Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

by Gjelten, Tom

  The Bacardis had a democratic style in their own socializing. In Santiago, a city known across Cuba for its wild celebrations, Bacardi men (and sometimes women) had a well-established party reputation. At the private San Carlos Club downtown or the Hotel Venus across the plaza, they were known for their generosity at the bar. If the only way to keep an establishment open another half hour after closing time was to tip the barman and buy another round for the entire house, there was almost always a Bacardi ready to pay. No family member was more beloved than Daniel Bacardi, Emilio’s gregarious grandson, who by the early 1950s was in charge of company operations in Santiago. Daniel was the public face of the Bacardi family, and he took the responsibility seriously, regularly visiting all the major nightclubs, bars, restaurants, and other social venues, always promoting Bacardi products and the company image. Though a wealthy man, he had friends from all social backgrounds and was widely admired for his down-to-earth demeanor and joyful approach to life and work. Family members were fond of telling the story of Daniel coming home at dawn one morning after an all-night outing and finding his wife, Graciela, already up and waiting for him at the door, none too happy about the hour. “This is not the time to be coming home,” she said.

  “You’re right,” Daniel said. “It’s time to go to work.” Without entering the house, he turned and headed for the Bacardi office. Daniel was famous for his ability to hold his liquor. A younger Bacardi worker in Santiago recalled years later that Daniel could finish off an entire fifth of white Carta Blanca rum in a single nighttime drinking session with a few friends and still show up early the next morning at the factory or the distillery—clear-headed, steady on his feet, and totally in charge.

  The Bacardis’ patronage of revelry in Santiago peaked each year in July during the annual carnival celebrations, the most exuberant in all Cuba. City business effectively came to a halt during the three-day carnival, as throngs of people filled the narrow streets to drink and dance. The highlight of the weekend was the annual parade of comparsas, neighborhood bands that competed against each other as part of the local celebrations. Each comparsa featured a dozen or more residents in outlandish costumes, playing conga drums or trumpets, ringing bells, shaking maracas, even banging frying pans in harmony with the driving conga rhythm. Those who didn’t play instruments danced in a line behind the others, in the traditional Santiago carnival routine that gave rise to the original “conga line.” Suckling pigs were roasted on street corners, and vendors moved among the carnival-goers selling beer and rum. The Bacardi management customarily distributed bonuses of up to one hundred dollars to its employees in the days immediately preceding the carnival, and the Bacardi workers were among the biggest carnival celebrants, making sure the company rum flowed freely. The partying was continuous—morning, noon, and night.

  By the 1950s, the Santiago carnival had essentially become a Bacardi event, so closely was it identified with the hometown firm. Bacardi Rum helped decorate the entire city with lanterns and banners, offering a prize for the best-adorned neighborhood, and it sponsored the annual “Carnival Queen” election. Anyone with a label from one of various Santiago products, including Hatuey beer and Bacardi rum, was entitled to a vote for the prettiest and most regal candidate.

  People from across Cuba traveled to Santiago each July for the carnival festivities, so no one paid much notice to a caravan of fifteen automobiles, packed with young men, heading out from Havana on July 24, 1953. Only a few of the men knew where exactly they were going. The others understood only that they were to take part in a “revolutionary” military operation under the direction of the man who was riding up ahead in the rented 1952 blue Buick sedan, Fidel Castro.

  The young Orthodox Party firebrand had been one of the few Cuban politicians energized by Batista’s coup. Always an improviser, Castro saw opportunity in the interruption of the democratic process, concluding that Batista’s dictatorial rule could provoke a violent uprising in Cuba and that he could lead it. It was an idea that appealed to him far more than conventional electioneering ever had. After the coup, Castro immediately went underground to begin planning something spectacular, and he was finally ready to carry it out. The plan was to lead an assault on the Moncada barracks in Santiago, an old Cuban army installation named for independence war hero Guillermo Moncada. Castro personally recruited and equipped about 160 men for the operation, most of them young factory workers or farmhands with little military training or political ideology apart from their opposition to the Batista regime—and their enthusiasm for a social revolution.

  Castro figured he and his men could seize the barracks by surprise and gain access to its arsenal, which would permit him and his ragtag fighters to equip themselves for further guerrilla operations. He had chosen carnival weekend for the operation, thinking the nightlong festivities in Santiago would enable him to slip his fighters into town unnoticed. The assault was planned for 5:15 A.M. on Sunday, July 26, when many of the soldiers and their officers would be weary, maybe even drunk, after a long night of celebrating. The plan, however, was naive and the execution amateurish. Castro was not yet much of a military commander, and his men were armed only with an assortment of ancient army carbines, an old machine gun, and small-caliber hunting rifles and shotguns. The inexperienced fighters got separated in the confusion of the assault, lost all element of surprise, and were thoroughly routed within a half hour. Fidel Castro and his twenty-one-year-old brother, Raúl, managed to escape and flee to the mountains nearby, but nearly half his force was either killed during the operation or captured and later executed.

  The Moncada barracks were located not far from the center of Santiago, and the gunfire early that Sunday morning was heard across much of the downtown area. The sun was barely up, and many late-night partyers were still making their way home when the fighting erupted. A group of Bacardi people—employees and family members, including Jorge Bosch, the twenty-eight-year-old son of Pepín Bosch—had been out all night and then attended early morning Mass at a church on Plaza Dolores near the center of the city. As they were leaving the church, the group heard gunshots coming from the Moncada fort, barely half a mile away, and they jumped in a car to investigate. Nearing the military complex, they saw a car speed past, filled with men in uniform, heading toward the mountains. Castro’s men had worn homemade army uniforms to disguise themselves, and Bosch and his friends later realized they had seen some of the moncadistas fleeing the city.

  Word of the attack spread quickly. Santiagueros prided themselves on their revolutionary heritage, and ever since Batista’s coup sixteen months earlier, there had been periodic talk in the city of a new armed insurrection against the government. As in Havana, the political stirrings were concentrated in the local university. One of the students who had taken part in demonstrations to protest the Batista coup was Vilma Espín, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of Bacardi executive José Espín. As a well-brought-up girl in a conservative, upper-class Cuban family, she had refrained from carnival partying on Saturday night and was sound asleep when the gunfire began at the Moncada, a few blocks from the Espíns’ house. “We could hear and feel the shots clearly,” she recalled in an interview years later, “and I immediately jumped out of bed and ran through the house yelling happily, ‘They’re attacking the Moncada! They’re attacking the Moncada!’” José Espín, the French-speaking accountant who had served as Enrique Schueg’s executive assistant and Bacardi labor negotiator, did not share his daughter’s political leanings. He was alarmed by her enthusiasm over the Moncada assault and worried that she might even have been involved somehow. She was not, but she admitted later that she viewed an armed insurrection at the time “as some kind of romantic thing, like with the mambises [the nineteenth-century independence fighters], without knowing what it was.”

  Pepín Bosch and his wife, Enriqueta, lived on a hilltop outside the city overlooking Santiago Bay and only heard about the Moncada attack when friends started calling Sunday morning. There was a rumor
that it was part of a larger organized revolt against the Batista regime directed by former president Carlos Prío, who was said to be coming to Santiago to take command. Bosch immediately got in his car and drove to the Santiago airport to await Prío’s arrival. Though opposed in principle to an armed insurrection against the government, he remained loyal to the president he had served as finance minister. “If this was something Prío was doing, that was another matter,” Bosch later explained. “I could understand Prío. I knew him as a talented man and a good Cuban.” Bosch waited at the airport for several hours before finally realizing that the report of Prío’s involvement was incorrect. The notion had not been without reason. After going into exile in Miami following Batista’s coup, Prío had repeatedly expressed support for a violent overthrow of the man who had deposed him, going so far as to secretly raise funds for weapons to be smuggled to Cuba. In June, he had signed an agreement in Montreal with other Cuban leaders, pledging to oppose Batista’s regime and work for the creation of a new provisional government. Among the other signers was Carlos Hevia, the Bacardi brewery executive and Pepín Bosch friend who had been Prío’s designated candidate in the aborted 1952 presidential election. The anti-Batista movement by 1953 was already broad and serious.

  The Moncada operation, however, was entirely the brainchild of Fidel Castro, as Batista’s police soon figured out. His brother Raúl was caught as he made his way on foot to his parents’ farm. Three days later, Fidel himself was found hiding in a farmhouse and brought to the Santiago city jail. Unshaven, in the same dirty, short-sleeved white sports shirt and dark slacks he had worn for six days, Fidel was surly and defiant throughout his interrogation, boasting that the people of eastern Cuba would have supported an uprising if only it had gone according to plan.

  Those who knew Fidel Castro personally were not surprised by the news of his ill-fated operation. Like most of Fidel’s ideas, the plan was daring and audacious, and it put him squarely in command of the action, which was where he demanded to be if he was to be involved at all. For Juan Grau, a young chemical engineer working for Pepín Bosch at the Bacardi distillery, the Moncada story fit with everything he had associated with Castro since they were fellow students at the Jesuit-run Dolores school for boys in Santiago. Grau had befriended Castro at the school, and Fidel often stayed with “Juanito” and his family on weekends. After Dolores, both boys moved on to the elite Belén school in Havana. Grau knew Castro could be powerfully persuasive, even irresistible, and also that he was hugely reckless and egotistical.

  One of Grau’s most enduring recollections stemmed from an expedition he and Castro took in 1943 when they were both members of a Belén mountaineering club. Castro, who was seventeen years old at the time, told a school priest that he and a younger friend intended to ascend a 2,300-foot peak in western Cuba called Pan de Guajaibón. The priest worried that the expedition was too dangerous for the boys to undertake on their own, and he asked Juan Grau to go see his friend Fidel and talk him out of it. When they got together, however, Fidel did most of the talking, persuading Grau and another friend that they should come along on the trek.

  The expedition was a near disaster. Fidel had not brought maps along, and the boys got lost on the mountainside as soon as they started out. After three days of hiking through the rugged range, they were still short of the summit. That night, they camped under the trees, preparing for their final climb the next day. They had consumed nearly all their supplies, save for a single can of condensed milk and some bread. In the middle of the night, Grau woke up and saw Fidel standing above him, guzzling the can of milk.

  “Fidel, what the hell are you doing?” he said. “You can’t drink the milk like that!”

  “Yes I can.”

  “But Fidel,” Grau said, “in the morning we can go to some farmer’s house and get some coffee and put the milk in the coffee and make it last longer.”

  “I’m drinking it this way,” Fidel said. When Grau continued to object, Fidel snarled at him, “You can eat shit.” (Es que tú eres un comemierda.) Grau immediately jumped up out of his sleeping bag and charged after Fidel.

  “Don’t you call me a comemierda [shit eater],” he said, taking a swing at Fidel. The other two boys, awakened by the ruckus, got up and separated Grau and Fidel, and the fight was over. Two days later, the four boys arrived back at Belén. They were welcomed as heroes, but Grau never forgot what had happened on the mountainside. When he heard it was Fidel who was behind the Moncada attack, Grau told his wife it brought back memories of his mountain-climbing adventure. “Fidel is loco,” he said, “just like always.” But Grau said it with a grudging respect, seeing his old friend as a man with undeniable courage and leadership talent.

  Castro also had superb political instincts, as he showed in the aftermath of the Moncada attack. He was responsible for an operation that resulted in the deaths of half of the young men who had entrusted their lives to him, and yet Castro found a way to turn the debacle to his favor and build a reputation on it. He was helped by the brutality of Batista’s commander in Santiago, Colonel Alberto del Río Chaviano, whose men executed many of the rebels they captured. Del Río Chaviano invented false stories of rebel atrocities and had the murdered prisoners’ bodies arranged so as to suggest they died in combat. When photographs emerged to show they had been killed in cold blood, the sympathy of many Cubans swung to the side of the moncadistas, and Castro was widely seen as a hero, especially among Cuban youth.

  His trial was held in Santiago in September 1953, with Castro acting as his own attorney. Knowing he was certain to be convicted, he used his courtroom time to argue that Batista deserved to be overthrown. His lengthy oration was not recorded, but Castro later recalled his oral argument, quoting himself as saying, “I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.”14

  After the Moncada attack and the bloody response by the police and army, the middle class in Santiago turned thoroughly against Batista. The city had always been associated with uprisings, and the Moncada attack fit squarely into that heroic tradition. One of the first rebels to be killed, Renato Guitart, was friends with Pepín Bosch’s son Carlos. Guitart’s father, who worked at the customs office in the harbor, was a man of only modest means but had many friends in the city, including Pepín Bosch. Though Bosch did not approve of the violent methods Castro advocated, he was horrified by the response of the local authorities and quietly arranged to cover funeral costs for several of the young men killed in the Moncada operation.

  Castro was sentenced to fifteen years in prison and sent with his brother Raúl and other rebels to a penitentiary on the Isle of Pines, where they spent twenty-two months before being released under a general amnesty. In the meantime, the movement against the Batista regime gathered strength. In the months following Fidel Castro’s trial and imprisonment, more anti-Batista conspiracies were planned. In December 1953, Carlos Prío was arrested in Florida on charges of having violated the U.S. Neutrality Act by sending arms and ammunition to Cuba. His main agent on the island was Aureliano Sánchez Arango, who had served him as education minister and later as foreign minister.

  The Bacardi clan hated Batista and, like other Cuba liberals of the time, sympathized broadly with the efforts to overthrow his government. Pepín Bosch remained loyal to Prío and friendly with Aureliano Sánchez Arango, with whom he had served in the Prío cabinet. He was not yet convinced of the wisdom of armed insurrection, but he was willing to help in an emergency. On one occasion, when Sánchez Arango needed to get off the island in a hurry, Bosch paid the expenses. Such activities could be dangerous. After almost every sabotage action, Batista’s police rounded up suspects, and being known as a prominent Prío supporter was enough to get one detained.

  To the extent Bacardi family members wondered about their own vulnerability, they learned a terrifying lesson one day in February 1954. Daniel Bacardi’s chauffeur, Gui
llermo Rodríguez, picked up Daniel’s eight-year-old son Facundito that morning to take him to school. About an hour later, Rodríguez returned, telling Daniel’s wife Graciela that someone had stopped his car, forced him at knifepoint to drive to a site out of town, and then abducted Facundito. In fact, Rodríguez himself had taken Facundito to a spot on the main highway outside Santiago and left him with an accomplice named Manuel Echevarría. Upon hearing the chauffeur’s terrifying story, Graciela sent him to the Bacardi distillery to find Daniel, who told Rodríguez to go with him to the Moncada barracks so they could report the kidnapping to the army command. When Rodríguez protested vigorously that the move would jeopardize Facundito’s safety, Daniel grew suspicious and asked the police to question Rodríguez himself.

  Before long, the news of the kidnapping had spread throughout Santiago. A huge crowd of sympathizers gathered around the Bacardi home in the fashionable Vista Alegre suburb, and hundreds of volunteers, some of them armed, headed to the countryside, determined to track down the kidnappers. More people gathered around the Moncada. Pepín Bosch made arrangements to pay the ransom, but he also called the U.S. consul in Santiago, who contacted the commander of the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay to request a helicopter, which was shortly provided. The Bacardi family definitely had clout. Helicopters were a rare sight in the Cuban countryside in those years, and the noisy approach of the navy aircraft alarmed Echevarría, the accomplice. Emerging from under a bridge where he had been hiding, Echevarría grabbed Facundito and started walking hurriedly down the highway. The two were quickly spotted by a Cuban army patrol.