Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

by Gjelten, Tom

  The old Bacardi company, like other formerly private enterprises, was now a component of a large, state-run industrial conglomerate. Two years earlier, Castro had declared that Cuba was to follow the Marxist-Leninist model of development. Che Guevara took over the Ministry of Industry in February 1961 and promptly announced that the Cuban economy would be guided by a highly centralized planning process. The Cuban engineers, technicians, and professional managers and administrators who had gone into exile were replaced by advisers from the Soviet bloc countries or by Communist Party functionaries. The workers still belonged to unions, but the principle of representation had been reversed: The role of the union leadership was to pass down to the workers the quotas and other production goals dictated by government officials, rather than to represent the workers before the higher authorities, as unions normally would.

  The early results from the country’s experience with socialist economic management were not encouraging. In spite of Soviet and other Communist bloc aid worth more than five hundred million dollars in 1962 and 1963 (on a per-capita basis, about twenty times the value of U.S. aid to Latin American countries), Cuba’s economic output was declining, especially in those industries affected by a shortage of technical and management expertise. Che Guevara himself was upset by widespread signs of incompetence and mismanagement. Why was it, he asked his associates, that so many shoes produced after the revolution in Cuban factories lost their heels with just one day’s wear? And why did the Coca-Cola coming out of the newly nationalized factory in Havana taste so vile?

  The meeting with the Santiago power workers went on longer than Fidel’s schedulers expected, leaving no time that day for a visit to the old Bacardi factory downtown. The comandante was determined to talk to some rum workers, however, and he and his entourage arrived at the factory gate early the next morning, a Saturday. The factory was closed, so no one was on hand to receive Fidel except for the two laborers whose turn it was to sit by the front gate as security guards. They paid no heed when two unmarked sedans pulled up. When one of the car doors opened and Fidel Castro himself climbed out, the guards nearly fell out of their chairs.

  “Compañeros,” Castro said, pointing to the closed factory gate, “how do I get in?”

  One of the guards, a skinny black man in a tattered white shirt and baseball cap, jumped to his feet and stammered, “Well, comandante, I’m afraid I have to say there’s no way, because I don’t have a key.”

  “How about I kick the damn door down?” Castro suggested with a wink at the guard, a man named Gilberto Cala.

  “That’s fine, comandante,” Cala said, suitably deferential. “Or we can go in down there where they’re building a bar.” He pointed down the street to an entrance to the rum-bottling plant, where carpenters were at work on a little refreshment area. “I think it’s open down there.” By the time they reached the door, a crowd had begun to gather. Cala, who had worked in the maintenance department at the rum plant since 1946, took Fidel in and showed him the bottling operation. His coworker had run off to find one of the factory supervisors, and Cala found himself all alone with the comandante, single-handedly representing the enterprise. “This is where we bottle the añejo,” he said, with all the pride and authority of a factory executive.

  “How about we try some?” Fidel said. Cala grabbed an empty bottle, filled it with the golden añejo rum from one of the tanks that fed the bottling line, and passed it to the comandante. Fidel handed the bottle to his personal physician, René Vallejo, who accompanied him everywhere. After several assassination plots, Castro did not drink or taste anything without Vallejo’s clearance. Vallejo took a drink and passed the bottle on to the others in his group, and when nobody toppled over dead, Fidel himself took a sip. Within minutes, the bottle was empty.

  Word had gone out that Fidel was at the factory, and a crowd of workers soon showed up to greet him. But Castro was enjoying the company of Gilberto Cala and directed all his questions to the wiry maintenance man. “You know, compañero,” Fidel said, looking at Cala, “we’re going to have to come up with a new name for this rum. They say we can’t call it ‘Ron Bacardi’ anymore. What do you think we should call it?”

  Cala, basking in Fidel’s attention, was momentarily taken aback by the question, but then his eyes brightened. “How about we call it ‘Ron Patria o Muerte’?” he suggested, eager to show he was familiar with the comandante’s favorite slogan. Only in Cuba would a worker suggest producing something called Fatherland or Death Rum.

  “I don’t think so,” Castro said, chuckling. Looking around the facility, Castro asked which rum the enterprise was bottling in preparation for the carnival days, which were just over a week away. Cala explained that the carnival rum, a cheaper white variety, was in another warehouse. “Let’s go there,” Castro said. “And where’s this guy Matamoros? I want to see him.”

  Alfonso Matamoros, the veteran rum blender who had worked for years alongside Víctor Schueg and Daniel Bacardi, was recognized as one of the heroes of the revolutionary Cuban rum industry. Like his colleague Mariano Lavigne, he had passed up the opportunity to follow the Bacardi family into exile, and his rum-making expertise was key to the survival of the enterprise after nationalization. Fidel had heard that Matamoros had proved his loyalty to the revolution by showing up at the Bacardi factory on the night of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, armed with a .44-caliber revolver and ready to defend the facility against any returning exiles who might attempt to reclaim it. The story might or might not have been true, but Fidel wanted to meet the rum hero in any case.

  Alfonso Matamoros could not be located that Saturday morning, however, and Castro had to settle for being guided around the facility by Reynaldo Hermida, one of the foremen at the aging warehouse. Gilberto Cala tagged along, not wanting to miss out on the experience of a lifetime. When another guard stopped Cala at the entrance to the warehouse to ask where he was going, Cala responded, “I’m the one who received Fidel,” and the guard let him pass.

  At the warehouse, Castro interrogated Cala and Hermida and other rum workers, asking how many cases they were setting aside for the carnival celebrations, whether production techniques had changed since the factory was nationalized, and what steps they were taking to maintain rum quality. Hermida said the company veterans like Matamoros and Lavigne knew the Bacardi rum production secrets and were keeping the quality as high as ever. He showed Fidel some of the fifty thousand barrels the enterprise had inherited when the government nationalized the Bacardis’ rum operation in Santiago. Fidel, stroking his beard, listened intently. While he could talk for hours about construction or agriculture or even medicine, he knew next to nothing about rum making.

  “What’s important,” he said finally, “is that you do whatever you can to maintain and even improve the production here. Our rums are one of the key things we can export, and this industry is vital to our nation.” After that, Castro left. He told the rum workers he wanted to return and talk some more when he was back in Santiago on another occasion, but after his July 1963 visit, Castro did not visit the old Bacardi factory again.

  Gilberto Cala followed him out of the warehouse, still not believing he had actually been able to meet the comandante and guide him around the factory. Shaking his head incredulously, he turned to Gabriel Molina, a reporter from the Noticias de Hoy newspaper who was accompanying Castro, and whispered, “¡Pero mira como vine a conocer yo al hombrín, compay!” (See, brother, how I got to meet the Man!) Molina quoted Cala in his story about the factory visit, describing the Bacardi worker as “a prototypical santiaguero” and calling his comment on meeting Fidel “somewhat disrespectful, but so spontaneous as to be excusable.”

  As Fidel left the factory, he was mobbed by well-wishers in the working-class Santiago neighborhood. Castro and his entourage could barely reach their cars, and it took a half hour for them to inch their way through the crowd and proceed down the street. Now in his fifth year in power, the charismatic Fidel Castro clea
rly remained a popular leader—at least in Santiago, the cradle of Cuban revolutions. The affection many Cubans felt for him, however, did not translate into ideological support for Marxism-Leninism, nor did it mean that Cuban workers would be inspired to toil and produce on behalf of the revolution, no matter how hard Fidel exhorted them to do so.

  In 1964 the Cuban government finally gave up trying to export any rum under a “Bacardi” label, having been blocked from using the brand in one country after another. Their Marxist focus on the rum workers and their physical facilities as constituting the essence of the Bacardi enterprise had blinded the revolutionary leaders to the importance of the intangible trademark. Some of the rum bottled for the domestic market would still be sold as “Bacardi,” at least for a while, but the premium product made in the old Bacardi factory in Santiago would now be known as Caney rum, using the Taino Indian name for a chief’s lodge. The label change did little to boost overseas rum sales, however. The nationalized company had lost virtually all the overseas orders that the Bacardi family filled from its Santiago facility, and until those orders could be replaced with sales to the Soviet bloc countries or to Western buyers interested in the new Caney product, the nationalized company’s export earnings would be negligible.

  The Santiago rum factory was now part of the Empresa Consolidada de Licores y Vinos (ECONLIVI), Consolidated Enterprise of Liquors and Wines, a huge government conglomerate in which were included all the previously private liquor and wine companies across the entire island. ECONLIVI was in turn part of the massive Ministry of Industry, presided over by Che Guevara himself, employing more than 150,000 people and comprising nearly three hundred formerly independent companies. The organization of Cuba’s industries under Guevara’s version of socialism was highly centralized and hierarchical, with individual enterprise directors having little or no freedom to make their own commercial or strategic decisions. The problems of rigidly top-down management were further aggravated by a high turnover of the administrative staff. The nationalized Bacardi company in Santiago went through four directors in its first three years under state ownership, and none of the four had a business management background, not to mention liquor industry experience.

  The company also had to get by without its top professional and engineering staff, almost all of whom had left after nationalization. The distillery laboratory was virtually shut down, and the science-based quality control work that had been overseen by top Bacardi engineers such as Juan Grau and Manuel Jorge Cutillas ground to a halt. Finally, the U.S.-imposed trade embargo and the revolutionary government’s unwillingness to spend precious hard-currency reserves on imported items meant that the rum and beer operations in Santiago soon faced shortages of such items as labels and bottle caps. The enterprise began using corks to seal the bottles, but before long a glass shortage meant bottles themselves were hard to come by. A shortage of chemicals and spare parts adversely affected water treatment procedures in the rum distillery, raising the danger of contamination. The rum enterprise that had operated so efficiently under Bacardi family ownership lurched from one crisis to another in the first years after nationalization.

  Whether the quality of the rum produced in the old facility was immediately affected, however, was a matter of some dispute. In Miami, Pepín Bosch and other members of the Bacardi family claimed that any rum coming from their factory after the Communists took it over was an inferior product. In mid-1964, the Canadian ambassador in Havana wrote to Bosch to request six cases of family-produced Bacardi rum, and to Bosch the reason was obvious. “Fidel makes bad rum,” he explained to a Miami Herald reporter. For Bosch, any assessment of the quality of Cuban rum after 1960 was inseparable from the broader question of Castro’s rule.

  In Santiago, however, veteran Bacardi workers—including some who had been loyal to the family for years—were offended by such sweeping criticism. Mariano Lavigne, who had gone to work for the Bacardis in 1918, was especially indignant. For at least three years after nationalization, he claimed, virtually all the rum bottled in Santiago was drawn from the reserves the government had confiscated from the family company in October 1960, meaning it was essentially the same product the Bacardis had sold. “If [Cuban] Bacardi is bad now, it always was,” Lavigne told a Cuban reporter in December 1963. He said the practice of drawing down the reserves would continue through the end of 1964, while the company was being reorganized.

  The quality of socialist Coca-Cola had deteriorated rapidly, but rum production was different. The industry had deep social and cultural roots in Cuba, and many veteran rum workers on the island saw themselves as custodians of a national heritage that superseded ideology or political loyalties. Regardless of whether the workers saw themselves as committed fidelistas, many were motivated (at least in the beginning) by the pride they took in manufacturing a genuinely Cuban product, a sentiment not shared by Cuban workers in other industries, with the notable exception of cigar making. Finally, there was an aspect of artisanship in rum manufacturing that was learned through experience, not in engineering schools, and among the Bacardi workers who stayed on the job after the factory was expropriated, there was enough practical knowledge to ensure some continuity in traditional Bacardi rum-making procedures.

  The Don Pancho aging warehouse, a windowless building where barrels of rum were stacked from floor to ceiling, looked and smelled the same as it had in the days when Emilio and Facundo Bacardi Moreau ran the company. The warehouse foreman, Francisco Ayala, installed by Pepín Bosch in 1959, was only the second man to hold the position since “Don Pancho” himself had died in 1940. Humberto Corona, the factory production chief, had held the same position under the Bacardis, and the cantankerous Alfonso Matamoros was still blending rums. Matamoros was as strict about the rum factory during the socialist era as he had been when it was family owned, and he resented interference from Communist bureaucrats just as he had resented Bacardi family members who showed up at the factory thinking that access to it was their birthright.

  It was Mariano Lavigne, however, who played the most essential role in keeping the former Bacardi enterprise operating. No one knew it better. Lavigne had gone to work in the Santiago factory at the age of thirteen in order to help support his mother after his father died. In the beginning, he washed bottles, glued labels, swept floors, and helped the carpenters build barrels and casks. Everyone at the factory knew him as Marianito, a diminutive nickname that would stay with him his whole life. Knowing his mother depended on the meager wages he brought home, the lad put in long hours and soon impressed the company management with his diligence and his seriousness. Gradually he was given more responsibilities, and as a quick learner he began picking up the basics of rum making and increasingly gained the confidence of Bacardi family members. “They pampered me,” Lavigne said later of the Bacardis. “I was almost like an adopted son.” Facundo Bacardi Moreau, the son of the company’s founder and its first master rum blender, was in his final years in the family business when Lavigne went to work for the Bacardis, and the young man had the opportunity to watch the master at work and absorb some of his knowledge. Though he had no formal technical training, Lavigne learned the organoleptic method of assessing rum quality, judging it by its taste, its odor, and even the way it felt on one’s hands.

  Lavigne spent many years working at the Bacardi facilities in Mexico, and his familiarity with Bacardi rum-making techniques was such that a Mexican competitor once tried to lure him away, saying that with Lavigne’s experience and expertise they could put Bacardi out of business in Mexico. Lavigne claimed later that he rejected the offer out of hand, believing that to go to work for Bacardi’s Mexican rival would be “an act of treason” to Cuba and to the family that had brought him along since his childhood. “Somebody told me, ‘you’re an idiot,’” Lavigne said, “to which I responded, ‘I may be an idiot, but I’ll never be a traitor.’”

  Lavigne’s ties to the family were broken, however, when the Bacardis went into exile following t
he confiscation of their properties in Cuba. By agreeing to serve the nationalized enterprise, Lavigne distinguished between his loyalty to the Bacardis and his loyalty to Cuba, and the choice he made put him and the Bacardi family on opposite sides of an unbridgeable divide. He would not forget his long association with the family, however, and in the privacy of his Santiago home, Lavigne filled a china closet with Bacardi mementos: drink glasses etched with the Bacardi logo, Bacardi swizzle sticks, photographs of himself with Daniel Bacardi, Pepín Bosch, and other family members, plus every Christmas card and letter he and his wife received from old Bacardi friends.

  He was never much of a revolutionary, and Lavigne’s one encounter with Che Guevara almost turned into a disaster. As minister of industry, Guevara visited the nationalized Bacardi factory in 1964, one of many such stops he made around Cuba. While Lavigne was passionate about his rum, Guevara cared only about the fate of the Cuban revolution. From the outset, he made clear that what interested him about the former Bacardi operation in Santiago was how it would contribute to the strengthening of the revolutionary Cuban state, not whether the legendary quality or unique character of Cuban rum could be maintained.

  “So where do you make this rat poison?” Che asked Lavigne in their first meeting. Che came dressed in his olive green fatigues and beret, his black hair curling over his ears, a cigar in his shirt pocket. He was conducting business in his typically brusque, informal fashion, as if he were still a guerrilla leader in the midst of a revolution. Lavigne, like many Cuban men of his generation, prided himself on his appearance and came to work each day dressed neatly in a sports shirt or a guayabera. He was visibly annoyed by Guevara’s impertinence.