Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

by Gjelten, Tom

  For the next two months, the Castro brothers, Che Guevara, and their surviving followers stayed hidden while government troops combed the mountains for them. In Santiago, Frank País and his fellow M-26-7 volunteers went underground again to await further developments. For all that most Cubans knew, Fidel Castro and his 26th of July Movement had been obliterated. Public attention turned instead to other insurgent anti-Batista groups, such as the Student Revolutionary Directorate, the university-based movement that was carrying out acts of sabotage in Havana. Former president Carlos Prío, Pepín Bosch’s old boss, was still funding an insurrection group of his own.

  Fidel Castro, however, had the advantage of imagination. He and his followers were underequipped, isolated in remote reaches of the Sierra Maestra, and constantly on the run, but Castro understood that propaganda and public perception were what mattered. He decided that he needed to be visited and interviewed in the Sierra Maestra by a credible foreign journalist, someone who would then report that Fidel Castro and his followers had survived the crossing from Mexico and were engaged in revolutionary operations.

  The contacts were to be made by Felipe Pazos, a distinguished economist who had been the first president of Cuba’s central bank during the time Pepín Bosch was finance minister but who then resigned in protest over Fulgencio Batista’s military takeover. He later became a prominent M-26-7 supporter, partly through the influence of his son Javier, a university student and one of the movement’s top collaborators in Havana. Pazos had stayed close to Pepín Bosch, and when Bosch formed his Minera Occidental venture in 1954, he asked Pazos to be the company president, giving him an office in the Bacardi building in Havana. Having served with the International Monetary Fund in Washington, Pazos spoke English and knew many U.S. journalists, and his M-26-7 colleagues in Havana figured he would be the best person to arrange an interview with Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra.

  Pazos promptly set up a meeting in his Bacardi office with the resident New York Times correspondent in Havana, Ruby Hart Phillips. Realizing a visit to the Sierra would jeopardize her own status in Cuba, she suggested that the Castro interview be given to Herbert Matthews, a veteran Times reporter and editorial writer who had been to Cuba several times. Matthews quickly flew to Havana and then headed to eastern Cuba, posing as an American tourist. He was accompanied by Javier Pazos, who spoke English from his school days in Washington and served as interpreter. In Manzanillo, the men switched to a jeep and drove into the mountains as far as they could, then proceeded on foot in the darkness to the rendezvous point, using birdcalls to make contact with a scout who led them to the site where the interview would take place. Castro arrived at daybreak.

  Matthews and Castro spoke for hours, as rebels paced back and forth around them. Che Guevara later reported that Castro had told him and the others to “look sharp, like soldiers,” which under the circumstances wasn’t easy. “I looked at myself,” Guevara wrote, “then at the others; shoes falling apart, tied together with wire; we were covered with filth. But we put on an act; we filed off in step with me in the lead.” Indeed, the deception went beyond Che’s little act. Raúl Castro at one point brought over a random fighter and had him announce, “Comandante, the liaison from Column number two has arrived,” to which Fidel responded, “Wait until I’m finished.” Castro told Matthews the Batista forces were organized “in columns of 200; we in groups of ten to forty, and we are winning.” It was all a ruse to fool the visiting journalist, and it worked. Castro at that point commanded only a couple of dozen men, all of whom were present during the interview.

  Matthews’s first article, published on February 24, began: “Fidel Castro, the rebel leader of Cuba’s youth, is alive and fighting hard and successfully in the rugged, almost impenetrable fastnesses of the Sierra Maestra, at the southern tip of the island.” Matthews said Castro’s political program “amounts to a new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic, and therefore anti-Communist.” As for Fidel himself: “It was easy to see that his men adored him,” Matthews wrote, “and also to see why he has caught the imagination of the youth of Cuba all over the island.” The front page stories had precisely the effect Castro hoped they would have; he became an instant celebrity in the United States and a hero in Cuba.

  On March 13, the Student Revolutionary Directorate launched an attack on Batista’s presidential palace in Havana, intending to kill him. Batista had been tipped off, however, and was barricaded on the top floor, accessible only by a locked elevator. The student attackers were repelled by the palace guard, and at least thirty-five were killed. The Directorate was essentially wiped out, and Fidel Castro—greatly strengthened by the New York Times publicity—was left as the leader of the anti-Batista struggle.

  Batista responded to the assassination attempt against him with the bloodi est repression Cubans had ever experienced. A cruel and lazy tyrant, he whiled away his time playing canasta and watching horror films, and he put sadists in charge of the police. After the palace assault, Cuban jails were filled to capacity. Police interrogators tortured and killed prisoners with impunity, tearing out fingernails, breaking bones, shattering internal organs, and leaving victims with disfigured faces. The more humble a prisoner’s origin, the more likely he was to be killed, and many prisoners were never seen or heard from again.

  Like the repressive Spanish authorities who had used voluntario death squads against proindependence activists in Cuba nearly a century earlier, the Batista regime armed paramilitary groups and encouraged them to pursue suspected rebels. Among the most notorious were Los Tigres, a small army of thugs in Santiago directed by Rolando Masferrer, an ex-Communist who had led an especially violent campus gangster group at the University of Havana when Fidel Castro was there in the 1940s. A decade later, Masferrer was a pro-Batista senator and newspaper publisher dedicated to tracking down and eliminating regime opponents, often demanding extortion money from those he intimidated. A burly, scowling man with thick, hairy arms and a mustache, Masferrer habitually dressed in a cowboy hat and sunglasses and took a retinue of heavily armed bodyguards with him wherever he went. Masferrer regarded Santiago, the city of revolutionary heroes and Bacardi rum, as his personal domain.

  Among those his men killed was a young Bacardi worker named Eladio Fontán, a member of the M-26-7 underground in Santiago. A group of Tigres pursued Fontán and cornered him in a dry-cleaning establishment. The Bacardi management had a bronze plaque made in the company foundry and mounted at the site where he died:TO ELADIO MANUEL FONTÁN, WHOSE LIFE WAS A CONSTANT BLAZE OF IDEALS. YOU WILL LIVE FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS. YOUR BACARDI COMRADES.

  In the wake of the attack against him, Fulgencio Batista began demanding public demonstrations of loyalty from anyone who depended on government largesse or favors—public employees, landowners, pro-Batista union leaders, businessmen, and bankers. Workers who failed to take part in scheduled demonstrations could be fired. A succession of industrial leaders, fearful of alienating the regime, called on Batista to offer their sympathy and pledge their allegiance.

  As president of the largest wholly Cuban-owned industrial enterprise, Pepín Bosch was among those under intense pressure. Bosch later said he was warned that unless he declared his support for Batista, his life could be in danger. Bosch stood fast, however, refusing even to offer perfunctory tribute to Batista. By then, he was convinced Batista would never give up power voluntarily. Though he had not approved of the 1953 Moncada assault, Bosch told his assistant Guillermo Mármol that he “applauded” the Santiago uprising in November 1956. In the preceding weeks, he had become increasingly outspoken against Batista’s abrogation of the Cuban constitution. In October, he hosted a luncheon at the Hatuey brewery in Havana for editors and reporters visiting from across the Western Hemisphere for the annual assembly of the Inter-American Press Association. Batista’s repressive rule and the prospect of revolution in Cuba were the main subject of discussion, and in his remarks to the journalists, Bosch referred obliquely to the situation in his count
ry. “Almost all of us here,” he told the group, “have known democratic freedom, and it is difficult for us to accept ... that unconstitutional rule could prevail. Democracy and freedom must triumph, and we should all join together in a noble effort to bring this about.”

  Shortly after the attack on the presidential palace in March, Bosch received a letter from Rolando Masferrer’s office, informing him that the senator was organizing a “National Anti-Communist Congress” in Havana in support of Batista’s policies “against the agents of Russia.” Attached to the letter was a blank donation form, which Bosch was to fill out with the amount he wished to pledge in support of the rally. “We will collect the funds for this event from friends of the cause,” the letter stated, “among whom we include you.” To ignore such an appeal under the prevailing circumstances in Cuba was a risky move, but Bosch was as courageous as he was stubborn. He passed the letter on to his secretary, with a brief instruction scrawled across the top: “Return—regretting not being able to cooperate.”

  Bosch was apparently unmoved by Batista’s charge that Fidel Castro was a Communist. He once wrote in an unpublished commentary that there was “little difference” between Communism and military dictatorships in their attitudes toward national business. While no capitalist entrepreneur could ever support Communism, he wrote, neither should he support military dictatorships:These dictatorships have two economic phases. At the beginning, the dictators and their henchmen limit themselves to government monies. Embezzlement and the misdirection of public works funding is enough to satisfy their desire for enrichment. [But] in the second phase, those funds are no longer enough, and they move to appropriate national businesses for their own use. The examples we have seen of this are infinite.

  Bosch may have been thinking of Gerardo Machado, who as Cuba’s dictator in the 1920s tried to force Bacardi president Enrique Schueg—Bosch’s father-in-law—to give him equity in the company. He may have been thinking of Batista himself, who had briefly taken control of Bacardi in 1943. Given the deepening corruption of his regime, his coziness with organized crime figures, and his willingness to ignore legal and constitutional constraints, there would be little to stop Batista if he wanted to move against Bacardi again. Any businessman who wanted to remain independent, Bosch concluded, should be wary of dictators of any stripe. “There is just one system we should all support,” he wrote. “Democracy.”

  Bosch clearly had probusiness views, but he considered himself socially and politically progressive. He was also a Cuban nationalist, and on several occasions he made known his concern about the extent to which U.S. capital had left little room in Cuba for the development of native entrepreneurship. By the spring of 1957, he had concluded that the best hope for reestablishing democracy and constitutional rule in Cuba lay with Fidel Castro and his 26th of July Movement. Castro was calling for sweeping social and economic reforms, but his program did not go significantly beyond what other politicians across the hemisphere had proposed, including Luis Muñoz Marín, the governor of Puerto Rico, whom Bosch greatly admired. He was also reassured by such M-26-7 supporters as his friend and business associate Felipe Pazos, who was among the most respected economists in all Latin America and a man known for his commitment to fighting poverty.

  Pazos was at work on Minera Occidental business in his office in the Bacardi building one day when he looked up from his desk and saw a police lieutenant standing in front of him. The officer had a description of the Pazos family car, including the tag number, and politely asked Pazos if he was the owner. “Yes, sir,” Pazos said.

  “Have you loaned it to anyone recently?” the officer asked. A few days earlier, Javier had taken the car to ferry weapons to his M-26-7 contacts in the mountains of eastern Cuba. When Pazos refused to answer, the officer informed him that the car had been found loaded with weapons apparently destined for the Sierra Maestra. Pazos hoped this meant that his son had not himself been caught. “If you don’t tell me whom you loaned it to, I’ll have to detain you,” the officer said.

  “Lieutenant, if that’s your obligation,” Pazos answered. He was taken to the police headquarters, where a similar interrogation occurred, this time by the police commandant. Again, Pazos refused to cooperate. He had figured that Batista’s police would not want to arrest him, because linking a famous economist and former National Bank president to Fidel Castro at that point would only have added to Castro’s prestige. Pazos was soon released, though inwardly he was shaking with fear and thinking that from that point on he would have to watch his moves very carefully. So would Pepín Bosch, who just a few weeks earlier had given Pazos two thousand dollars for the purchase of arms and ammunition.

  On a steamy Saturday evening in June 1957, fifteen local civic and business leaders gathered for a quiet dinner at the El Caney Country Club just outside Santiago. With sporadic shootings taking place around town almost every night, no one was anxious to venture out after dark, and the men had the private club entirely to themselves. About two weeks earlier, the bodies of four Santiago youths had been found hanging from trees, having been tortured, stabbed, and then shot. In response, thirty-one church, civic, professional, and social organizations had issued a statement demanding that Batista end “the reign of terror” in the city. M-26-7 guerrillas, meanwhile, had been staging daring ambushes of their own. The men at the country club had gathered to discuss the worsening situation in Santiago with a visiting U.S. journalist, Jules Dubois of the Chicago Tribune.

  Among the dinner organizers were Daniel Bacardi and Pepín Bosch. Daniel that year was president of the Chamber of Commerce, following the example of his grandfather Emilio, who directed the Santiago Chamber of Commerce in 1894, another year of crisis for the city. The distinguished santiagueros at the country club also included the presidents of the Rotary and Lions Clubs, the priest who led the local Catholic Youth Movement, the president of the University of Oriente, and the heads of the Santiago medical and bar associations. Another guest was Manuel Urrutia, a local judge who had just given legitimacy to the insurrection by issuing an opinion that a hundred young Santiago men being held on “rebellion” charges were acting “within their constitutional rights” when they took up arms against the Batista regime, “in view of the usurpation and illegal retention of power by Batista and his followers.”

  Dubois, a veteran Latin America correspondent, had flown to Santiago from Havana the night before in order to report on the spreading rebellion against the Batista dictatorship. He was met at the airport by Pepín Bosch, whom he had known for years. As they rode into town through darkened city streets, Bosch turned to Dubois and said, “It is fortunate you came tonight.” He told Dubois that a Batista soldier had been killed that morning, presumably by M-26-7 guerrillas, and that as an important U.S. journalist, his presence in Santiago that night might keep the police and army from engaging in more reprisal killings.

  As the group sat down for dinner in the otherwise empty dining room, Dubois noticed an extra place at the head of the table. A card marked “Reserved” was conspicuously propped on the plate. A prominent local coffee exporter by the name of Fernando Ojeda stood up to offer a toast to Dubois. “One of our compatriots had planned to attend this dinner in your honor tonight,” Ojeda announced, gesturing to the vacant chair, “but he sent his regrets that he could not make it. We can understand that, and we accept his excuses, because he is engaged in an important mission for Cuba. His name is Fidel Castro.” Dubois was stunned. The men around the table constituted the upper crust of Santiago’s business, professional, and cultural leadership, and here they were offering a formal tribute to the bearded revolutionary of the Sierra Maestra.

  Two days after the country club dinner, having confirmed his impressions about the depth of middle- and upper-class support in Santiago for the revolution, Dubois filed his Tribune report. “The wealthiest and most prominent men of Santiago,” he wrote, “most of whom never have been involved in politics before, are backing the rebel, Fidel Castro, as a s
ymbol of resistance against Batista.” Bacardi president Pepín Bosch was clearly out front. While many businessmen and professional people were supporting the 26th of July Movement in private, Bosch was one of the few willing to do so publicly, and Dubois asked him to explain why Castro had so many people behind him in Santiago. “We have a fervent desire for freedom, justice, and democracy,” Bosch said, according to Dubois. “I don’t conceive that I can continue to live the way we have to live here. This is why every one of us is making every effort to do our duty for our country.”

  A key to the broad support for Fidel Castro’s movement in Santiago was the work of Frank País, the young Baptist schoolteacher. País had organized an independent “civic resistance” network in the city of mostly middle- and upper-class residents who were not yet ready to join the 26th of July Movement themselves but wanted somehow to support it. Among the collaborators in the Resistencia Cívica were some high-profile businessmen. Teofilo Babún and his two brothers, owners of a major timber and shipping firm in Santiago, used their business as a cover to transport arms, ammunition, and radio equipment to Fidel’s fighters in the Sierra Maestra. Bacardi rival Gerardo Abascal, the head of the Álvarez Camp rum company in Santiago, smuggled rifles in the trunk of his car. Lily Ferreiro, who owned and managed the ultramodern supermarket in fashionable Vista Alegre, allowed the rebel underground to use her home as a meeting place. The owner of Tube Light, a Santiago firm that sold electrical and neon signs, supplied the rebels with wire to detonate land mines.