Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

by Gjelten, Tom

  The encounter made a lasting impression on Hernández and the other workers who witnessed it, though it said at least as much about one proud distillery worker and his insistence on being treated respectfully as it did about Pepín Bosch and his imperial manner; there were no repercussions. For the most part, surviving Bacardi workers in Santiago remember the family and its company fondly. The working atmosphere was fairly relaxed, and Bacardi employees earned fringe benefits that other Cuban employers did not offer. The company took out life insurance policies for its workers, for example, and Pepín Hernández recalled that when his father died young, it was the payout from the Bacardi policy that allowed his mother to keep the house where they had been living. In the fall of 1954, Bosch offered Bacardi workers an opportunity to buy shares in a new mining company he was creating, Minera Occidental Bosch, S.A., that was to dig for copper in an area of western Cuba. The company failed, and Bosch’s major investors lost their money, but Bosch personally reimbursed each Bacardi worker for the amount of his or her loss, out of his own pocket.

  Bosch could be a tyrant, but he always valued good labor relations and took pride in the fact that the company was never again crippled by a strike after he took charge. Guillermo Mármol, whose legal work for Bacardi focused on collective bargaining issues, recalled a brewery administrator in Havana who once settled a labor dispute at the plant by setting up a “yellow” procompany union and signing an agreement with the illegitimate union “leadership.” Bosch was furious when he heard of the arrangement, telling Mármol it was certain to come back at some point and haunt the company. He ordered Mármol to tear up the agreement with the yellow union and draft a new, more generous collective bargaining contract proposal, one that could be ratified by representatives of the Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC), the leading union group in the country.

  By 1955, Bosch was overseeing the construction of new distilleries in Puerto Rico and Mexico, and he had his eye on Brazil, having visited there a year earlier with his wife to explore business opportunities. The major challenge in expanding rum production overseas was finding a way to maintain the quality that had been achieved back in Santiago. Some aspects of rum making could not be easily replicated. A key to the character of Bacardi’s Cuba rums lay in the process by which the distillate was aged in oak barrels in the aging warehouse, or nave. The Bacardis’ aging facility in Santiago was called the Nave Don Pancho, after Francisco “Don Pancho” Savigne, the man who was in charge of the facility during the 1920s and 1930s (and a first cousin of Emilio’s wife, Elvira Cape). The caldos, as the aging distillates were called, constituted the Bacardis’ single most important physical asset in Cuba, because they could be mixed to produce rums of different average ages. The aging process itself was mysterious and dictated by time-honored traditions, with many myths developing around it. There was a railroad station across from the warehouse, and one local explanation for the quality of aged Bacardi rum was that the caldos were gently shaken every time a train rolled by.

  Much of the knowledge that went into rum distilling and blending came only through long experience. The “master blenders” in the family, such as Daniel Bacardi, had it, but so did some veteran Bacardi workers who had la bored most of their lives in the distillery or the factory. For many years, the production chief at the Santiago rum factory was Alfonso Matamoros, whose older brother Miguel was a famous composer of traditional Cuban music and the founder of the Trio Matamoros. The Matamoros boys were black and grew up poor in Santiago. Miguel had worked as a driver for Facundito Bacardi, the fun-loving son of Facundo Bacardi Moreau, and often sang at Bacardi parties. When his brother Alfonso needed a job, Miguel asked Facundito if he would hire him. Alfonso went to work for the Bacardi company as a young man and advanced to the top position at the factory, where the rums were blended.

  No Bacardi facility was more secret. The factory was kept locked around the clock, and no one was allowed to enter unless authorized by Daniel Bacardi. Alfonso Matamoros was the only person with a key. One day in the late 1950s, a young Bacardi engineer in his early twenties—Manuel Jorge Cutillas, a grandson of Emilio’s daughter Marina—needed to get into the factory to make some technical check. Alfonso Matamoros, about thirty years older and in no doubt about his authority, insisted on escorting Cutillas, not caring in the least that he was a Bacardi family member. At one point, Cutillas climbed on top of a vat where the rums were mixing and was overwhelmed by the sweet smell. He asked Matamoros what was going on in the vat.

  “I don’t know,” Matamoros said, scowling.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” Cutillas demanded. “You run the place!” In fact, Matamoros was one of a tiny handful of people outside of Daniel and other family members who had some idea of the “secret formula” by which Bacardi rums were produced. But he wasn’t about to say anything to this upstart engineer, no matter who he was. “I don’t know,” Matamoros repeated. “Just do what you have to do.” He would answer no more of Cutillas’s questions.

  With the production of Bacardi rum so dependent on tradition-bound methods, it was a constant struggle for the company to reproduce its success in different climes with new facilities and personnel. The Bacardi rum produced in Puerto Rico was close in taste to that produced in Cuba, but for some reason the Mexican version was quite different. One possible explanation was that the Mexican rum was distilled in a leased facility, not built according to Bacardi specifications. The company therefore bought a sugar hacienda called La Galarza, about eighty miles southeast of Mexico City, with the idea of building a new Bacardi distillery there from the ground up. The owner sold Bacardi the hacienda with the idea that he could supply the distillery with molasses from his sugar crop. The property dated to the seventeenth century, and Bosch gave orders to preserve the chapel and the crumbling colonial ruins that came with it. His plan was to turn the facility into a picturesque but modern distillery with bountiful gardens, a walled orchard, and a lovely old house where guests could be accommodated. In 1955 he dispatched Juan Grau to supervise the distillery’s construction.

  The blueprints Grau prepared were based on the distilling facilities in Santiago, and he expected the Mexico distillery to function just as the Santiago distillery did. Daniel Bacardi, the family rum expert, came to inspect the first product. Rather than taste it, he opened the tap on a barrel and let some rum trickle into his palms, then rubbed his hands together and sniffed them. It was the best way to sample the rum’s essence. As Grau waited expectantly at his side, Daniel’s brow furrowed. He splashed some more on his hands and held them to his nose again.

  “Well?” Grau finally asked.

  “No,” Daniel answered. “No. No. This is not good.”

  “Well, no, it’s not exactly the same,” Grau admitted. He had been hoping Daniel would at least find the rum acceptable.

  “No.” Daniel was shaking his head. “No, no, this is not the same at all.”

  “Tell me how it’s different,” Grau said.

  “That’s for you to figure out.”

  Daniel returned to Cuba to report the bad news to Pepín Bosch, and Bosch promptly summoned Grau back to the island for another chilling conversation. “Juan, did I put any restrictions on you in Mexico?” he asked in the intimidating little voice Grau had come to know all too well.

  “No, Mr. Bosch,” Grau answered, “you gave me a free hand.”

  “Then why didn’t you give me the product I wanted? What are you going to do about it?” It was vintage Bosch, mercilessly holding a subordinate accountable for what had been a disappointing outcome.

  “Mr. Bosch, all I know to do is what I was taught to do at MIT, which is to start over from the beginning and take it step by step,” Grau said. He decided he would need a special small-scale distilling unit to serve as a pilot plant, so that he could carry out a series of test distillations, changing one variable at a time. The unit he acquired was no more than six feet wide and twelve feet tall, including a fermentation tank, a m
olasses-heating unit, a centrifuge, and a small distillation column about a foot wide. For his test runs, Grau asked Pepín Bosch to send two barrels of Cuban molasses to Mexico in his private plane.

  It proved to be the key. Rum made in Mexico with Cuban molasses was almost identical to the rum made in Cuba. The next challenge would be to isolate the distinguishing characteristics of Mexican molasses and then adjust the fermentation and distilling procedures to correct for the differences, so that a “Cuban” rum could be produced from Mexican molasses. Grau was a brilliant engineer and after eight months of experimentation, he achieved his objective. It was a turning point in Bacardi distilling history. From then on, Cuban-style Bacardi rum could be produced from almost any molasses, as long as the correct technical procedures were followed. It would taste the same whether produced in Mexico or Brazil or the Bahamas or Puerto Rico.

  Consistent quality was one key to the company’s commercial success in the coming years; another was that Bacardi remained a private, family-owned business. Management experts have long debated the relative merits of family ownership, but Pepín Bosch and other Bacardi executives learned early how to turn it to their advantage. Bosch had the confidence of his Bacardi in-laws, and that fact gave him more leeway in directing the company than other chief executives might have had. For a businessman who liked to make quick decisions, such flexibility was important.

  His authoritarian management style notwithstanding, Bosch maintained an atmosphere of openness and intimacy in the administrative offices in Santiago. In the mid-fifties, the Bacardi firm was still headquartered in the brick building on Marina Baja Street, renamed Aguilera Street, where the French licorista José León Bouteiller had begun his rum distillation trials with Don Facundo himself nearly a century earlier. In the spring of 1954, an architectural firm assessed the firm’s office space and reported that it was overcrowded and inefficiently organized. It was time for a new headquarters, and Pepín Bosch and his Bacardi family directors decided they would settle for nothing less than world-class.

  They purchased a large piece of land alongside the main highway leading out of Santiago and hired Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the famed German-American architect, to plan a modern industrial landmark. His commission was to design an architectural showpiece befitting Bacardi’s international reputation but also reflecting the familial atmosphere to which the firm had long been accustomed. The final Mies design featured an open space, 130 feet square and 18 feet high, with glass sides and a roof of reinforced concrete that extended outward about 20 feet in each direction, supported by eight concrete columns. The design was considered so unique and important that the sketches were later included in architectural history books. The building itself was never constructed. Events in Cuba intervened.

  Chapter 14

  Rising Up

  Juan Grau, the Bacardi engineering whiz, was driving from Mexico City to the new rum distillery at La Galarza one day in September 1956 when he and the Bacardi lawyer riding with him decided to stop for a bite at a roadside taco eatery. There were dozens of taquerias along the highway, and the one they chose in the little town of Río Frío was no different from the others. Shortly after the two men sat down at the counter, the door opened and more patrons walked in. Glancing over his shoulder, Grau saw several men with full beards and dusty clothes, but paid them little heed as they grabbed chairs and settled noisily down at the only two tables in the establishment.

  Suddenly, the tallest of the newcomers jumped up and shouted, “Juanito Grau!” Turning around, Grau saw it was Fidel Castro, his Santiago school chum and fellow mountain climber.

  “Fidel, what the hell are you doing here?” Grau said, rising to embrace his old friend. He had not seen Castro in years, though from the newspapers Grau knew he was exiled with some of his followers in Mexico. There were rumors about a new revolutionary uprising in Cuba.

  “We’re coming from Veracruz,” Castro said cryptically. In fact, he had just presided over a meeting there of his rebel volunteers, several of whom were now returning with him to the Mexican capital. The insurrection Castro would lead in Cuba was less than three months away, and he was on the lookout for a boat he could use to ferry his little guerrilla force back to the island. Among the bearded men with Castro in the café that day—unfamiliar to Grau, of course—was the Argentine adventurer Ernesto “Che” Guevara, already one of Castro’s close collaborators. Leaning close to Grau, Fidel whispered, “I’m going to call you. This is important, what we’re doing.” Grau nodded and gave him his telephone number, though privately he was thinking that a call from Fidel was likely to bring nothing but trouble.

  Even in those early days, Castro was seen by many Cubans as a man capable of leading a national insurrection. Grau had a wife and two small daughters to support, but he might still have been tempted to go along if Fidel had made a serious effort to recruit him. “I really don’t know what I would have done,” Grau said later. “I mean, I hope I would have had enough sense not to go with him, but it could have been a dangerous moment. He might actually have convinced me, you know?”

  Castro had already worked his powers of persuasion on a Cuban-born military officer from Spain named Alberto Bayo, who had been a guerrilla warfare expert on the Republican side during the Spanish civil war. Castro looked him up in 1955 to seek his help in training his rebel volunteers to fight in Cuba. The sixty-five-year-old army general had retired from military service by then and was running a small furniture factory in Mexico City. Recounting their meeting later, Bayo said he told Castro he would help train his rebel army but could only afford to give him three hours a day. “No, General Bayo,” Castro responded, “we want you the entire day. You must give up all your other occupations and devote yourself fully to our training. Why would you want a furniture factory if inside a short time you could come with us and be victorious together in Cuba?” Bayo wrote that he was so “intoxicated” by Castro’s enthusiasm and confidence that he promised on the spot to sell his business and devote himself to training the Cuban rebels, few of whom knew anything about military operations.

  Such stories became legendary over the course of the Cuban revolution. Fidel Castro came to power more through the force of his personality and his awesome ability to inspire or intimidate than through his skills as a military leader. In operational planning, he was consistently sloppy, disorganized, and reckless, but he made up for it through sheer audacity, irresistible energy, and political cunning. Cubans came to see him as a man who genuinely believed in the need to build a more just and humane society in Cuba and whose strength of conviction and character meant he would not be corrupted as easily as his predecessors had been. If he insisted on having total charge of the revolution, it was understandable. In time, it was believed, he would be forced to compromise and share power with others. His drive and enthusiasm were contagious, and Cubans of all backgrounds and social classes—including the Bacardis of Santiago—rallied behind him. In “History Will Absolve Me,” Castro had challenged his countrymen to “fight for it with everything you have,” and the people of Cuba soon proved they were willing to do just that, without knowing for sure whom they were following or what would come next.

  Fidel Castro’s revolutionary uprising got off to a feeble start. The boat he finally purchased for the expedition, an aging diesel-powered yacht named the Granma, was meant to carry no more than twenty-five people, but Castro squeezed eighty-two aboard, plus two antitank guns, ninety rifles, three machine guns, forty automatic pistols, and several boxes of ammunition and supplies. His plan was to land with his guerrilla fighters on the southern coast of Oriente province in the darkness, just as his followers in Santiago were launching an anti-Batista rebellion in the city.

  The coordinator of the 26th of July Movement in Santiago was a twenty-one-year-old schoolteacher named Frank País. In many ways, he was Fidel Castro’s polar opposite: modest where Castro was self-aggrandizing, deliberative where Castro was impulsive, and pragmatic and organized where
Castro was bold and careless. The son of a Baptist minister, he carried a Bible with him at all times and taught in a private Baptist academy. His sincerity and seriousness impressed all those who knew him. By the time Fidel and his guerrilla force set off from Mexico on the Granma in late November 1956, País had built up an extensive underground network in Santiago, working closely with Vilma Espín and other M-26-7 collaborators.

  Just before leaving Mexico, Fidel sent País a coded message saying he expected to reach Cuba with his guerrilla fighters on November 30 and that País should plan on launching his uprising that same day as a diversion. País followed the instructions precisely, leading a force of about three hundred volunteers in early-morning raids on the Santiago police headquarters, the customs office, and a coast guard station. The next day, País staged more raids, and for a few hours all public activity in the city was again brought to a halt.

  The Granma, however, was still at sea. The overcrowded yacht could not move nearly as fast as Castro thought it would. Weather conditions were terrible, and only three of the men aboard the boat had any idea how to navigate and steer. By the time the Granma finally did touch land on the morning of December 2, it was on a sandbar more than a mile from the point where the guerrilla band was supposed to rendezvous with fellow rebel fighters. The men had to wade ashore in daylight, leaving most of their weapons, ammunition, and supplies behind. The Cuban military, having squelched the Santiago uprising, was by this time on full alert and quickly located the Granma fighters making their way haphazardly through the jungle.

  On December 5, government troops found most of the rebels camped in a sugarcane field and attacked. Under fire from all directions, the rebels fled in a panic, leaving most of their remaining equipment behind. Many were killed; others were captured and executed. Of the eighty-two rebels who had come ashore, only twenty-two escaped to regroup in the nearby mountains. Among the survivors were Fidel, his brother Raúl, and Che Guevara. It had been a repeat of the Moncada debacle, and once again Castro refused to take personal responsibility for what had happened. Though the Granma landing disaster was due largely to his own bad judgment and reckless planning, Castro chose to lash out at his men for losing their weapons in the chaotic aftermath. “The one and only hope of survival that you had, in the event of a head-on encounter with the army, was your guns,” he raged. “To abandon them was both criminal and stupid.”