Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

by Gjelten, Tom

  Amelia Comas Bacardi, a great-great-granddaughter of Don Facundo, returned to Cuba in April 2002, the first of the U.S.-based Bacardis to do so in more than forty years. She had always wanted her husband Robert to see the tiny island near Santiago where she had spent the enchanting summers of her Cuban girlhood. Vacationing year after year with him and their children at his old family place in Connecticut, she complained that all she could share of her own homeland were the stories, such as how she and her sisters and brothers and Bacardi cousins used to jump from the deck of their grandmother’s summer house straight into the cool waters of Santiago Bay and dive for conch and starfish. Amelia had left Cuba when she was still a teenager, and she wasn’t even sure it was really as lovely as she remembered it.

  On a perfect April morning, she and Robert boarded a rusting ferry in Santiago for the slow trip out to Cayo Smith, the island where the Bacardis had once summered. The Cayo is a rounded hump of land set like a gem in the shimmering bay, about a mile from the old Morro fortress that has guarded the sea entrance to Santiago for more than three centuries. At the crest of the hump is a graceful little whitewashed church. Amelia got teary as soon as she caught sight of it. So much felt and looked familiar: the island’s contour against the surrounding hills, the brilliant blueness of the sky, the stillness of the Cuban air, the boatmen oaring soundlessly in the distance.

  Cayo Smith was in many ways unchanged from the days when the Bacardi family had vacationed there. There were no cars on the island in 1959, and the houses were built on piles over the water’s edge so boats could berth alongside. The fidelistas later renamed it Cayo Granma after the yacht that carried Fidel and his fellow rebel fighters to Cuba from Mexico, but the narrow street encircling the island was still for pedestrians only, and many houses were still perched on posts. As the ferryboat approached, however, Amelia could see that the Cayo and its environs had not so much been preserved as simply neglected. The beach where she and her friends had held swimming parties was mostly deserted—untended, overgrown with weeds, and strewn with uncollected litter. When Amelia spotted her grandmother’s house, she was horrified. The grand summer place of her childhood was now a teetering wreck. Many of the windowpanes were gone, and the rusty, corrugated tin roof was missing patches. The wood-frame siding still showed tinges of color, but the house appeared not to have been painted in years. The porch posts looked like they were rotting.

  Leaving the ferry landing, Amelia and Robert took the stone walkway that led to her old house and on around the island. They passed young men idling in the shade of the banyan trees, and Amelia wondered if she had played with their parents. She now had a full head of gray hair, her gait had slowed, and she was worlds apart from this poor place. The family rum business founded in Santiago by her forebears had developed into the largest family-owned spirits firm in the world, worth at least five billion dollars. Amelia, a stockholder, was well off and well traveled, and when she came back to Cuba it was at the suggestion of the ranking U.S. diplomat in Havana.

  The front door of the old summer house was locked. A sign identified the building as a handicrafts center, but no one was there, and the windows were shuttered. As they were investigating, a short, wiry man with curly gray hair suddenly approached, clearly perturbed by the nosy strangers. “What are you doing here?” he wanted to know. Dressed only in shorts and sandals, his deeply bronzed skin suggested a life around the water.

  “I’m looking around,” Amelia said. “This is my house.”

  “No, it’s not,” he said. “This house belonged to Cachita Bacardi.”

  “She was my grandmother.”

  The man’s eyes widened. “Are you Marlena?” he asked excitedly. “Lucía?” Amelia had two older sisters. “Amelia?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Priki!” he announced with a giggle, opening his arms to hug her. As a boy, he had lived across the street from the Bacardi house and played regularly with Amelia’s twin brothers. It was Priki who had taught Amelia and the others how to dive for shellfish. He had lunched at Amelia’s house and she and her brothers at his. He now had a slight paunch around the middle, but his arms and shoulders were as sinewy as ever. He and his wife and daughters still lived with his elderly mother in the house where he had grown up, and Priki considered himself the custodian of the Bacardi property. “I stop everyone who comes snooping around here,” he declared proudly.

  Priki had a key to the house and showed the visitors inside. After Amelia’s family left, he explained, the house was assigned to the Federation of Cuban Women, an organization created by the Cuban authorities to mobilize women for the chores of the revolution. Later, a pharmacy operated there. For the past fifteen years, the house had been used as a marine taxidermy workshop by a group of twenty local women, including Priki’s wife. They stuffed and mounted local exotic fish, lacquered seashells, and produced postcards and other souvenir items for sale to tourists. The interior walls of the house had been removed, leaving two large rooms filled by worktables and lined with shelves where the women kept their supplies. The house was even flimsier than it had appeared from afar. Several of the floorboards were rotten, and the water below was visible between the cracks. Walking through the house, Amelia reconstructed the layout as she remembered it. “The kitchen was over here,” she said, pointing to a corner of the crafts work area near the front porch. Only the bathroom was in its original location.

  The taxidermy collective was organized as a unit of the National Union of Light Industry Workers, under the control of the Cuban Communist Party. The walls were covered with signs and posters exhorting the women who worked there to maintain “high revolutionary values” and work for the “defense of socialism,” but Priki ignored them. Many people on Cayo Smith, he said, remembered Caridad “Cachita” Bacardi fondly and still viewed this decaying structure as her house. The news that a Bacardi daughter was back on the island spread within minutes, and local residents were soon swarming around the visitors. “Do you want to see the church?” someone asked. “Run and get the key! We have to show her the church!”

  The Bacardis were white, upper-class Cubans, and it is impossible to generalize from their lives to the experience of the whole Cuban people, a great many of whom were poor. They had once been slave owners on an island where nearly half the population had some African ancestry. But they did love their country and were generous citizens, and they played a progressive leadership role in Cuba as long as they were able to. Much of the national narrative in Cuba is about missed opportunities, and the Bacardis’ story is intriguing partly because it raises what-if questions: The country would have evolved differently if the Bacardis were the rule rather than the exception among a generally irresponsible Cuban elite, or if they had been asked to stay and help and not been pushed away in the name of the country’s “social transformation.” In response to Fidel Castro’s revolution, a million Cubans—a tenth of the country’s population—went into exile. A broken thread in modern Cuban history was left to dangle, with its own cast of characters and a unique set of experiences, ideas, and possibilities. Part of the Cuban question now is whether and how its past and future can be reconnected. The Bacardi case is instructive.

  Amelia returned to Santiago half expecting to find that her family had been forgotten—or worse, that they were now seen as enemies. A whole generation of the city’s population had grown up without any contact with the Bacardis, and to the extent her family was still mentioned by the authorities, it was in a critical context. The name “Bacardi” was now associated with the counter revolution and the U.S. embargo and the effort to “steal” Cuba’s premier rum brand. Ricardo Alarcón, for years Castro’s point man on U.S. relations, told a reporter in 2001 that he considered the Bacardis to be “key to the whole policy of economic warfare against Cuba. They are the group that opposes the Cuban revolution abroad.” Knowing the Cuban government’s sensitivity to the Bacardi connection, Amelia used her married name in filling out her visa application, but
Castro’s agents figured out who she was and followed her and her husband almost everywhere they went in Cuba, making little effort to hide their presence.

  In the Bacardis’ hometown, however, Amelia found that her family was still held in high regard. When she visited the Bacardi plot at Santiago’s Santa Ifigenia cemetery, she found the graves all carefully tended. Emilio Bacardi’s monument, an obelisk of polished black granite on a pedestal, was in perfect condition. The patch of grass surrounding it was neatly trimmed and bordered by a black wrought-iron fence. The tomb of Amelia’s grandfather, Emilio’s son Facundo Bacardi Lay, was in similar condition. The white marble column at the head of his grave was topped by a bust of Facundo as a man of about forty. (He died young.) Someone had removed the pair of steel spectacles that were once fastened to his stone face, but otherwise the monument was untouched.

  Amelia was also pleased by her visit to the municipal museum that Emilio Bacardi had established in Santiago during his mayoralty, a grand neoclassical edifice with Corinthian columns. She knew that the Communists had kept it open and that it was still called the Museo Bacardi, but she did not expect to find it so well maintained. Showing up at the front door with Robert one afternoon, Amelia casually told the attendant who she was. Astonished, the attendant called the museum director, José Olmedo, at home, and he came running over to give the couple a personal tour. Amelia told him she only wanted to see “a few things” that she remembered from visiting the museum as a child.

  Olmedo’s father and grandfather had worked for the Bacardis in their rum and beer businesses before the revolution, and he told Amelia that they had always spoken highly of her family. A diligent student of Santiago history, he could recite Emilio’s achievements as mayor and was delighted that he could show off his knowledge to someone who appreciated it. Though rules are not broken lightly in Cuba, Olmedo told Amelia and Robert they could see whatever they wanted in the museum and could disregard the posted signs against taking pictures. “That doesn’t apply to you,” he said.

  In his old age, Fidel Castro became more intransigent than ever. He may have been worrying that the reforms he had reluctantly supported after the collapse of the Soviet bloc could set the stage for a rollback of his revolution. In 1995 he had complained that “every opening has brought risks to us,” and within the next few years he reversed many of the previous reforms. Opportunities for self-employment were once again restricted, and Castro made further foreign investment on the island so unattractive that by 2001 it totaled only about forty million dollars, less than in any year since 1993. At the same time, he moved to further limit any political activity that could potentially undermine his rule. When a human rights activist named Oswaldo Payá organized a petition drive in 2001 to pressure Cuba’s National Assembly to expand civil liberties, Castro countered with an intimidating campaign of his own. Cubans across the country were pressured to sign a declaration that the one-party socialist system should be “untouchable,” and the Assembly subsequently amended the constitution to say precisely that. A year later, Castro ordered the arrest of seventy-five prominent dissidents, human rights activists, and independent journalists, all of whom were put through summary trials and sentenced to long prison terms, allegedly for having collaborated with the U.S. government. It was the most sweeping repression of the opposition movement in Cuba in four decades. The dissident crackdown cost Castro important support in the West, but he dared go ahead with it because he had found a new strategic ally in Venezuela’s oil-rich autocrat, Hugo Chávez. By 2005, Chávez was providing Cuba with more than ninety thousand barrels of oil per day, a subsidy worth nearly two billion dollars a year.

  After the initial burst of enthusiasm in Cuban investment opportunities, foreign businesses became increasingly disillusioned about the prospect of making good money on the island. A major complaint was the unenforceabil ity of laws and contracts. There was no independent judiciary in Cuba, so when businesses saw taxes unfairly imposed, contracts broken, or regulations misapplied, they had nowhere to turn for an appeal. The inescapable reality was that Cuba remained a dictatorship, where authorities were deeply suspicious of foreigners and determined to monitor their every move. One Spanish businessman, frustrated after years of dealing with the Cuban state, wrote an open letter advising other businessmen to stay away from the island. “Transactions and business dealings do not occur between genuine entrepreneurs,” he wrote, “but rather in a dark universe of spies and police.” By 2006, the London-based Economist Intelligence Unit was judging Cuba to be among the least attractive business environments in the world, ranked eightieth of eighty-two nations, trailed only by Iran and Angola.

  At Castro’s direction, the Cuban government by then had recentralized control over the economy, withdrawing much of the autonomy given to state enterprise managers and their foreign partners in the mid-1990s. Preserving the regime’s hold on power was the single idea behind all economic, investment, and trade policies. In tourism, the government favored the development of huge, physically isolated complexes that could be closely controlled, and it promoted all-inclusive packages over less restrictive tourism that would allow foreigners to interact with ordinary Cubans. In other sectors, secret investment deals with Venezuela and China took precedence over transparent arrangements with Western firms. By the end of 2006, the number of Cuban businesses operating jointly with foreign partners had dropped by nearly 50 percent from the level of four years earlier. Those that survived were primarily large-scale ventures in high-profit areas: mining, energy, tourism, telecommunications, biotechnology. And rum.

  There may be no bar on Earth where a mojito is quite so perfect as one sipped on the terrace of Havana’s elegant Hotel Nacional. Under the portico, gray-haired guitarists in straw hats and white guayabera shirts sing old Cuban love songs and sway to the conga beat of the beaming young musicians at their side. The rocky bluff at the far end of the hotel gardens drops sharply to the sea and the blue sky beyond. The air is steamy, and when the waiter arrives with the iced drink, the napkin around the glass is damp. The sweetness of the rum and cane sugar and the fragrance of the crushed mint refresh instantly.

  Rum is one of the precious elements—along with cigars—that keep a hallowed place in Cuba no matter which ideology rules. Julia Ward Howe, the Bostonian songstress and social reformer, was shocked to be offered a drink everywhere she went on a visit in 1859. “Rum is not a wicked word in Cuba,” she noted with amazement in her diary. It still isn’t and never will be. When Cuban men gather to play dominoes on a card table in a park or along a sidewalk, there is often a bottle at someone’s elbow. When a new one is opened, it is first tipped; a splash of rum on the ground sanctifies the spot. The history of Cuba can be narrated around tales of rum; it has been a symbol of Cuban life from the days of sugar and slaves through the Castro era. Visiting tourists who rarely drink rum at home ask for it as soon as they arrive, just as they always have.

  The Hotel Nacional was famous for its rum mojitos back when it was the favored accommodation of Miami gangsters and Hollywood stars, and in March 2004 the Havana Club venture celebrated its tenth anniversary at the same hotel. The highlight of the week-long celebration was the International Havana Club Grand Prix, a cocktail-mixing competition sponsored by the French-Cuban venture as a way of promoting its products. Some of the world’s most flamboyant bartenders flew to Havana for the event, along with hundreds of invited guests. The contestants, representing twenty-three countries, assembled on the stage of the hotel ballroom to take turns preparing four cocktails with Havana Club rum—a mojito, a daiquiri, a Cuba libre, and a “Habanísima,” basically a mojito without the soda water. They had five minutes to mix the drinks before a panel of judges and were rated on flair points as well as on the quality of the final product. The onlooking guests were continuously supplied with free samples.

  Cuba was a police state, but it was becoming a playground again, as it had been in the golden age when beautiful people came to Havana and fell under
a charm of sweet mambo rhythms and Caribbean romance. The authorities had concluded that their country had an economic interest in promoting tourism, rum, and cigars, even if it meant presenting an image of Cuba more reminiscent of the 1950s than of Che Guevara and leftist solidarity brigades. The collaboration with Pernod Ricard to promote and market Havana Club products was one of the government’s few remaining alliances with a Western capitalist firm, but it had become a top priority. At the state-owned Hotel Nacional, the musicians’ shirts were all emblazoned with the Havana Club logo, and every drink served in the hotel bar came in a Havana Club glass. The yellow scooter taxis parked outside the front gate all carried Havana Club decals, and the drivers all wore Havana Club T-shirts.

  The French-Cuban operation made strategic as well as commercial sense. Marketing Havana Club rum meant marketing Cuba. The joint venture hired Cuban salsa musicians, dressed them in Havana Club outfits, and sent them on European tours to play at outdoor festivals and cultural events, advertising a Cuban lifestyle. Pernod Ricard had not simply joined with a state-owned company; the partnership was with the state itself. It had an inherently political aspect—not because it promoted revolutionary socialism or an anti-U.S. message, but because it presented Cuba in entirely positive tones.

  The arrangement was good for both sides. In the first ten years after the establishment of the joint venture, global Havana Club rum sales increased fourfold, from 460,000 cases in 1994 to 1.9 million cases in 2003. The brand was still far behind Bacardi worldwide, but Bacardi sales were flat, whereas Havana Club had the top growth rate in the world among spirits. Its seven-year-old rum was doing especially well, drawing positive reviews from connoisseurs and comparing well to highly regarded rums from such countries as Haiti, Guatemala, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Jamaica. As a premium product, a bottle of seven-year-old Havana Club rum sold for more than twenty dollars in Europe.