Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba
Page 60
7 Facundo Bacardi Lay’s twin brother, José Bacardi Lay, died of influenza in 1918. Six years later, Facundo also died prematurely, of pneumonia.
8 Hereafter, I will generally refer to the firm as the Bacardi Rum Company (or just Bacardi Rum), except when the context makes the legal Cuban name, Compañía Ron Bacardi, S.A., more appropriate.
9 Illegal liquor was referred to generically as “rum,” and the shipowners and liquor traffickers were known as rum runners, even though most of the liquor smuggled from Rum Row was whiskey.
10 Daniel Bacardi Lay (1895); Arturo Schueg (1917); José Bacardi Lay (1918); Facundo Bacardi Lay (1924); Facundito Bacardi Gaillard (1932); José “Pepe” Bacardi Fernández (1933).
11 Among those targeted was the pro-Machado mayor of Santiago, Desiderio Arnaz, whose father-in-law, Alberto Acha, was a Bacardi executive. Arnaz was imprisoned, but Acha was able to intervene to secure his son-in-law’s release. Arnaz, his wife Dolores, and his sixteen-year-old son, Desi Jr., then left Cuba for the United States, where Desi Jr. found television fame as the husband of Lucille Ball.
12 Emilio’s wife, Elvira Cape, died in 1933. Facundo Jr.’s wife, Ernestina Gaillard, died in 1949.
13 The slogan “¡Qué Suerte Tiene el Cubano!” caught on to such an extent that it became something of a national motto, appearing as the caption for a magazine spread on Cuban women and being used as a line in TV shows and popular songs. A 1999 dictionary of “Cubanisms” included the slogan among its entries, one of the more unheralded Bacardi contributions to Cuban culture.
14 Castro was apparently inspired by the words of Adolf Hitler, on trial for his role in the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923: “You may find us guilty a thousand times over, but the goddess of the eternal court of History will... tear to tatters ... the sentence of this court. For she will acquit us.” Thanks in part to the lengthy speeches Hitler made in his own defense, his popularity actually increased during the Munich trial. Castro carefully studied Hitler’s life and may have been seeking to replicate his courtroom success.
15 Enrique Oltuski, who served as a vice-minister under Che Guevara, said in a 2005 interview in Havana that Bacardi was nationalized “in spite of the fact that the owners had a positive historical role. It was a general rule. The nationalization of Bacardi was not against the enterprise, nor against that family. It was part of a national measure. Many North American enterprises took a very radical position against the Revolution, but the nationalization of Bacardi came [only] after we declared socialism, when we were against the big companies.”
16 Castro’s eagerness to see a counterrevolution develop in Cuba came straight from his reading of Karl Marx. Writing about the 1848 “February revolution” in France, Marx observed that it advanced not through its own achievements, “but on the contrary by the creation of a powerful, united counter-revolution ... in combat with whom the party of overthrow ripened into a really revolutionary party.” Castro was convinced that the same dynamic held in Cuba.
17 In a letter to Khrushchev on October 26, Castro appeared to suggest that if the United States were to send U.S. ground troops into Cuba, the Soviet Union should respond with a nuclear strike on the U.S. homeland. “I tell you this because I believe that the imperialists’ aggressiveness is extremely dangerous,” Castro wrote, “and if they actually carry out the brutal act of invading Cuba, that would be the moment to eliminate such danger forever through an act of legitimate defense, however terrible the solution would be.”
18 Bosch’s B-26 Invader was later delivered to the Honduran air force. Years later, by then painted black and orange and nicknamed Versatile Lady, the aircraft was put on display at the History and Traditions Museum at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas.
19 No one besides Freyre and Oliva was supposed to be aware of the CIA funding, which, according to a CIA memorandum, was processed “through a cover mechanism and therefore could not be traceable to the Agency.”
20 When the violently anti-Castro militant Orlando Bosch requested a two-hundred-thousand-dollar contribution from Bacardi in February 1975, Pepín Bosch sent a representative to inquire what he was planning with the money, and he had an associate report the request to the FBI.
21 Bosch always denied having had higher political ambitions in Cuba, but many of his closest associates suspected he would have jumped at a serious and realistic opportunity to be Cuba’s president. In a 1984 interview on the U.S. government’s Radio Martí, Bosch told the program host, a former Cuban politician named José Ignacio Rasco, that the presidential “shoe” would not have fit him, but he did not deny having a political calling. “You cannot be a merchant, an industrialist, or a banker and not be a politician,” Bosch said.
22 Alliances within and between the Bacardi family branches were sometimes based on trustee relationships. Some large amounts of stock inherited by younger family members were held for them in trust by others in the family, giving the trustees power within the company beyond what their own stockholdings would have provided.
23 The one “Bacardi” facility that consistently presented problems in this regard was the distillery in Barcelona, Spain, which Enrique Schueg had licensed to Francisco Alegre in 1910. Unlike other Bacardi operations, the Barcelona distillery functioned independently, and Alegre’s distillation and manufacturing techniques were not under Santiago’s control. The Bacardi tasters in Cuba considered the Spanish “Bacardi” undrinkable, and Pepín Bosch did all he could to cancel the license. Schueg had made a long-term agreement with Alegre and his family, however, and Bosch was not able to secure the closure of the Barcelona plant until 1975.
24 After the 1992 acquisition of Martini & Rossi, which had an excellent distribution system in France, Bacardi cut its ties with Pernod Ricard. Prado and other Bacardi executives realized that one of the reasons the French firm pursued Havana Club was to replace Bacardi in its own distribution network, and their annoyance with Pernod Ricard was somewhat moderated by that understanding.
ALSO BY TOM GJELTEN
Sarajevo Daily:
A City and Its Newspaper Under Siege