Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

by Gjelten, Tom

  The Resistencia “treasurers” in Santiago were Enrique Canto, who owned a department store, and José Antonio Roca, a dentist. Daniel Bacardi and Víctor Schueg (the son of Enrique Schueg and Amalia Bacardi Moreau) were among Roca’s regular patients, and they regularly brought along some cash for Fidel’s fighters when they came for a dental exam. Roca later recalled that Víctor on one occasion alone gave him an envelope containing ten thousand-dollar bills. Pepín Bosch, who generally funneled his contributions through Enrique Canto, contributed even more. In interviews with a U.S. diplomat in Mexico City in 1960 and with the New York Times in 1963, Bosch acknowledged giving Castro $38,500 of his own money (a contribution that in 2008 dollars would be at least $275,000), and family members said he probably gave more than that. Like other wealthy Cubans who supported Castro, Bosch later regretted having helped him and was reluctant to discuss it. Nor was Castro anxious to admit how much help his movement accepted from the very businessmen whose properties he later confiscated. The result, in the words of a U.S. diplomat based in Cuba, was “a mutually convenient conspiracy of silence” on the extent to which the Cuban bourgeoisie financed Castro’s rise to power, but it was significant.

  One of Bosch’s most important roles in the anti-Batista struggle was to promote contacts between the 26th of July Movement and the U.S. government. Bosch was friends with the U.S. vice-consul in Santiago, Bill Patterson, and he knew that Patterson was an undercover CIA field operative. Though the United States was still officially behind Batista, the political turmoil in Cuba was of serious concern, and the Santiago consulate was an important base for gathering intelligence on Fidel Castro and his movement. Bosch personally introduced Patterson to Vilma Espín and Frank País, in order to give the two M-26-7 activists an opportunity to persuade the United States that their movement was worthy of support. Bosch also helped arrange a secret meeting between the M-26-7 leaders and a group of U.S. officials from Washington, including CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick, who made a fact-finding visit to Santiago in the spring of 1957. Vilma Espín assured the U.S. delegation that Castro and his followers were only working for “what you Americans have: clean politics and a clean police system.” The M-26-7 representatives, meanwhile, took note of U.S. concerns about their movement. Frank País wrote to Fidel Castro afterward that “financial sectors” in the United States feared that the 26th of July Movement, if it defeated Batista, might be too unstable to govern Cuba effectively.

  Shortly after the meeting with the U.S. visitors, País arranged for two of the more moderate M-26-7 sympathizers—the economist Felipe Pazos and Raúl Chibás, the brother of the late Orthodox politician Eddy Chibás—to be taken to the Sierra Maestra for a meeting with Fidel Castro to review the 26th of July Movement’s political goals. Though the initiative caught Castro somewhat by surprise, he spent several days with the two men, and Pazos later claimed that Castro suggested that Pazos could be president of a provisional M-26-7 government. The conversations produced what came to be known as the Sierra Manifesto, laying out a political program the movement supposedly intended to implement. The document called for a democratic government in Cuba, with an absolute guarantee of press freedom and open elections in all labor unions. In the economic sphere, the manifesto proposed an agrarian reform program, increased industrialization, and a halt to gambling. There was no mention of nationalizing industries or collectivizing landholdings.

  Frank País was pleased by the Sierra Manifesto and by Castro’s apparent acceptance of the principles that underlay it. The relationship between the two men had always been a bit charged. País was one of the few M-26-7 leaders who dared to challenge Castro’s judgment. In 1956 he had actually traveled to Mexico to argue (unsuccessfully) that the time was not yet right for an uprising in eastern Cuba. Castro respected País’s organizational abilities, and he depended heavily on the steady flow of weaponry, supplies, and volunteers that País oversaw. But Castro was never comfortable with M-26-7 activity outside his direct control or influence, and he had limited patience for País’s Baptist religiosity or his constant harping on the need for “democracy” in the anti-Batista movement. Many historians later guessed that a collision between the men was inevitable, but the truth will never be known. On July 30, 1957, shortly after returning from the Sierra meeting with Pazos and Chibás, Frank País was shot dead on a Santiago street by a police assassin. He was only twenty-two years old.

  Batista’s men in Santiago knew how important Frank País was to the 26th of July Movement, and with his killing they sent the local population an intimidating message. His body was deliberately left in the street for all to see, lying in a puddle of blood. As word of his killing spread, all of Santiago erupted in outrage. On the day País was buried, the entire city was shut down. Virtually every store was shuttered and every business closed, including the Bacardi Rum Company. As head of the local Chamber of Commerce, Daniel Bacardi cham pioned the general strike. For five days, shopkeepers refused to open their doors and workers stayed off the job. The action was entirely spontaneous. Strikes were illegal in Cuba at the time, and by staying home the Santiago workers defied their own union leadership, which was still allied with Batista.

  The regime prohibited the Havana media from reporting news of the Santiago strike, for fear it would spread to the capital. The authorities were furious at the civic and business leaders in Santiago for supporting the strike and did all they could to force them to back down. Pepín Bosch was in Mexico at the time of the País assassination, and the Santiago rum and beer operations were in the hands of Daniel Bacardi, who found himself under intense pressure to order his workers back on the job. He nevertheless refused, and on the third day of the work stoppage police arrested Pepín Bosch’s son Carlos and detained him in the Moncada barracks, thinking it would give them leverage with the Bacardi management.

  Though he had once given an M-26-7 fund-raiser two hundred dollars to buy pistols for the Sierra guerrillas, thirty-year-old Carlos had been barely involved in anti-Batista activities. Known to his friends and family as “Lindy” from the day he was presented to Charles Lindbergh as an infant, the young Bosch was devoted mainly to sailing, an activity he had shared with his friend Renato Guitart, one of the young men killed in the Moncada attack. Though he was not physically mistreated during his detention in the Moncada barracks, the experience opened Lindy’s eyes to the reality of Batista’s repression. The barracks that summer was crawling with paid thugs, employed by the military police to terrorize or assassinate regime opponents. While Lindy was being held at the barracks, one group was called out on a special “mission” in town. When they returned to the barracks later that night, Lindy overheard one of the thugs gloating that he had “got one.”

  The situation in Santiago was as tense as it had been since the uprising in November 1956, with heavily armed soldiers patrolling the streets. The regime authorities had already warned striking workers that they would be fired if they did not return to work immediately, though the threat was empty in those cases where the employer backed the strike. Around the time Lindy Bosch was taken away, soldiers arrived at Daniel Bacardi’s house in the upper-class neighborhood of Vista Alegre and remained there for several hours, saying they would not leave until he signed a document telling workers to return to their jobs. Instead, he and other commercial leaders issued a statement saying they neither supported nor opposed the general strike. “We cannot stimulate tensions that would result in brotherly hatred,” it said. Once it became clear the strike was not spreading to other parts of Cuba, the Santiago workers gradually began returning to their jobs.

  Bosch and his wife Enriqueta were unaware of the developments in Santiago, because an earthquake in Mexico had severed telephone communications. His aide Guillermo Mármol finally had to fly there and personally deliver the news about their son’s imprisonment, tracking them down at La Galarza distillery. On August 6, three days after he had been detained, Lindy Bosch was released from custody, just as his parents
were returning to Santiago. Enraged by his arrest, they had immediately flown back to Cuba. Upon landing in Santiago, Bosch headed straight to the Moncada barracks to demand an explanation from the commander. The officer claimed he was ready to turn against Batista and had ordered Lindy detained in order to force Bosch to return to Santiago to direct an uprising. Bosch knew that his sympathy for the 26th of July Movement was public knowledge, and he suspected that the army commander was trying to trap him into making a declaration that would justify his arrest. He ignored the commander’s suggestion, walked out of the barracks, and made preparations to leave Cuba for the duration of the revolution.

  The experience convinced Bosch that he had to find a way to keep his company out of Batista’s grasp. He figured that Batista was looking to punish him for supporting Fidel Castro’s movement and seeking some opportunity to seize at least partial control of the Bacardi company. The solution Bosch devised to protect the family holdings was ingenious. He organized a new company, Bacardi International Limited (BIL), legally separate from Compañía Ron Bacardi, S.A., but owned by the same shareholders. The new company, to be based in the Bahamas, would hold the exclusive rights to manufacture and distribute Bacardi rum outside Cuba, except for the United States and Mexico. Given the political uncertainties on the island at the time, the move made great sense, and Bosch had no trouble persuading the Bacardi directors to approve the creation of the new unit. Fulgencio Batista might try to impose new taxes or come up with some other way to punish the Bacardis or pressure them, but the most valuable segment of the company’s commercial business would be safe.

  At the time, the most successful Bacardi operations were the ones outside Cuba. The new distillery at La Galarza in Mexico was open and impressing everyone who visited it. “In all Mexico I have not seen a cleaner and more highly performing installation than what exists at La Galarza, and I doubt one exists outside the country either,” gushed a prominent Mexican businessman after touring the new plant. “That installation breathes efficiency and good management.” Planning was under way for a new distilling operation in Brazil, and the new plant in Puerto Rico was nearing completion. Pepín Bosch’s friend Luis Muñoz Marín, the Puerto Rican governor, inaugurated the facility in January 1958, christening it the “Cathedral of Rum.” It was the largest rum factory in the world.

  It would be a while before they realized it, but the key question as early as 1958 was not so much whether the Bacardis wanted a revolution in Cuba as whether the revolution wanted them. Like many other Cubans, the Bacardis assumed that the Sierra Manifesto and other such declarations summarized what the 26th of July Movement actually stood for politically. They did not fully understand that there were competing revolutionary factions and that the views of Felipe Pazos and other moderates in the urban underground were not necessarily shared by the more radical rebel fighters in the mountains, Che Guevara among them.

  Guevara, the freelance Argentine revolutionary, had been in Guatemala when the CIA arranged the ouster of the elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, after he alienated the United Fruit Company with his attempt to carry out a modest program of land reform. For Guevara, the Guatemala experience showed that the United States would not tolerate a democratically elected left-wing government in Latin America, and he argued that only a genuinely Marxist-Leninist revolutionary state aligned with the Soviet Union could survive U.S. opposition. In his private diary, Guevara referred to M-26-7 sympathizers Felipe Pazos and Raúl Chibás as “cavemen” and showed nothing but scorn for the “bourgeois” ideas they espoused during their visit with Fidel Castro in the Sierra. Castro at the time was being extraordinarily careful with his public statements. The one question visiting journalists always asked him was whether he was a Communist, and he always answered no. But Guevara could not help himself. In December 1957, he got into an extraordinary (and significant) behind-the-scenes disagreement with René Ramos Latour, who had replaced Frank País as the underground leader in Santiago. From his mountain camp, Guevara wrote Ramos Latour a scathing letter, accusing him of trying to move the revolutionary movement “toward the Right.” He then blurted out his own pro-Soviet views. “I belong to those who believe that the solution of the world’s problems lies behind the so-called Iron Curtain.”

  Ramos Latour wasted no time in responding, emphasizing that he and his ideological allies advocated a strong but independent Latin America, “an America that can stand up proudly to the United States, Russia, China, or any other power that tries to undermine its economic and political independence. On the other hand, those with your ideological background think the solution to our evils is to free ourselves from the noxious ‘Yankee’ domination by means of a no less noxious ‘Soviet’ domination.” Explicitly at stake in the exchange was the future character of the revolutionary movement, and Fidel Castro was to be the arbiter.

  The factional dispute was next reflected in a disagreement over revolutionary strategy and tactics. The urban wing proposed a nationwide general strike, while the mountain wing favored the expansion of guerrilla military operations. It was a decisive debate. If the general strike went according to plan and brought an end to the Batista regime, workers, businessmen, professionals, and all others who participated could legitimately share a claim of the credit. On the other hand, if Batista were defeated through military action, the guerrilla leadership in the mountains would be in a stronger position to dictate the makeup of a new government. In the end, Fidel Castro endorsed the strike, though somewhat halfheartedly and only after much hesitation.

  The call was issued on the morning of April 9, 1958, with M-26-7 operatives interrupting radio broadcasts to advise the Cuban people to stay away from work. Within hours, many cities in the interior of Cuba were effectively shut down, most notably Santiago. At the Bacardi facilities, more than 1,200 workers walked off the job at midday, supported in their action by Daniel Bacardi himself. In Havana, however, the strike failed. Only a few businesses were affected, and the M-26-7 saboteurs who attempted to disrupt utilities and communications were quickly neutralized by Batista’s police.

  Once it appeared that the strike was unlikely to succeed, Vilma Espín called on workers in Santiago to return to their jobs, breaking from René Ramos Latour and allying herself with the M-26-7 hardliners in the mountains. A few weeks later, Fidel Castro convened a meeting in the Sierra Maestra to discuss the apparent failure of the strike. There would be no more internal debates. At that meeting, Castro officially designated himself the commander-in-chief of the entire revolutionary movement. The M-26-7 leaders who had pushed for the strike, including Ramos Latour, were repudiated and reassigned to other positions in the movement, clearly subordinate to the mountain command. Ramos Latour, who had dared to challenge Che Guevara’s acceptance of “Soviet domination,” was put in charge of a frontline combat unit. He was killed in action a few months later.

  Batista sensed an opportunity in the failure of the general strike and ordered a massive military offensive, sending more than ten thousand troops into the Sierra Maestra. The government campaign was dubbed Plan FF for “Fin de Fidel,” and the mission was precisely to bring about the “End of Fidel” and his rebel force. In the meantime, however, there had been an important change of circumstances: The U.S. government had come to the conclusion that Batista was unlikely to survive politically and cut off all arms shipments to his regime. By midsummer, the government offensive was collapsing. The Cuban army was not well trained or equipped for guerrilla warfare and was unable to make major progress against Castro’s rebels, who limited themselves to hit-and-run attacks. Peasants were also battling Batista forces in the Escambray mountains, and Raúl Castro took a rebel column and opened still another front in the Sierra Cristal mountain range. Vilma Espín joined him, and the two began a wartime romance. Fidel Castro dispatched Che Guevara with a column of fighters toward Las Villas province, and he sent Camilo Cienfuegos, another top comandante, toward the west. Government forces were hit by desertions and defections, while n
ew recruits flowed steadily into the rebel ranks.

  Dozens of Bacardi workers volunteered for rebel army duty, having been assured by Daniel Bacardi (acting as company chief in the absence of Pepín Bosch) that their jobs would be waiting for them when they returned. Bacardi women, including Daniel’s sister Ana María, knit caps and stockings for the rebels, who were fighting in the chilly reaches of the Sierra Maestra. The M-26-7 leaders recognized the Bacardi enterprise as an ally and issued orders to spare its facilities from damage. The company had just that year opened a brand-new distillery in Santiago, and it was untouched. Rebels in the Santa Clara area deliberately left a nearby bridge intact so as not to impede shipments from Bacardi’s Hatuey brewery in Manacas. The brewery manager, Augusto “Polo” Miranda, had rebel contacts and kept them informed of his shipping schedule.

  Inevitably, however, the rebels’ military activity affected commerce as a whole. By the fall of 1958, transportation and communications in the area around Santiago had been severely disrupted. Several zones were under rebel control, and traffic on the main roads was blocked. In Santiago itself, the police and Rolando Masferrer’s private militia engaged the rebels in running gun battles somewhere almost every night. Manuel Jorge Cutillas, the young Bacardi engineer, was working long hours as the manager of the new distillery in Santiago, and he often chose to sleep in the plant rather than risk his life driving home through the darkened and dangerous city streets.

  Before long, electricity was cut off in Santiago, and Bacardi managers had to cut back production. A shortage of glass forced a suspension of work at the bottling plant, and the Bacardi rum factory was closed for the first time in anyone’s memory. With all roads in and out of Santiago blocked and train transportation halted, the only way Bacardi managers could get their product out of the city was by boat, via Havana, just as in the previous century. In the first three weeks of December, about forty thousand cases of Bacardi rum were shipped by sea to Havana, all for distribution elsewhere within Cuba.