resources to help. But they were too few in number or too weak to make a lasting difference, and the Cuba that entered the 1950s did not make it to the decade’s end.
Most of Cuba’s big sugar barons and bankers welcomed Batista back to power, appreciating his firm hand, but not the Bacardis and especially not Pepín Bosch. With his military coup, Batista had overthrown the president under whom Bosch had dutifully served and blocked the possible presidential election of Bosch’s old auténtico ally Carlos Hevia. In the years that followed, few, if any, Cuban businessmen opposed the Batista dictatorship more vigorously than Pepín Bosch or worked harder for the restoration of democratic rule on the island.
As an old Cuban firm, Bacardi had an established reputation for patriotism and integrity, and Bosch and other company executives had worked hard over the years to promote that corporate image. Bacardi rum was advertised as “Sano, Sabroso, y Cubano”—Healthy, Flavorful, and Cuban. On the eightieth anniversary of the day in 1868 when sugar planter Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freed his slaves and launched the Cuban independence struggle, a Bacardi advertisement showed a pair of black hands thrust skyward with broken chains on the wrists and Céspedes’s famous words to his slaves: “From this moment, you are as free as I am.” For the country’s jubilee celebration in May 1952, the company hung an enormous Cuban flag down the entire six-story front of its Havana headquarters. A new edition of El libro de Cuba was prepared that year, and Bacardi executives were once again invited to submit a corporate profile, just as they had done for the 1925 edition. Titled “Bacardi, the Great Cuban Industry,” it described the extension of the company’s international operations as “an expansion that no comparable industry in Cuba has carried out” and highlighted the family’s “parade of contributions to the fatherland” over four generations. Just one industrial enterprise in Cuba was larger—Textilera Ariguanabo, S.A., a textile manufacturing business—and it was owned by a U.S. family.
By producing Cuba’s most popular rum and beer brands, Bacardi was intimately associated with national celebration. By the 1950s, the company had become the island’s leading corporate patron of Cuban culture. Emilio Bacardi and his wife Elvira Cape had set the precedent with their establishment of the Museo Bacardi, the Biblioteca Elvira Cape, and the Academia de Bellas Artes, all in Santiago. In the 1940s, the Premio Bacardi (Bacardi Prize) was established to reward the best book on the independence war hero Antonio Maceo. In Havana, the wood-paneled mezzanine bar in the art deco Edificio Bacardi was one of the city’s leading intellectual salons, with lectures, readings, and literary discussions featuring such prominent Cuban poets and writers as Nicolás Guillén and Alejo Carpentier. The Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso got her start thanks to Bacardi sponsorship of her dance company, Ballet Alicia Alonso, which after 1959 became the National Ballet of Cuba.
Nothing stirred Cuban passions more than dance music and baseball, and Bacardi was linked with both. The rum company had sponsored baseball in Cuba since the 1880s, when it fielded a Santiago team in the summer league. By the twentieth century, the Casa Bacardi team—with players recruited from the factory workforce—was a semipro organization. The Bacardi-baseball connection was a natural one: Fans in Cuba at even the most dilapidated parks watched their games with a glass of Bacardi rum or a Hatuey beer in hand. The scoreboard at the main stadium in Havana carried huge ads for Bacardi and Hatuey, and when baseball games were first telecast across the island in the early 1950s, Hatuey was the commercial sponsor. Cutaway shots showed Manolo Ortega, a popular newscaster and sports announcer, sitting in a broadcast booth with a big red Hatuey sign behind him and a can of Hatuey beer at his elbow. The most popular Cuban player of the 1940s and early 1950s, Roberto Ortiz, went to work for Bacardi as soon as he retired from baseball, officially as a salesman but unofficially as a public relations representative.
Bacardi support for Cuban musicians was just as prominent. In the 1940s and 50s, Cubans heard most of
their music on the radio, and no program was more popular than the “Bacardi Hour,” carried on the CMQ station and show-casing the top Cuban musicians of the day. Bacardi also sponsored a musical program on Radio Progreso, featuring the famed Sonora Matancera orchestra and lead singer Celia Cruz, who within a few years gained international renown as the “Queen of Salsa.” Each Christmas, the company sponsored an islandwide music broadcast featuring a “danceable program” that ran until 4 A.M. and was meant to ensure “that our inimitable Cuban music is present at every social gathering,” along with Bacardi rum, of course. During commercial breaks, the announcer encouraged the radio listeners to “head to the bar and ask for a Cuba libre for yourself and for your companion!” When Cuban partygoers drank Bacardi, they could even feel they were honoring their homeland:Friends, Bacardi is more Cuban, purer, and better tasting than any foreign liquor. It is made for the hot Cuban climate, and for that reason it’s healthier.... So toast with Bacardi! Made in Cuba to delight the universe!
With such advertising campaigns, Bacardi was promoting the very rum-and-rumba lifestyle that Fidel Castro and other revolutionaries would later condemn as decadent. In the Bacardi view, however, there was no contradiction between Cuban patriotism and Cuban playfulness. The idea was not to encourage escapism and self-indulgence, but to make Cubans feel good about themselves and proud of their nation, even while dancing the night away.
