Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

by Gjelten, Tom

  “They are adults, and they are old enough to make their own choices,” she said firmly. “It’s not for us to direct them.”

  The governor, infuriated by her impudence, said the Bacardis as a family were proving to be “bad Spaniards,” and he ordered Amalia and Facundo to leave the building.

  Variations on the Bacardi family story played out across Cuba, in all the homes where native sons of Cuba joined the independence movement over the objections of Spanish fathers who were loyal to Madrid or even toiled for the colonial administration. In Havana, the teenage son of a Spanish soldier adopted the Cuban revolution as his personal cause.

  José Martí, who would become Cuba’s greatest national hero, showed such promise in his early academic work that the director of the Havana Municipal School for Boys, a nationalist poet named Rafael María de Mendive, offered to accommodate the lad in his own home when his father was posted outside Havana. As Daniel Costa and Francisco Martínez Betancourt had done for Emilio Bacardi, encouraging him to think for himself, Mendive did for the young Martí.

  He was just fifteen when Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freed his slaves and launched the Cuban revolution, but Martí closely followed what he later called the “glorious and bloody preparation” for that moment. In October 1869, just before the first anniversary of the revolution, Martí was arrested on the basis of an unsent letter found in his house, signed by him and addressed to a fellow student who was preparing to enlist in the Spanish army. In the letter, Martí appeared to encourage the student to reconsider his decision. Though he was barely seventeen years old, Martí was sentenced by the Spanish authorities to six years of hard labor in a prison attached to a stone quarry. For Martí, the back-breaking experience was an education on the suffering of other prisoners, many of whom had been sent to the quarry because of their involvement in revolutionary activities. After several months, Martí’s parents were able to get their son’s sentence reduced, and he was subsequently allowed to leave Cuba for Spain. Shortly after his arrival in Madrid, Martí published a dramatic account of his experience in prison, El presidio político en Cuba (Political prison in Cuba). He was barely eighteen years old. The tract had a major impact among Spanish liberals, largely because of his eloquence in condemning those Spanish authorities who were torturing and killing young Cubans in the name of Spain’s “national integrity.”

  El presidio político en Cuba established Martí’s reputation both as a writer and as an advocate for Cuba. He meshed the roles so perfectly that his accomplishments went beyond either literature or politics alone. From Spain, he traveled to Paris, New York, Mexico, and finally back to New York, where he founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party and almost single-handedly rallied the Cuban diaspora to support the cause of independence. He eventually met Emilio Bacardi, and the two became friends and collaborators.

  At the time, Emilio was collecting funds for the rebel army, passing messages, and circulating revolutionary literature, even while trying to keep a low profile. Santiago was crawling with Spanish troops and voluntarios, ready at any moment to arrest anyone they suspected of being a rebel collaborator. Some people were found to have been “unfaithful” to the state merely on the basis of a report that they had been seen at a rebel location. A week or two later, an announcement would come that the condemned men would be executed. At midnight on the eve of their execution, the prisoners were moved to an execution waiting chamber. Early the following morning, a firing squad consisting of an officer and twenty-five soldiers, mainly drawn from the voluntario ranks, would escort the prisoner to the place of execution, which in Santiago was, appropriately, the exterior wall of the municipal slaughterhouse. At 7 A.M. sharp, they would be shot, in full view of anyone walking on the busy street that ran alongside the building. As part of his research for the Crónicas, Emilio listed by name all the people executed by the Spanish military or the voluntarios in 1869 and 1870 alone. The list went on for twenty-five pages.

  Cuba was split into two worlds. In the cities, the Spanish army and the voluntarios were in control, while the ill-equipped rebels remained in the countryside, where they dominated. Their top military strategist, General Máximo Gómez, was a master of guerrilla tactics and believed the rebels should weaken the colonial regime by cutting railroads and burning sugar mills. Whenever they destroyed a sugar plantation, the rebels would invite the plantation slaves to join them, explaining that the aim of revolution was the abolition of slavery as well as independence. The rebel army was soon a thoroughly interracial force, including poor white farmers, mulattoes, and free blacks, as well as emancipated slaves. Only about a quarter of the fighters had guns. Most carried machetes, and some former slaves—primarily the Congolese—had only wooden daggers dipped in poison, a technology carried over from Africa. During the earlier civil war in Santo Domingo (later, the Dominican Republic), Spanish troops had pejoratively referred to black fighters as mambises, derived from an African word, and during the Cuban independence war, the rebel fighters adopted the name proudly for themselves. The black and mulatto fighters rallied especially behind the twenty-year-old captain Antonio Maceo.

  By 1873, however, the revolution was losing force. Many superior officers had been killed in battle or assassinated. The rebel leaders were also demoralized by the lack of support for the Cuban cause in Washington. In October, an American steamer, the Virginius, allegedly owned by the Cuban revolutionary committee in New York, was stopped by a Spanish man-of-war in British territorial waters off the coast of Jamaica. Among the ship’s passengers were nearly a hundred Cubans who had volunteered to fight in the revolution, plus a shipment of arms and ammunition for the rebel army. The American-British crew managed to throw the war matériel overboard before the ship was seized, but everyone aboard was taken to Santiago to face a court-martial. Within days, fifty-two of the passengers and crew members had been executed on the orders of the Spanish governor in Santiago, General Juan Burriel.

  The others would probably have been executed as well but for the intervention of a British naval commander, Sir Lambton Lorraine, who heard about what happened and brought his own frigate into Santiago to confront Burriel. The affair quickly escalated into an international crisis. Lorraine got his superiors’ authorization to sink one of the Spanish ships in the harbor if one more British prisoner were shot. That threat forestalled additional executions, at least temporarily, while furious negotiations were conducted. In the end, the Spanish government apologized for the incident, Burriel was relieved of his command, and Sir Lambton Lorraine became a Santiago hero.

  The Virginius incident had special significance for the Bacardis. The slaughterhouse (matadero) was less than a block from the distillery on Matadero Street. Facundo Jr. was working there when the executions occurred and heard the shots. He knew exactly what was happening, having heard firing squads on previous occasions. Clambering over the distillery fence, he looked toward the slaughterhouse and saw a horse-drawn wagon parked by the execution wall. A body had just been thrown in the back, and two legs protruded from the wagon end. It was an image he would never forget.

  In 1874, still in the midst of war, the Bacardi company went through its first reorganization. José Bacardi Massó, who had put up most of the money to buy the Nunes distillery but was minimally involved in its operation, sold his shares to Facundo, his older brother. José León Bouteiller, advancing in age and declining in health, also sold some of his shares. With the help of his wife, Facundo contributed enough capital to establish himself as the senior partner. Bouteiller left a few pesos in the company, and Emilio and Facundo Jr. each contributed 750 pesos from inheritances they had received from their godmother Clara Astié. This gave the company a total capitalization of 6,500 dollar pesos, almost double the initial investment. The new firm was called Bacardi & Compañía, the name under which it would gain worldwide fame.

  “Bacardi” was the best-known rum brand on the island, but new competitors were appearing. In 1872 three Spanish businessmen established a
nother rum factory in Santiago. They had experience in making cognac and sherry in Spain and intended to focus on making aged rum, applying some of the same aging and blending procedures long used in sherry production. They sold their premium aged product as Ron Matusalem Extra Viejo (Extra Old Methuselah Rum), named for the Old Testament patriarch who was said to have lived more than nine hundred years.

  Facundo Bacardi featured a different rum style. In 1873 his company introduced a new product, Ron Superior Extra Seco (Superior Extra Dry Rum), the lightest and whitest rum ever sold in Cuba. In 1876 the Bacardis sent a sample of Extra Seco to the Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia, the first major world fair to be held in the United States. Competing against three other Cuban distilleries, as well as several North American and Caribbean rums, Don Facundo’s Extra Seco took the top prize in its class. A year later the same label won a gold medal at the Exposición Universal in Madrid.

  One development during this period worked to the company’s favor. A devastating plague hit the French vineyards in the late 1860s, when the phylloxera pest began infecting the vines. Wine and brandy production dropped almost to zero, and French consumers had to look elsewhere for their spirits. The new rums appearing on the market were an instant hit in France, and in the absence of wine and brandy production, rum imports soared. The Bacardis’ international promotion of their rum was paying off. The phylloxera pest spread gradually southward, and soon the wine industry in Catalonia was affected as well. Catalan wine had been one of rum’s main competitors in Cuba, and its reduced availability to island drinkers meant a bigger opening for rum.

  Satisfied that his company was on solid footing, Don Facundo opted to retire in 1877, leaving the rum business in the hands of his sons. The youngest, twenty-year-old José, worked in sales. Facundo Jr., who had worked closely with his father for years, handled production and became the company’s first “Master Blender.” Don Facundo, however, named thirty-three-year-old Emilio as president. Being the oldest son mattered in Cuba. A year earlier, Emilio had married María Lay Berlucheau, a santiaguera of French descent like Doña Amalia. Around the time Emilio became the company president, María gave birth to a boy, named Emilio after his father but known throughout his life as Emilito.

  With his new family and business responsibilities, Emilio was a changed man. No longer the rabble-rouser of his twenties, trying to incite a disturbance in the town square, he had become a respected businessman in a suit and tie and a white straw hat. Still, he did not back off from his work with the independence movement. His higher profile at the family company after Don Facundo’s retirement actually gave him an even better cover for underground work. He now had commercial reasons to visit local sugar plantations, where he coincidentally could make contact with rebel representatives. His business dealings took him all around Santiago and even abroad, where he met regularly with rebel supporters and patrons of their cause.

  With Emilio at the helm of the family business, the Bacardi name had a dual meaning in Santiago. Bacardi & Compañía was a successful commercial enterprise with international reach. Bacardi rum was above politics, favored by pro-Spanish voluntarios and pro-Cuban rebels alike, and did business with whoever wanted to buy rum, wherever there were opportunities, from Havana to Madrid. But the Bacardi sons were Cuban nationalists and independence advocates, and Emilio was an enemy of Spanish authority. This intertwining of nationalist and capitalist identities became a defining characteristic of the family enterprise, and the way Bacardi & Compañía managed the dual roles would distinguish the firm from its competitors for generations to come.

  Emilio took over leadership of his father’s company just as the Cuban war was entering its final months. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes was killed in 1874 when Spanish troops found him on a farm where he had sought refuge. Antonio Maceo, the brilliant young mulatto general, demonstrated exceptional skill and bravery leading his troops in almost daily combat against superior Spanish forces, but conservative forces renewed old charges that he would rally Cuban blacks against whites and establish a “Negro republic,” and his leadership was seriously undercut.

  In February 1878, after nearly ten years of war, the “commissioners” of the revolutionary Cuban Republic met with the overall Spanish commander in the village of Zanjón and agreed to end the fighting. The Pacto del Zanjón promised the same political autonomy for Cuba that Puerto Rico then enjoyed, plus emancipation of those slaves who were in the rebel army. It did not, however, meet the revolution’s central demands—independence and the abolition of slavery—and Antonio Maceo told the Spanish commander at a meeting in Baraguá that he would not abide by the agreement. Several months later, Maceo himself was forced to accept a truce, but his defiant stand, dubbed the Protest of Baraguá, offered at least a heroic flourish at the end.

  The Ten Years’ War cost the lives of about fifty thousand Cubans and more than two hundred thousand Spaniards, but it also contributed to the construction of a Cuban nationality that extended across racial lines and to the creation of an ideal for which the Cuban nation had proved willing to fight. José Martí famously described the war as “that wonderful and sudden emergence of a people, apparently servile only a short time before, who made heroic feats a daily event, hunger a banquet, and the extraordinary, a commonplace.”

  In theory, the Zanjón agreement provided an opening for democratic local government and free elections. A “Liberal” Party, sometimes known as the Autonomist Party, was organized in Cuba to compete politically with the conservative, pro-Spanish forces on the island. Its political program envisioned Cuba remaining a Spanish colony but with political autonomy. Emilio Bacardi was one of the founding members in Santiago, arguing that the political opening afforded by the Zanjón pact should be exploited, regardless of whether it provided all the revolution had sought.

  The Liberals soundly defeated the pro-Spain Conservatives in Santiago’s first free elections, and Emilio won a seat on the town council. In public office, he displayed a surprisingly moralistic streak given his relatively young age. He cosponsored a measure to crack down on carnival activities in Santiago, for example, by allowing no more than four carnival days per year and barring any public dances or masquerade parades that offended the community’s “morals and decency.” (This was one part of his legacy that future Bacardis would not always honor.) But Emilio also demonstrated liberal impulses by proposing that the city build low-cost housing units and sell them to workers at discounted prices and by insisting that the right to sell lottery tickets be reserved exclusively for the aged and the handicapped. He showed such interest in schooling issues that he was selected to serve on the local board of education. He became one of the most popular and respected politicians in the city, and his office on Marina Baja Street was filled constantly with people seeking his help or advice.

  The flurry of democratic activity in Cuba did not last long. Authorities in Madrid ignored many of the promises made at Zanjón and once again restricted Cubans’ rights. Within months, some veterans of the Ten Years’ War were arguing that they had to return to combat. In the eastern province of Oriente, former rebel leaders collected their weapons and headed back to the mountains, with hundreds of fighters following them. Emilio argued that taking up arms again would be suicidal, but it was in vain. As soon as he heard that combat had begun again, Emilio headed to the city hall and made arrangements to set up a war hospital there.

  The Spanish authorities reacted furiously to the renewed fighting and began detaining anyone they regarded as an opponent, without bothering to make inquiries, gather evidence, or hold trials. The sweep initially targeted Santiago blacks and mulattoes, with more than three hundred arrested immediately and thrown into a dungeon to await deportation, but it was soon broadened. On September 6, 1879, sixty-four-year-old Don Facundo himself was detained at the Matadero facility along with Facundo Jr. They were soon freed, but the police then headed for the Bacardi offices on Marina Baja, where they found Emilio and arrested hi
m.

  For more than ten years, Emilio had successfully dodged the authorities while carrying out underground work for the revolution. Ironically, it was only now, when he had disagreed with the decision to take up arms, that he found himself under arrest. “No concrete charges could be brought against him,” his daughter Amalia wrote in a biography of her father, “but the colonial authorities knew only too well whom they were taking.”

  Six others were imprisoned with Emilio: another city councilman, two lawyers, a legal clerk, a journalist, and a twenty-four-year-old municipal employee named Federico Pérez Carbó, who soon became one of Emilio’s closest friends. Within a week, they were transferred from the local jail to the Morro, the ancient fortress at the head of Santiago Bay that long had served as a maximum-security prison. The inmates were held incommunicado for more than a month before they were allowed a breath of fresh air or a taste of decent food. Emilio, the inveterate note taker, recorded every development in a tiny diary, from the changes of command to the arrival of new prisoners.

  On November 4, Emilio learned he and the others were being sent to Spain. Before leaving, he was allowed just a brief visit from his young wife, María, his firstborn son, Emilito, and his newest son, Daniel. There is no record of their meeting in his diary. He noted only his subsequent arrival in Puerto Rico, the transfer to a second boat, and the departure for Spain. Three days later, at sea, grief overcame him. “It’s half past midnight, and from somewhere I can hear the cry of a child,” he wrote. “Oh! If only they would bring that child to me, how I would entertain it, how I would kiss that little creature, that child who in this great faraway emptiness reminds my soul of my own Emilio and Daniel. I heard this moan as their cry of farewell, coming all the way from my home! My poor boys! How it seemed I could hear them! How it seemed I heard them say, ‘Papa!’”