57. Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba
Since its founding nearly 160 years ago in Cuba, one family has run Bacardi. They fought for Cuba's freedom, fostered an artistic community in the country, and rebuilt their business after fleeing the country because of Fidel Castro. Even today, they continue the struggle for Cuban identity from abroad. It's the history of Cuba and what it means to be Cuban, distilled into a glass of Bacardi rum.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | and more.
Reported and produced by Charlie Herman, with Julia Press and Sarah Wyman.
Read more:
- Tom Gjelten, Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba
Transcript
Note: This transcript may contain errors.
CHARLIE HERMAN: When Fidel Castro, sometimes called Cuba's "Maximum Leader" was alive …
[CASTRO SPEECH]
CH: Well, to put it mildly, he had a lot of enemies … especially in the Cuban exile community in Miami, Florida.
After Castro rose to power in 1959, tens of thousands of Cubans fled their homes for the United States. One of them was Jose, or Pepin, Bosch. He was one of Castro's fiercest opponents. He also ran Bacardi, you know, the company that makes rum.
TOM GJELTEN: There's no Bacardi executive or family member who feels more personally betrayed by Fidel Castro than Pepin Bosch himself.
CH: This is Tom Gjelten, author of "Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba." Originally, Bosch actively supported Castro. But that changed when he saw how the Cuban leader was amassing power and, from his perspective, turning into a dictator. Within a few years, Bosch did a complete 180 and actively supported overthrowing Castro.
TG: I was just reading the other day, a memoirs of his lawyer who, uh, talked about how the CIA approached Pepin Bosch and got him to rent a boat that became later used by the CIA to sabotage sugar exports from Cuba.
CH: This is just one of several examples of how Bosch tried to bring down Castro's Communist government.
TG: He bought an airplane and he based it for a time in Nicaragua and for a time in Costa Rica and had it outfitted with bombs, and his idea was that he was going to recruit a pilot who was going to fly the plane to Cuba and bomb oil refineries in Cuba. He was, he wanted to be careful. He didn't want to bomb any civilian population centers. But he figured that if he could put the oil refineries out of business, that that would be, sort of, a very big contribution to this overthrow movement.
CH: That's wild to think that like the, the leader of a major international company is secretly trying to bomb the oil facilities of a, of another country. I mean, it's, it's, it doesn't even seem believable. Did the bombings happen?
TG: The bombing? The bombing did not happen because, what he was talking about was basically a suicide mission.
CH: Yet, here was the leader of Bacardi, a company rooted in Cuban culture, actively plotting to bring down Cuba's leader, Fidel Castro. So what fueled this thirst for retribution? Rum.
From Business Insider, this is Brought to you by... Brands you know. Stories you don't. I'm Charlie Herman.
Bacardi is one of the world's biggest sellers of rum and owns brands like Grey Goose Vodka and Patron Tequila. It's also the name of the family that's run the company for nearly 160 years.
Bacardi was founded in Cuba at a time when Cubans began fighting for their independence from Spain. Nearly a hundred years later, Bacardi had to start again after Fidel Castro came to power and seized the company.
What followed has been a fight over rum, but more importantly, over what it means to be Cuban.
So the next time you order a Bacardi and coke, remember its other name: Cuba Libre. Free Cuba.
Stay with us.
ACT I
CH: In the early 2000s, I lived in Miami for several years. I was a producer for ABC News and a couple of times, I got the chance to travel to Cuba to report on several stories. Interviewing and meeting Cubans there as well as Cuban-Americans in South Florida, I heard the emotion in their voices when they talked about their connection to the island. People like Vanessa Garcia and Victoria Collado.
VANESSA GARCIA: Well, we're both super Cuban and I want to emphasis the super. (laughs)
CH: This is Vanessa.
VG: I have a political prisoner grandfather and uncle for example, um, a, there was Jose Marti, like in my, in my veins, essentially read to me like from the womb, patriot poet of Cuba.
CH: She's a writer and artist born and raised in Miami, where she still lives.
VG: I learned Spanish first I, everything about what we did was Cuban. You know, all my life, I said, I'm Cuban, even though I had not been to Cuba until I was 30.
CH: And this is Victoria. She's a theater director … and she also has a lot in common with Vanessa.
VICTORIA COLLADO: Yeah, it's creepy at certain points because Spanish was also my first language. We grew up in the same neighborhood, um, families that was political prisoners. I went to Jose Marti school, uh, and literally had, was dressed in a Cuban flag while walking down eighth street. So it can't get more Cuban than that.
CH: Listening to them talk about their Cuban identity, Vanessa made a distinction between being an immigrant to the United States and being what she says many Cubans see themselves as: refugees.
VG: And I do think that there is a difference because you're a refugee from a place you cannot go back to. Um, you can't go back for a reason, because you were exiled or because you're going to get killed if you go back or because there's really no way back for a very long time.
CH: About three years ago, their "super Cuban selves" began working with Bacardi. A marketing agency for the company approached them to write a show about a brand of rum that originated in Cuba. But to tell that story, you also have to tell the story of Cuba itself, because rum is so connected to the island's history: The sunshine, the sugar cane, Havana's nightclubs in the 1930s and 40s. Listen to the music of "son cubano" … from Cuban performers like the Buena Vista Social Club or Benny More ...
[BENNY MORE CLIP]
CH: Just try and stop yourself from swaying side-to-side to the sound of those classic Cuban drums. Imagine yourself kicking back and relaxing with a rum drink in your hand, like a daiquiri or a mojito. That image of Cuba — at least to non-Cubans — really took off after Prohibition started in 1920. And one company that promoted that idea was Bacardi.
RACHEL DORION: Bacardi rum was really the one that put Cuba on the map and put some of these cocktails in people's minds.
CH: This is Rachel Dorion.
RD: For Bacardi, I am the archivist. I am a sixth generation Bacardi family member.
CH: Dorion says Bacardi became popular in America and around the world because of Prohibition. I know. It's kind of ironic. But once Americans couldn't legally wet their whistle at home, Cuba, only 90 miles away, became the place to get a good drink.
RD: Bacardi decided to focus on if we can't get Bacardi rum to the Americans, how can we bring the Americans to Bacardi rum?
CH: It did so with marketing campaigns that included an ad of a glamorous flapper with the tagline "Cuba is great. There's a reason. Bacardi." Within ten years, tourism had skyrocketed. By 1930 nearly 70,000 Americans were visiting the island each year, and many of them were welcomed to Cuba by Rafael "Pappy" Valiente, a Bacardi employee
RD: He had this nickname as the happiest salesman in all of Havana because his sole job for Bacardi was to greet people as they arrived on their plane with the Bacardi cocktail in hand.
CH: When Prohibition ended in 1933, rum, and especially Bacardi rum, continued to be a popular drink in America. It's easy to see why — it's a light spirit that mixes well with other, often sweeter ingredients to make classic cocktails like rum and coke or pina colada or the once famous Prohibition-era drink, the "Mary Pickford:" rum, pineapple juice and grenadine.
But this wasn't always the case when it came to Cuban rum. Until the mid-1800s, it was rough and harsh, and largely a byproduct of the sugar industry. That changed mostly thanks to Don Facundo Bacardi. In 1862, he founded the company that bears his name after spending years perfecting a recipe for making the lighter style rum we drink today.
RD: Taking the time to perfect that process, um, it was incredibly revolutionary. What he came up with as a process for rum production was, was groundbreaking at the time.
CH: If you've listened to previous episodes of this podcast, you know I would love to tell you about how this new rum was made — the special yeast, the use of charcoal, how the rum was aged in American oak, but sadly, that'll have to be for another time.
What's important for this story is that as Bacardi the business grew and became Cuba's first multinational company, the Bacardi family became actively involved in the fight for a free Cuba, independent from Spain.
RD: Not only was the Bacardi family known for this great rum that they produced, but for what they did to give back to the community, um, to fight for the independence of the Cuban people in the late 19th century.
CH: That starts with Emilio, the son of Don Facundo, the man who founded Bacardi. I might add that Emilio is also Rachel Dorion's great-great-grandfather.
RD: He was the president for the company after Facundo passed away. But on the other hand, he was equally dedicated to fighting for the independence and freedom of all Cuban people.
CH: By the late 1870s, Emilio was running the family rum business while he was also supporting the rebels fighting to overthrow Spain and end colonial rule of Cuba. Here again is Tom Gjelten.
TG: Emilio himself never took up arms, so it wasn't as though he was a combatant or, you know, had any sort of commanding roles, but behind the scenes, he was a key clandestine player and the Bacardi business provided the perfect cover for his clandestine activity.
CH: Emilio raised money for guns and ammunition and secretly passed messages back and forth among the rebels. But Spanish authorities found out. They arrested and imprisoned him in a penal colony off the coast of North Africa twice. Those experiences only reinforced Emilio's commitment to a free Cuba. He was part of a generation of men who held romantic ideals about nationalism and revolution, where writers like Jose Marti — the patriot poet of Cuba — lived and died for what they believed.
In 1898, after years of fighting (and with the intervention of the United States), Cubans finally gained their independence from Spain. But in the decades that followed, they often struggled establishing a democracy. And it's worth mentioning, part of the reason is because of the complicated and at times heavy-handedness of the United States. On several occasions, the US military intervened directly in Cuba's affairs.
For his part, Emilio did what he could to help. In his hometown of Santiago in the eastern part of the island, Emilio became the city's first Cuban mayor. Later, he served as senator.
While Cuba haltingly came into its own as an independent nation, Bacardi the company flourished. In the first half of the 20th century, sales increased on the island (remember, Prohibition?) and internationally. Bacardi called its rum: "The One That Has Made Cuba Famous." Cubans admired the company's success and pointed to it with pride.
TG: To the extent that Cuban patriotism and Cuban nationalism became a more potent force in Cuba, the Bacardi's benefited economically and financially because they produced a product that was arguably, there was no other product in Cuba that was so intimately associated with Cuban history and the Cuban identity as Bacardi rum.
CH: From the early 1900s and up to the 1950s, Bacardi became the biggest sponsor of Cuban culture: baseball teams, museums, libraries and what would later become the National Ballet of Cuba. Bacardi was served at the Havana nightclubs and casinos that made Cuba world famous. On the radio, there was the "Bacardi Hour" and other programs sponsored by Bacardi that showcased Cuban music and performers like Celia Cruz, who years later would be called the "Queen of Salsa."
[CELIA CRUZ CLIP]
CH: Bacardi celebrated the best the nation had to offer. Yet at the same time its rum had become a symbol of Cuba, the company was frequently at odds with the Cuban government. Corruption was rampant and political instability often resulted in violence. So Bacardi made a decision that was both political and financial. Not only did it sell rum in dozens of countries, it started making rum overseas so the company would be less dependent on what was happening in Cuba. It would be a fateful decision.
In 1952, a military coup led by Fulgenico Batista brought the end to democracy on the island and the beginning of a dictatorship (one that, later, received support from the US government.)
Faced with a repressive regime that brought to mind the Spanish government during the colonial era, a new generation of Bacardis followed in the footsteps of their forefather Emilio Bacardi and fought for a free Cuba.
TG: They were willing to take a stand against the Batista dictatorship.
CH: No one more so than Pepin Bosch. Bosch had married Emilio Bacardi's niece. And like his in-laws, he financially supported democratic causes in Cuba. After the 1952 military coup, Bosch worried Batista might try to confiscate the Bacardi business. So Bosch and other family members opened their pocket books to help the rebel they hoped would restore democracy to Cuba: Fidel Castro.
TG: So the Bacardis were among the main financial backers, of Fidel Castro's of movement, um, to the extent of actually buying arms and Pepin Bosch himself, um, contributed thousands and thousands of dollars.
CH: By his own estimates, Bosch gave more than $300,000 in today's money to Castro.
Within a few years, Batista realized he had lost control of the island and had practically no support, so on January 1, 1959, he fled. When Castro heard the news, he rushed to the town of Santiago — home of the Bacardis — and stood on the balcony of the town hall before a cheering crowd. There to greet him, were the Bacardis.
TG: The Bacardi's played a very important role in reassuring sort of the moneyed class in Cuba, that this was going to be okay, that Cuba needed this revolution, that it needed the reforms that Fidel Castro represented.
CH: Unfortunately, the Bacardis' faith in Castro would cost them nearly everything: their business, their home and their identity.
That's when we come back.
ACT II
CH: We're back.
In January 1959, Fidel Castro arrived in Havana. Massive crowds welcomed him and his fellow revolutionaries.
[APPLAUSE]
CH: Some business leaders (and US officials), however, were a little less excited about the young revolutionary fighter with the bushy beard now in charge. Castro regularly made anti-America statements, hinted at nationalizing foreign-held property and even more disturbing, ordered executions of political opponents. While Castro repeatedly denied he was a communist, many of the people around him were. Clearly, Castro intended to implement some big economic changes, but how would they affect private enterprise?
Despite all this, Pepin Bosch and other Bacardis mostly continued their support of Castro. In fact…
TG: Pepin Bosch is going out of his way to reassure other Cuban businessmen, that this was a project that they should support, and they shouldn't worry about it because Fidel Castro believed in democracy that he was going to do the things that Cuban needed done.
CH: But within a few months of watching Castro's government, Bosch realized that those other business leaders might have been right to worry about Castro. This became clearer when he travelled with Castro to the United States in 1959. Bosch only decided to go after Castro personally called and convinced him. In later years, he frequently retold the story.
"You cannot refuse me," Castro told him. "It is your obligation to come with me to Washington." Bosch gave in and said yes. He explained later, "I had to give him the benefit of the doubt."
During the 11-day trip….
BRITISH PATHE: New York's Pennsylvania Station rarely has seen anything like it. Only the magnetism of a Castro could produce it.
CH: Castro was often greeted by cheering fans.
BRITISH PATHE: The welcomers are eager to see him to touch him… even a child appears dressed in in Castro-like garb.
CH: In his military fatigues, he laid a wreath at the Lincoln Memorial, ate hot dogs at Yankee Stadium, and sat for an interview with NBC's Meet the Press.
MEET THE PRESS: I am not Communism, I am not agree with Communism. There is no doubt for me between democracy and Communism ….
CH: It was an eye-opening trip for Bosch. During the flight to the US, Castro asked him for his help. As the president of Bacardi, the country's largest Cuban-owned industrial business, Bosch was respected by other businessmen and labor leaders. Castro hoped Bosch could get Cuban businesses and labor to back his government. Bosch replied, quote "If you want me to help you, you'll have to allow elections and give the workers their freedom." At the word "freedom," Bosch said Castro walked away and never spoke to him again on the trip. Yet once in Washington, Bosch heard Castro tell the Secretary of State that he did want free elections and democracy. Bosch realized he couldn't trust Castro.
TG: Right up into the 1960s, uh, the Bacardi's continued to stand behind Fidel Castro and say, this is a government that we as Cubans need to support.
CH: What changed?
TG: What changed was that Fidel Castro, decided that he wanted to have socialism in Cuba.
CH: And Castro's brand of socialism would leave little room for private companies like Bacardi. Bosch feared Castro's government might try to nationalize Cuban businesses like his.
In 1960 Castro seized more power. Government officials were pushed out, often replaced by lackeys. He gave speeches attacking the United States, sent former supporters to prison, and began shutting down independent media outlets. Bosch and other Bacardis saw Castro becoming more authoritarian -- what would be called Cuba's "Maximum Leader." So Bosch took steps to protect the Bacardi company as well as preparing his family for the worst. He started mailing the original Bacardi trademarks one by one to the offices in New York... just for safekeeping.
Then one day, Bosch knew it was time to leave Cuba. It started with an American oil company the Castro government had nationalized.
TG: They had a, an account in a New York bank, with more than a million dollars in it. And the Cuban government having expropriated the oil company wanted to get its hands on this, uh, New York bank account.
CH: And it turns out, the person who could do it for them that was Bosch. He had co-founded the firm with US investors. So one day, some Cuban officials paid Bosch a visit with a message from Castro:
TG: They came to his office and they said, um, Mr. Bosch, you are a friend of Cuba. We really appreciate your contribution to the struggle. We do need your signature on this check.
CH: Bosch knew that if he didn't sign the check, he could be in a lot of trouble, perhaps even arrested. It could also be bad for Bacardi.
He knew at that point, he had to get out of Cuba fast.
So he made an excuse to temporarily put off the officials, and then immediately began preparing to flee the country. But Bosch had a problem; He didn't have an exit permit. He did, however, know the Interior Minister who could get him one.
TG: He goes to the interior minister's office, uh, and says he's there to get his exit permit. The secretary says 'he's not here right now.' And so Pepin just sits down in the office and says, 'I'm staying here until he comes back.' And after several hours, the interior minister comes back and feels compelled to sign the exit permit.
CH: And Bosch and his wife immediately left for Miami.
CH: Did Bosch ever go back to Cuba.
TG: Bosch never set foot in Cuba again.
CH: A few months later, Castro and his government took a step that showed where the country was headed.
TG: They made an ideological decision that they were going to have socialism in Cuba. And as a result, they couldn't have capitalist businesses continuing to operate.
CH: One morning, Cubans woke to hear the names of nearly 400 companies being read aloud on the radio. They had all just been nationalized. The Cuban government owned them now. Sugar mills, department stores, textile factories. And rum makers, like Bacardi. Again, Rachel Dorion, Bacardi's archivist.
RD: Everything happened so quickly, but the company, the family felt as though, you know, a hundred years' worth of their business and everything that they had put their, all of their time and their effort into, and this empire, frankly, that the had they had created was ripped from their arms essentially.
CH: Once that happened, many of the Bacardis, as well as their employees, began scrambling to get out of Cuba. Some left by plane, others by boat. Many ended up in Miami where they thought they'd return to Cuba very soon. That would not come to pass.
But it is important to note that not everyone left.
TG: The truth is that the workers who produced the rum in Santiago did not have access to wealth. They did not have the option of going into exile the way, the more wealthy Cubans did. So almost the entire workforce in the Bacardi factory stayed there, under communist rule.
CH: The Cuban government planned for those workers to keep making rum which it would then sell around the world as "Bacardi." But the Cuban Communists made a crucial mistake.
TG: The Castro people were Marxists, and they had this idea that the value of a company was labor and capital. Um, they did not have a very sophisticated understanding of the importance of intellectual property. So they neglected when they expropriated the company, they really didn't know how to expropriate the trademark.
CH: The Castro government owned the facilities in Cuba, but it didn't own the Bacardi trademarks. For Pepin Bosch, this oversight meant he could rebuild Bacardi outside of Cuba … and fight back against Castro.
TG: They were very successful at making sure that their trademarks were registered outside Cuba.
CH: When the government nationalized Bacardi in Cuba, Bosch sprung into action and formed a new Bacardi, this time in the United States. This US company owned the trademarks he had previously sent off in the mail. And that meant it could sell rum around the world as Bacardi … and at the same time, prevent the Cuban government any time it tried to put the Bacardi name on a bottle of rum. For Bosch, he saved his family's brand and business, but as important, denied Castro the Bacardi family name and its history.
TG: They did not have the Bacardi brand. And the Bacardi brand was much more valuable than the physical capital, the factory itself, the rum stocks, and, and even the labor force.
CH: Cuba could keep on making rum at the distillery it seized, but it wouldn't be Bacardi. Bosch and his family, however, could keep making and selling Bacardi rum, and they did. He had all the ingredients for Bacardi to reinvent itself -- a known brand, customer loyalty, distilleries in places like Puerto Rico and Mexico, marketing expertise and a thirst to succeed.
TG: Cause it really forced them to be all that much more aggressive about their international operations, just at a time when they stood to benefit from that.
CH: In 1960, Bacardi sold 1.7 million cases of rum. By 1976, that number skyrocketed to over 10 million cases. With financial success, the company had the means to support the family and former employees if they left Cuba.
TG: You know when they came out of Cuba, there was a Bacardi representative at the airport to meet them. And would line up housing for them would make sure that the refrigerator was full of food, would provide them jobs, would provide them transportation. would make sure that they got, uh, sort of reestablished in the United States.
CH: It became a virtuous circle. Keeping the family together saved the family business ... and defending the family business saved the family. And together, the Bacardis held onto the memory of all that had been taken from them: not just their business in Cuba, but also Cuba itself.
TG: In 1960, the Cuban nation was cleaved, split in two. You had this enormous exile population who felt very strongly about their Cuban identity. Uh, I know a lot of Cuban exiles, they say they feel more Cuban than American.
CH: For many, this fueled their enduring resentment of Fidel Castro. That was especially the case for Pepin Bosch.
TG: He, like many Cuban exiles, were determined, believed that they could overthrow Fidel, believed that they could sort of win their country back. He became, uh, involved in that movement. And of course, this coincided with the CIA becoming very involved in an effort to overthrow Fidel. And, you know, it wasn't long before Pepin Bosch and the CIA sort of joined forces.
CH: Bosch told the Miami Herald in 1964, "I am one of the few Cubans who has a prosperous enterprise. It is my feeling that we have an obligation to our country." Beyond the plan to bomb oil refineries, Bosch also financed prominent anti-Castro organizations that put pressure on the Cuban government in other ways: public relations campaigns, lobbying efforts, more sanctions and greater enforcement of the US embargo against Cuba.
When Pepin Bosch died in 1994, he had rebuilt Bacardi and kept up the fight for a free Cuba, like the Bacardis before him had done. But his hope to return to a Cuba without Communism or Castro did not happen. Fidel Castro died in 2016 but his government continues, and the struggle is not over.
TG: It's no longer any effort to overthrow the Cuban government right now. Now the focus is on, who's going to control Cuba in the future. This is very much a question of who gets Cuba once Cuba changes.
CH: And right in the middle of that debate, is Bacardi.
That's after the break.
ACT III
CH: We're back. Listos?
Despite the Cuban government seizing its business in Cuba, Bacardi escaped and rebuilt itself because it had taken precautions, like protecting its trademarks. The government did use its former distillery in Cuba to make rum, but had to sell it under a different name. And it had some success, especially in countries behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union.
But Bacardi was not the only rum company the government nationalized. There was another one that the Communists thought had a lot of potential for making money it desperately needed. This distillery made a rum called "Havana Club." And that's where Vanessa Garcia and Victoria Collado come in.
One day, Vanessa, the writer, got a call from an executive at a marketing agency working with Bacardi ...
VG: 'Hey, you know I've heard you write about Cuba and that you know something about Cuba and that you also write plays, and we want to do this 20 minute, um, show in a bar and would you be interested in, in it?' And I was like, 'yeah, sure. Let me see, you know, let me look it up.'
CH: He wanted a show that told the history of Havana Club. So Vanessa did some research. She learned that the rum was created by the Arechabala family. They were kind of "rivals" with Bacardi. Both of the companies were founded in the second half of the 19th century. And both of them made the lighter style of Cuban rum that became popular, especially with Americans -- though credit where credit is due, Bacardi started several years earlier and it really pioneered the style. The Arechabalas, however, had that really good brand name, "Havana Club."
VG: And it's a great name, especially if you're going to export this thing, it's in English. It's awesome.
CH: After Castro came to power and nationalized both companies, members of the Bacardis and the Arechabalas fled Cuba for the United States.
VG: What ends up happening is that their stories really go in two different directions because Bacardi has set up, uh, before the revolution happens, they've set up, points of distribution and they have all kinds of things, right? So they they have a way to sell Bacardi outside of Cuba. Arechabalas don't have that. They don't have any of that.
CH: And with the Arechabalas not putting up a fight like the Bacardis did to protect their brand, the Cuban government started selling "Havana Club" rum, especially overseas." It came to symbolize Cuba, just as Bacardi had once done.
Executives at Bacardi thought ... that was wrong. Sure, another rum claiming Cuban heritage was competition, but what Bacardi also saw was: "that could have happened to us." So Bacardi made a deal with the Arechabala family to produce its own "Havana Club."
Vanessa realized what she had in her hands was a much bigger story, one about Cuba and Cuban identity told through rum. So when the marketing executive called her to follow up, she told him...
VG: 'Do you know that this 20 minute thing you're talking about is actually called immersive theater? And I know the perfect director and let's call her.'
CH: That'd be Victoria Collado.
VG: And all of a sudden that 20 minute show in a bar becomes a two hour pilot production.
CH: The play they created is called "Amparo'' the name of the wife of one of Arechabalas and also a Spanish word for refuge or protection. Their show is about what happened to that family when the government confiscated their business. But as immersive theater, instead of simply sitting in a seat and watching, you, the audience, are assigned a role as you walk through the show — it might be someone who worked in the sugar industry or the lawyer or the emcee. Don't worry. You don't have to act, but taking on this role gives you a perspective for what those characters saw in Castro's revolution. The evening starts with music and cocktails at a nightclub one New Year's Eve...
[AMPARO CLIP]
CH: But then descends into revolution….
AMPARO: I know it's been a tough year, many place nationalized, and confiscated.
Let's call it what it is, stolen.
CH: ...executions...and flight ...
AMPARO: We have to think, we have to act, we have to leave.
I am not leaving. They don't have the recipe, we can rebuild.
CH: As an audience member, you experience the choice many Cubans had to make at that time: support the revolution or leave your country.
VC: When you interact with a story for an hour and a half, and you actually not just sit down and watch it, but you walk through the story, you are the characters in the story. When it comes time to pick your rum, there is body memory there is sense memory that comes to life, uh, when you choose what you're going to choose.
CH: After creating the show, Vanessa and Victoria and the Havana Club rum team at Bacardi team tried it out on audiences in Miami and New York and …
VG: We see that it works and we see that people are like crying. We were like, 'okay, so this is speaking to people that not only are Cuban themselves, but that are, that that knows something about loss, which is everybody.'
CH: And so in Miami last year, the show had an eight-month run in front of sold out crowds. Victoria, the director, sums up the entire story of Havana Club this way:
VC: It's a Cuban story.
CH: What does that mean, it's a Cuba story? That's shorthand for something.
VC: Yeah. A shorthand for Cuba story is a story where you had a thing and then somebody comes in and takes it away from you. That's a Cuba story.
CH: It's also a complicated one. It's true that the Cuban government seized the distillery where Havana Club was made. It's also true that the family stopped making rum and years later, let the trademark for Havana Club expire. Eventually, the Cuban government registered the trademark and then, in the 1990s, signed a deal with the spirits company Pernod Ricard to sell Havana Club rum around the world. That's when Bacardi made its version, knowing it would be a direct challenge to the Cuban government.
VG: Bacardi says, 'yes, we understand this story. This story is our story.' And they, they take on the fight. They not only buy the recipe of, the true recipe of Havana Club, but they also take on the fight for the trademark, which is, which is essentially what's at stake.
CH: I mean, it's a fight that goes on. In some aspects, it's still going on to this day, laws changed, lawsuits, multiple lawsuits filed a lot of money and a lot of emotional—
VG: If you don't have it, An emotional investment in this thing, you don't take this on. I mean, it's a, you know, it's like, why would you take on a headache, which is essentially what this is, unless you really, really deeply believe in everything that's behind this fight?
CH: What followed has been nearly 25 years of ongoing lawsuits, lobbying and even a change to federal law. Currently, there's a kind of stalemate with two Havana Clubs for sale: one made in Cuba and sold everywhere BUT in the United States. And one made by Bacardi and sold ONLY in the US.
Both sides will tell you they are the rightful owners of Havana Club — the rum born in Cuba. Bacardi and its supporters will say: 'The Cuba government stole Havana Club from the Arechabala family. It can't trademark something it took illegally. We have a deal with the Arechabalas to make and sell Havana Club based on their original recipe.'
VG: The thing is that people go to Cuba and they take out the bottle of Havana club rum. And they think that they're taking this like true, real, authentic Cuban rum taking this out. And yes it is Cuban rum. It's definitely a Cuban rum, but it's not Havana club. That was stolen from the Arechabala family.
CH: However, the makers of Havana Club in Cuba will tell you: 'We are the real one. Our Havana Club is made in Cuba by Cubans with Cuban ingredients like Cuban sugar cane. We make the rum at a distillery we built and we own the trademark.'
Clearly, this is about more than rum.
VC: It's more than a brand. It's, it's the constant fight for our story.
VG: It's about the fight for Cuba and that the fight for Cuba is not about guns. It's about knowledge right now.
CH: If you spend time with Cuban-Americans in Miami, you'll likely hear the word, "la lucha." It translates as "the struggle," and today, it often refers to the fight against Castro and the government he led for nearly 50 years. But it's an idea that goes back to the 19th century -- to days when Emilio Bacardi and other Cuban patriots took their first steps to end colonial rule and become an independent nation. Since then, Cubans have struggled to be free to tell their story. And through it all, fighting for Cuba has been rum and Bacardi.
CREDITS
CH: This episode was produced by me, with Sarah Wyman and Julia Press. Thanks as always to Claire Banderas, Tyler Murphy, and Anneke Ball at Insider.
If you want to learn more about Bacardi and the history of Cuba, be sure to check out Tom Gjelten's book, "Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba." It's a great read, maybe with a glass of Bacardi anejo neat.
In this story you also heard a news clip from British Pathe, NBC, and Huntley Film Archives. And thanks to Paul Ramirez at TEAM for the use of the clips from the recording of the show 'Amparo.'
Our editor is Micaela Blei. Bill Moss is our sound engineer. Music is from Audio Network. John DeLore and Casey Holford composed our theme. Dan Bobkoff is the podfather. And Sarah Wyman is our executive producer.
Brought to you by... is a production of Insider Audio.