Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

by Gjelten, Tom

  Conditions in the capital had remained relatively normal, and the Bacardi staff there did not initially realize how bad the situation in Santiago had become. On November 4, the company’s Santiago-based sales chief, José Bou, described conditions in the city in an epistle he titled, “Letter from a santiaguero to a Havana Friend.” He addressed it to his Bacardi colleague Juan Prado, the sales manager in Havana, though it could have gone to just about anyone in the capital who was clueless about what was happening at the other end of the island.

  “Dear Juanito,” he began. “You in Havana are completely detached from reality. It’s like Havana is Cuba, and the rest of the island is ‘Korea.’” Bou said there were no groceries in the Santiago stores, no milk for the children, and no drinkable water, except for what could be bought from vendors. And then there was the violence.

  What would you all say if, seated by your windows, you had to contemplate a panorama of airplanes surrounding the city and strafing the suburbs? What would you say if you saw your city militarily occupied, if you saw tanks and armored cars patrolling the streets, and truckloads of soldiers with their machine guns pointed in every direction, threatening even the most peaceful citizens? What would you say to your children, who, upon seeing these vehicles, ran away screaming and crying and hating anyone in uniform?

  A courtly gentleman with grown children, Bou’s main concerns had been to see his family doing well and Bacardi sales growing. He was no follower of Fidel Castro and did not consider himself political, but with the brutality he had seen from the Batista security forces, Bou was becoming increasingly upset.

  We feel so oppressed and badly treated that the moment will come when, no matter how old we may be, there will be nothing left for us to do but take up arms ... against those inhuman and beastly ones who feel not a drop of pity when they kill in cold blood.... I would rather die heroically than continue under the bloody boots of these men who have no soul.

  Bou’s letter indicated why the revolution was able to triumph in Cuba. He and others in Santiago had come to hate the Batista regime so much that they were willing to support virtually any rebellious movement that could bring about its downfall, no matter what questions were raised about the rebels at the time. Manuel Jorge Cutillas, the young distiller, recalled later how he and his Bacardi relatives and colleagues would climb to the top of the Hatuey brewery for a better view of the fighting outside the city. From there, they could see a huge black and red M-26-7 flag flying in the nearby hills. Batista’s airplanes swooped down and strafed the area, and puffs of smoke rose from the trees. But Cutillas and his colleagues then heard the rebels on the ground firing back, and they cheered wildly, “Get ’em! Get ’em!”

  By the fall of 1958, the CIA had concluded that Batista was opposed by at least 80 percent of the Cuban people. Even his most stalwart defenders in the U.S. government were coming to the conclusion that he would have to go, though they were not anxious to see his regime replaced by a government dominated by the worrisome Fidel Castro. The CIA and the FBI were reporting that Castro himself was not necessarily a Communist but that he was surrounded by several people who were, including his brother Raúl and Che Guevara. In a last-ditch effort to find an alternative, a group of U.S. government officials and businessmen proposed that Batista step aside voluntarily in favor of a caretaker government dominated by anti-Batista military officers and respected civic leaders, most notably Pepín Bosch of Bacardi. Batista, however, refused to consider the initiative.

  It probably would not have worked in any case. Fidel Castro had said on more than one occasion that he and his followers would not be satisfied with a military coup that removed Batista from power, and by December 1958 his movement was essentially unstoppable. The U.S. ambassador soon advised Batista that the United States no longer believed he was effectively in control of Cuba, and Batista began making plans to flee. At 2:40 A.M. on January 1, 1959, he left Cuba on an airplane with his family and a few friends. Fidel Castro got the news while eating breakfast at his headquarters in the sugar mill town of Central América outside Santiago. Fearing that senior dissident military officers might attempt to install a new government on their own and thus block his revolution, Castro ordered rebel units to move immediately on Santiago, so that he could declare himself in charge.

  Castro encountered no resistance, and he was in Santiago by the end of the day. He and his small army of fighters and sympathizers arrived in a two-mile long caravan of trucks and jeeps, snaking slowly through streets crowded with wildly cheering throngs. All along the way, people hung out windows and crowded onto balconies, screaming in joy as the caravan passed.

  “¡Viva Fidel! ¡Viva la revolución! ¡Viva! ¡Viva!”

  Fidel stood in his jeep, waving and shaking the hands of people who rushed up to him. It was midnight on New Year’s Day before he arrived at Céspedes Park, the main plaza between the cathedral and the town hall, the spot where Mayor Emilio Bacardi had first raised the Cuban flag exactly fifty-seven years earlier. Emilio’s great-grandson Manuel Jorge Cutillas and other Bacardi family members were wedged onto the balcony of the Club San Carlos, overlooking the plaza, which was packed with thousands of delirious Castro supporters. Daniel Bacardi and other town leaders waited for Castro at the town hall, in a second-floor conference room. Castro moved around the room shaking hands, then stepped out onto a balcony overlooking the plaza and faced the roaring crowd, his hands raised high in triumph.

  Among those greeting him was the Santiago commander of the National Police, Colonel Bonifacio Haza, who had surrendered his police units to the rebel army. After a few minutes, Castro went back to the conference room to review the latest news on army movements, while various Santiago civic leaders took turns offering prayers and making speeches to the people in the plaza. At about 2:15 A.M., Castro himself returned to the balcony. To thunderous applause, he announced that Santiago, “the strongest bulwark of the revolution,” was to serve as Cuba’s new capital. It was one of many promises that Castro would soon break.

  Chapter 15

  Giving Fidel a Chance

  Fidel Castro was a genius in the exercise of power. Within a few hours of arriving in Santiago, he had designated a new president for Cuba—the anti-Batista judge Manuel Urrutia—and declared that “the full authority of the Republic” was vested in him. The significance of the act, however, was precisely the opposite of what Castro said it was: He had taken for himself the right to choose the country’s chief executive, and he had made sure that no one dared to challenge his decision. Similarly, Castro told the crowd in Santiago that he had no political ambitions, only to turn his immediate attention to the reinforcement of his personal position among the Cuban people.

  A lesser politician under the circumstances would have rushed to Havana to lead the national cheerleading over Batista’s ouster; Castro chose instead to make a slow overland trip from Santiago to the capital, leading a caravan of trucks, armored cars, and other vehicles up the country’s main east-west highway. The six-day journey enabled him to present himself dramatically to the population, town by town. Standing in his open jeep, waving to people along the road, followed by his scraggly rebel entourage, Castro over the course of those six days became the embodiment of the Cuban revolution. At every opportunity, he stopped to make speeches about the prospect of social and economic justice for Cubans of all classes. Each day, the crowds were bigger and more enthusiastic, with new rebel “recruits” joining the procession after every stop. Throngs of people waited for hours along the way, holding signs that said, “¡Gracias, Fidel!” Almost every scene and rousing speech was broadcast on Cuban radio and television, and Castro’s deliberate lag in reaching Havana served only to make the people there all the more excited to see him. The weekly magazine Bohemia prepared a special one-million-copy “Freedom Edition,” with a painting of Castro on the cover, captioned “Honor and Glory to the National Hero.”

  Castro’s route took him through the Havana suburb of El Cotorro, where t
he Bacardi company had one of its Hatuey breweries. As a family firm identified with Cuban patriots and untainted by any association with Batista, Bacardi Rum was eager to show its support for the country’s new leader, and the management and workers arranged a welcoming luncheon for Castro at the Cotorro brewery, just as the company had done for Ernest Hemingway in 1956. Another sumptuous feast was prepared, and the brewery workers hoisted a hand-painted banner on the brewery fence, welcoming Castro with the same message he saw in every city he passed. “¡Bienvenido, Fidel! ¡Gracias!”

  The luncheon was to be Castro’s last stop before his grand entrance to Havana. By early afternoon, the highway in front of the brewery was clogged with traffic and onlookers. The motorcade now included busloads of rebel volunteers, open trucks crowded with hitchhiking revolutionaries, and Sherman tanks driven awkwardly by young guerrillas still unfamiliar with the controls. Fidel himself had switched that morning to a new British helicopter his men had found at an army base five days earlier in Holguín. He landed at a field just south of El Cotorro, then made his way to the brewery in a jeep, with his driver weaving around the stalled traffic and even pulling onto the sidewalk, yelling to the frenzied crowd to stay back. Just as Castro approached the brewery, a messenger arrived with the news that his nine-year-old son Fidelito was waiting for him at a Shell gas station down the road. The boy’s mother, Mirta Diaz-Balart, whom Fidel had married and divorced years earlier, had arranged for Fidelito to be taken to the United States while Fidel was preparing his revolution, and Fidel had not seen him for more than two years. The brewery siren was already wailing to signal the guest of honor’s arrival, but upon hearing that his son was nearby, Fidel told his driver to go straight to the gas station. Aides who had been waiting at the brewery rushed off to catch up with him.

  The Bacardi employees and family members were disappointed that Fidel had not bothered to stop to see them, but they were still caught up in the excitement of the moment. Some followed Fidel downtown, while others watched him on television. Fifty-seven-year-old Joaquín Bacardi, the sole surviving son of Emilio’s younger brother José, had been among those waiting to greet Fidel in El Cotorro. The Harvard-educated and Denmark-trained brewer had a reputation for being sparse with words, but on the day Fidel and his men entered Havana, he was overcome with emotion. “It is the most marvelous thing that I have ever seen or expected to see in my life,” he told reporter Jules Dubois. “Cuba is now free, and I hope it will remain so for many years.”

  A day earlier, the Bacardi company had published an ad in Havana newspapers addressed to Cuba’s liberators: “Thank you to the people of Cuba and to the Cuban Revolution. Because of your efforts and sacrifice, once again it’s possible to say, ‘How lucky the Cuban is!’” In the preceding months of violence, ¡Qué suerte tiene el cubano! had seemed a bit inappropriate as a Bacardi ad slogan. The Bacardi and Hatuey names had nevertheless remained prominent over that time in baseball stadiums, in magazine and newspaper advertisements, and on radio and television. The nightly newscast on the leading television network in Cuba, CMQ, was sponsored by Hatuey beer, and this was in the era when commercial sponsorship meant a company effectively owned a program. Manolo Ortega, the same broadcaster who announced Hatuey-sponsored baseball games, read the news each night and then concluded his program by raising a glass of Hatuey to the camera and toasting his viewers. It was via Manolo Ortega and his nightly “Hatuey Newsreel” that many Cubans first saw and heard Castro making revolutionary speeches.

  Some questions about Fidel Castro’s rule had been raised immediately after his arrival in Santiago, when he began ordering the execution by firing squad of batistiano policemen, informers, and other regime collaborators. Capital punishment was prohibited in Cuba under the very 1940 Constitution that Castro had promised to uphold, but he justified the killings on the basis of a rebel “criminal code” he and his followers had drafted a year earlier in their mountain camp. The condemned men were offered only the barest excuse of a legal proceeding before they were lined up and shot.

  The mass executions (seventy in a single day in Santiago alone) bothered some of Castro’s own supporters, including some Bacardis. Their rum factory was just down the street from the slaughterhouse wall where hundreds of Cuban independence sympathizers, including the Virginius crew, had been shot in the previous century by Spanish troops. Manuel Jorge Cutillas, the young Bacardi engineer and great-grandson of Emilio, was staying with his parents in their house in the Vista Alegre neighborhood one night when he and his wife Rosa were awoken by gunfire; it continued so long that they never got back to sleep. The next day, Cutillas learned that a mass execution had taken place that night on nearby San Juan Hill, under the direction of Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother. The next night, the firing squads resumed their work. To his astonishment, Cutillas learned that among those executed was Colonel Bonifacio Haza, the former Santiago police commander who had personally surrendered his forces to Castro and stood alongside him on the balcony on January 1. The executions made Manuel wonder about the character of the new revolutionary regime.

  Those doubts, however, were not shared by Manuel’s parents, his grandfather Radamés Covani, or his grandmother Marina Bacardi, Emilio’s daughter, all of whom remained enthusiastic supporters of Fidel Castro and his new government. The majority of Cubans, in fact, seemed to accept the executions as a necessary step. Some of those shot were known torturers or assassins, and many Cubans figured they got what they deserved. For Castro, the executions served an additional purpose by demonstrating that he would not hesitate to use maximum force against those he judged to be mortal foes of the revolution. When the killings prompted an international outcry, Castro responded defiantly, calling on Cubans to show their solidarity at a mass rally outside the presidential palace on January 21. At least a half million people responded. “We will show them that public opinion is behind us, and that we are doing the right thing!” Castro declared. Many in the crowd carried banners that said, ¡Que Sigan Fusilamientos! (May Firing Squads Continue!) Cubans were ready for big change in their country, and most saw Fidel Castro as the man who could make it happen.

  Among those willing to give Castro the benefit of the doubt was Bacardi chairman Pepín Bosch, who returned from exile in Mexico on January 5, full of optimism about the future of his country. Having opposed Batista for so long, Bosch was thrilled that he was finally gone. “The triumph of the revolution makes me extremely happy,” Bosch told a reporter upon his arrival at the Havana airport. “Although it may not have appeared so, it had the support of almost all the Cuban people. The men who directed it are well intentioned, and they will have success in the difficult tasks that await them in reordering the national life.” Reminded that he had once been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, Bosch dismissed the idea. “This is the hour of the youth,” he said, “and we can expect nothing less than great days ahead for Cuba.” Privately, Bosch told friends and Bacardi associates that the mass executions and Castro’s bellicosity left him uncomfortable, but, for the moment at least, he was willing to look past such concerns.

  Santiago, the Cuban city that had suffered most in the previous two years, quickly returned to normal. Traffic began moving again, and the stores reopened. The Bacardi rum plant, having shut down in November, resumed operations. Before long, the city was back to its old partying ways, and young people who for months had been hiding from the police were out in the streets again. Barely three weeks after the fall of the Batista regime, Santiago hosted the biggest social event of the new era: Vilma Espín and Raúl Castro, the revolution’s First Couple, got married in a civil ceremony at the Rancho Club, a fashionable restaurant and motel founded and co-owned by Pepín Bosch.

  José Espín, the longtime Bacardi executive and stockholder, arranged a huge wedding reception for his daughter and her new husband, adorning the venue with hundreds of fresh flowers and supplying forty cases of champagne. Virtually the entire Bacardi clan was in attendance, including Emilio
Bacardi’s ninety-four-year-old sister-in-law, Herminia Cape, the younger sister of his wife Elvira Cape. Emilio and Elvira’s daughter Marina Bacardi and her husband Radamés were also there, along with Marina’s grandson Manuel Jorge Cutillas, who came despite his personal misgivings about the Castro brothers. Hundreds of Santiago residents showed up, as did many of Raúl’s fellow revolutionaries, with the exception of his brother Fidel, who was in Venezuela on his first overseas trip since taking power. Raúl arrived in his guerrilla uniform, black beret, and M-26-7 armband, packing his .45 pistol. Though twenty-seven years old, he still had trouble growing a full beard, and, perhaps to compensate, he had let his hair grow especially long, tying it back in a ponytail that Vilma’s girl-friends found amusing.

  The wedding was a high point of the Bacardi-Castro relationship: a daughter of Santiago’s elite, deeply rooted in the Bacardi circle, united with Fidel’s own brother, the man Fidel would designate as his heir and successor. The Bacardis and the Castros at that point shared not only their upper-class roots in Oriente province but their commitment to a new Cuba.

  The man who could carry the partnership forward on the Bacardi side, Pepín Bosch, went to Havana two weeks after returning to Cuba and pledged his support for the new government. On January 22, the day after the big proexecution rally at the presidential palace, Bosch paid a visit to Castro’s new minister of finance, a U.S.-educated economist named Rufo López-Fresquet. Bosch brought with him a check for $450,000, the amount the Bacardi company expected to owe in taxes later that year. Batista and his cronies had depleted the Cuban state treasury before they fled the island, and Bosch was making his company’s tax payment several months ahead of its due date in order to help the government pay its bills. Other Cuban businessmen were also paying their taxes in advance, but the Bacardi payment was the biggest to that point. López-Fresquet’s deputy drafted a receipt on the spot, thanking the company “for the cooperation you are lending to the Government of the Revolution.”