by Gjelten, Tom
Whether sent by God or not, cholera did indeed make an appearance a few weeks later, and within two months a deadly epidemic was sweeping the city. The death toll reached a peak on November 3, when ninety-four people died. At the Santa Ana cemetery, cadavers lay unburied for a day or more for lack of gravediggers. Before it ran its course, the cholera epidemic wiped out a tenth of the city’s population. Among the victims were Facundo and Amalia’s six-year-old son Juan and their infant daughter María, as well as Amalia’s grandfather. Frightened and grief-stricken, Facundo and Amalia decided to take their surviving sons, eight-year-old Emilio and four-year-old Facundo Jr., away from Santiago. In December 1852, they sailed for Spain, where they could stay for a time with Facundo’s parents in Sitges.
Facundo, now nearing forty, soon grew restless, however, and after a few months he returned to Cuba with his family—except for Emilio. Facundo and Amalia left him in the custody of a family friend in Barcelona, Daniel Costa, who had promised to oversee the boy’s education. Costa was a man of elevated literary and artistic tastes, and Emilio flourished under his personal tutoring. Back in Santiago, meanwhile, Facundo and Amalia went through the most difficult time of their lives, still mourning the loss of their two children and now facing an economic setback. Facundo’s shops had been looted while he was away and needed to be restocked. Commercial activity in the city had declined precipitously, as much of the population had fled. Customers to whom Facundo had extended credit were unable to pay bills, and with his own suppliers demanding payment, Facundo was forced to ask his wife for help. Amalia’s grandfather had left her ten thousand dollars at his death, and she allowed Facundo to invest it in his business, where it was listed on the books as a loan. He borrowed an additional seventeen thousand dollars from Amalia’s wealthy godmother, Clara Astié, a woman who would come to the Bacardis’ aid repeatedly.
Santiago’s long economic boom appeared to be at an end. Sugar prices were slumping, with the growth in world production outpacing the growth in demand, partly because of the introduction of the sugar beet in Europe. The less efficient Cuban sugar planters, located disproportionately on the eastern end of the island around Santiago, found their profit margins shrinking, and as their fortunes suffered, so did those of the merchants who did business with them. In 1855 the firm Facundo Bacardi y Compañía was declared bankrupt. By liquidating some assets and reorganizing his financing, Facundo was able to safeguard his wife’s savings and ultimately repay Clara Astié, but after twenty-five years of hard work, enterprise, and frugality, he faced the prospect of having to start over.
An indistinct family photograph from the 1880s, said to be the only surviving image of Facundo, shows him to have been lean of build, with sharply chis eled features. He is clean-shaven, and his hair is short and combed straight back. A drawing of him commissioned after his death, based on recollections of his appearance, shows him with a stern visage. His eyebrows are narrowed, his mouth is turned down in a frown, and he is perfectly groomed. Even his friends addressed him as Don Facundo, with the honorific suggesting respect. Family members would later say they could not recall seeing Facundo in his shirtsleeves, even in the privacy of his own home. His black shoes always lustrous, his shirts perfectly starched, his collars perfectly white, Don Facundo was the embodiment of a sober businessman. Each evening, after returning from a long day of work, he would pace the house, his hands clasped tightly behind his back, his gaze fixed ahead, his thoughts elsewhere. “Facundo, always in that silent place,” Amalia often said, knowing better than to interrupt him. It was his daily meditation time, and he would continue pacing until the call for dinner.
A strong will and a shrewd mind were needed to do well in that tumultuous era. Facundo Bacardi never doubted there was money to be made in Cuba, if only he could identify the right opportunity. Selling groceries would not do it, Facundo now realized; he needed to produce something. Slowly, an idea took shape. He could make rum.
Cuba’s rich volcanic soil, tropical climate, regular rainfall, and abundant sunshine made it an ideal island for growing sugarcane. The industry got off to a slow start, but by 1850 Cuba was the number one cane producer in the world. Sugar exports had grown tenfold over the preceding fifty years. Rarely had an industry anywhere expanded so dramatically or produced such quick profits.
Heavily forested and underpopulated, the country was at first better known for its strategically located ports and its ship-repairing industry than for its agricultural production. The sugar industry took off only because of a pair of crucial and nearly simultaneous developments. One was the revolution in Haiti, sparked in 1790 when freed blacks on the island began arguing that they deserved to be treated as French citizens under the terms of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the document underlying the French Revolution of 1789. Within a year, a full-fledged slave revolt had broken out across Haiti, the eventual consequence of which was the flight of the French plantation owners and the total collapse of the Haitian sugar industry. Cuban planters, previously lagging behind their Haitian rivals, saw their competition disappear. But they still needed to solve their chronic labor shortage. For years, they had been seeking Madrid’s permission to import slaves freely, arguing that the unrestricted use of slave labor would boost the sugar economy and bring Cuba previously unimaginable riches. In 1791, just as Haiti was coming apart, the Cuban planters got their wish. The Spanish Crown that year removed all limitations on the slave trade.
Cuba thereby staked its future on the institution of slavery, with profound implications for its economy, for the course of its history, and for its character as a nation. Within a few years, as many as ten thousand enslaved Africans were being shipped to Cuba annually. By the 1850s, there were about four hundred thousand slaves on the island, about 40 percent of Cuba’s total population. The vast majority worked on sugar plantations, where production was based as much on brute labor as on technology.
The larger estates employed hundreds of slaves, almost all of them men. Field slaves cut the sugarcane with machetes. Others worked at the “sugar house,” a place of overpowering noise and sweet, sticky smells. Slave laborers manually fed the cane stalks into huge, steam-powered iron rollers that squeezed the juice out. Others oversaw the cauldrons where the sugar juice was boiled into syrup or the cooling troughs where the syrup was left to crystallize. The sugar crystals were removed from the syrup by means of a centrifuge, typically a cylinder of wire mesh that spun rapidly inside a drum. The liquid would escape, draining into a catch basin as molasses, with the sugar crystals left caked on the wire mesh. Once dried, the sugar was packed into crates for shipment. The remaining molasses was filtered and collected in huge barrels called hogsheads.
There was a big market for Cuban molasses in New England, where it was used for distilling rum. For nearly a century, rum had been the spirit of choice in the United States. By one estimate, at the time of American independence the average adult male in the thirteen original colonies was drinking between four and five gallons of rum a year. In the beginning, most of the rum came from distilleries in the British West Indies, but the North American demand soon exceeded their capacity. Just as significantly, New England businessmen recognized a moneymaking opportunity. Molasses was relatively cheap and plentiful, and they could make huge profits by importing the molasses and distilling the rum themselves. The combination of African slaves, Cuban molasses, and New England rum gave rise in the early years of the nineteenth century to a variation of the infamous Triangle Trade. New England merchants shipped their rum to West Africa, where it was traded for slaves, who were then taken to Cuba to be put to work on sugar plantations. The slaves were exchanged in Havana or Santiago for Cuban molasses, which was shipped in turn to New England and distilled into rum.
Raw sugar was bringing Cuba so much wealth in the first decades of the nineteenth century that few growers or industrialists bothered to consider whether they could themselves get into the commercial rum business as a sideline to their main sugar op
erations. To be sure, Cuban sugar farmers had been distilling some form of primitive rum or aguardiente (from agua ardiente, “burning water,” akin to “brandy” in English or eau-de-vie in French or acquavite in Italian), as long as they had been growing cane. Virtually every sugar mill complex in Cuba had a small distillery attached, even if it was just a simple pot still set up under a tin roof to protect it from the rain. In general, however, the industry was so poorly developed that Cuban rum fetched a mere fraction of the price paid for the better known rums of Jamaica, Barbados, and Martinique. The dean of Cuban sugar historians, Manuel Moreno Fraginals, having reviewed nearly everything that was written about Cuban rum in the early years of the nineteenth century, concluded that even the best versions were considered to have “an unpleasantly musty taste and smell.” Within Cuba, locally made rum was often sold straight from the barrel in working-class taverns and neighborhood pulperías, open-air stands set up in the doorways of houses or on public corners, barely a step above a vendor’s pushcart. Being respectable merchants, the Bacardi brothers refused to sell Cuban rum in their own shops.
One explanation for the low quality was that Cuba lacked the rum-making heritage of the other “sugar islands,” which had benefited by their access to superior British and French distilling expertise and technology. Another factor was the puritanical attitude of the Spanish Crown, which for years officially prohibited the manufacture of rum in Cuba, citing a need to protect public health and morals. The Spanish authorities finally lifted restrictions on rum production in 1796, but by then Cuba had been left on the sidelines of the rum trade.
As of 1850, basic rum-distilling procedures in Cuba were still at a rudimentary level. Molasses was mixed with water and left to ferment in vats. Yeast, either naturally occurring or artificially introduced, converted the sugars in the mix to alcohols. After several days, the fermented “wash,” as it was called, was fed into a still or alembic, basically a large copper kettle or pot set over a fire. Once heated, the spirits of the fermented mix would evaporate before the rest of the liquid, because alcohol has a lower boiling point than water. The alcoholic vapor would be piped to a second container where it would cool and condense. A somewhat purer spirit could be produced by running the distillate through the process again. The clear, cold liquid that dripped from the tap at the end was aguardiente, rum in its crudest form. It was potent, as much as 85 percent pure alcohol. Towels soaked in aguardiente were considered a cure for headaches and thought to speed the healing of wounds. Cubans also washed their hands in aguardiente and splashed it on their faces as a cleanser. They just didn’t much like the way it tasted.
One problem stemmed from the Cuban molasses itself, which had a relatively high sucrose content. In an extrasweet mixture, the yeast consumes the sugar voraciously, producing high levels of alcohol quickly and dramatically raising the temperature of the solution. Either development can kill the yeast and spoil the product. The trouble could be avoided by carefully measuring and adjusting the sugar levels in the wash and by monitoring the heat produced during the fermentation process, but this required expertise, technology, and attention to detail—all lacking in Cuban distilleries. The decision to build the sugar industry on slave labor had resulted in a shortage of skilled and motivated workers on the Cuban plantations, and the distilleries were not well tended as a result.
As early as 1816, one business leader in Santiago had argued that more attention should be paid to the rum industry on the island, lamenting that “the molasses with which aguardiente is made departs Cuba in immense quantities for the United States, where it is converted into rum at great advantage for that country’s industry.” He was appealing for a united Cuban front to challenge a tariff system that impeded Cuba’s access to the U.S. rum market. Such calls, however, were largely ignored until the 1850s.
The price of molasses had stopped rising by then, in part a consequence of Cuba’s abundant output. Rum production in the United States, meanwhile, was declining, as Americans on the lookout for cheap spirits began turning to rye whiskey. New England rum producers were also coming under pressure from the temperance movement, and many decided to close their distillery doors rather than face the protests of activists.
The cutback in U.S. distilling opened an opportunity for Cuban producers. A significant international rum market still beckoned, and no one was better positioned to increase production than the Cubans, who had all the raw material they would ever need. Given the high cost of transporting molasses to market and the relatively low price it was getting at that point, some Cuban growers had actually been feeding their surplus to their pigs or even dumping it in the river. It would make far more sense to turn the molasses into export-quality rum.
Facundo Bacardi knew he would face competition if he were to get started in the rum business. Having once banned rum production, the Spanish Crown was now offering prizes for the development of a Cuban spirit “able to satisfy the taste of the Court and the elite of the Empire.” Between 1851 and 1856, at least a half dozen handbooks on rum making were published in Cuba, summarizing all the available technical information. It was only a matter of time before someone came up with a high-quality product.
At least Facundo was in the right place. Though sugar production was not as advanced in the east of Cuba as in the west, Santiago was Cuba’s closest connection to the British and French islands where the best-known rums were made. The French colonists who had come to the Santiago area from Haiti brought with them an appreciation for fine liquors. Santiago was also just a short distance from Jamaica, closer to Kingston than to Havana, and santiagueros were probably more familiar with Jamaican rums than they were with those from their own country. One of the first rum producers in Santiago was a Cuban of British ancestry, John Nunes, who opened a small distillery in 1838 near the waterfront on Matadero Street. Nunes knew something about making rum, though in the beginning his operation was as humble as any in the Santiago area. A Bacardi company narrative written many years later included a bit of the Nunes story:The alembic installation was poor, rickety, miserable! But Mr. Nunes dabbled a little one day, a little more the next, and he was able to sell his liquor, first in Oriente [province] and afterwards across the whole island. Later he sent small shipments of his product off to American and European markets, though without any label to distinguish it.
By following the example of distillers such as Nunes, Facundo Bacardi could learn some of what he needed to get started in the rum business. But Facundo wanted an alembic of his own, or access to one, so he could begin experimenting with different methods of rum production. One man who could help him was a French Cuban named José León Bouteiller, who had a pot still that he used for making cognac and candies.2 Bouteiller rented a house on Marina Baja Street from Clara Astié, Facundo’s sometime benefactor and the godmother of his wife Amalia. Through Doña Clara, Facundo established a connection with Bouteiller, and the two men began a friendly collaboration.
When Astié died in 1859, she left her Marina Baja property and the rest of her estate to Amalia and her other godchildren, including fifteen-year-old Emilio Bacardi, who had returned from Spain two years earlier. Bouteiller remained in the Marina Baja house as a Bacardi tenant, and as part of his rental agreement he agreed to share his pot still with Facundo and assist him in rum distillation trials. At last Facundo had the opportunity he had been waiting for. He knew what he wanted to produce: a new Cuban rum that could not only compete with the rums from Jamaica or Martinique but improve on them. Even the best Caribbean rums were strong enough to burn the throat, and many were flavored so heavily that they could be drunk comfortably only when mixed with tea or punch. Facundo wanted to make and sell a rum that would move beyond the old association with buccaneers, rowdy sailors, and working-class taverns and take a place alongside the fine brandies and whiskeys favored by elite drinkers. Cuban rum had that potential, Facundo believed, if he could refine it properly, something no one had yet managed to do.
Bouteiller
’s alembic was small, and Facundo’s plan was for the two of them to work at the Marina Baja location with batches of molasses, distilling just a few jugs of rum at a time, experimenting with yeast strains, varying the sweetness of the water-and-molasses mix, and adjusting the distillation procedure itself. The fermentation of the molasses actually produced a variety of alcohols and other elements, some contributing to rum quality and others detracting from it. Grain alcohol, or ethanol, the most neutral spirit, is almost odorless and flavor-less, and in its purest form the ethanol produced in fermenting molasses differs little from that produced in fermenting sugars from potatoes or corn. But fermenting molasses also produced other alcohols, loosely called congeners, with different chemical compositions and therefore distinct flavors. All the alcohols had their own boiling temperatures, so they evaporated at different points during the boiling of the fermented molasses. The lighter alcohols, the first to evaporate, included methanol, which is toxic and therefore undesirable, but along with that came some fragrant compounds called esters, which contributed a fruity aroma to the distillate. The heavier alcohols, the last to evaporate, were loosely called fusel oils, and contained many of the flavors associated with rum. It was those same fusel oils, however, that left drinkers with hangovers and headaches. The key to making good rum was to control the distillation so as to be able to separate the desirable alcohols from the undesirable ones.