Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

by Gjelten, Tom

  Madrid may have seen rum from Cuba as a Spanish product, but there was no doubt that many Cubans saw it as a treasure of their own. In later years, Bacardi advertising took this a step further. One popular ad slogan for the rum was “El Que a Cuba Ha Hecho Famosa” (The One That Has Made Cuba Famous). Bacardi rum was arguably more “Cuban” than other rums produced on the island. Major competitors, including Camps Hermanos in Santiago (makers of Matusalem rum) and José Arechabala in Cárdenas (makers of Havana Club rum), were run by transplanted peninsular Spaniards, while Bacardi & Compañía was now owned and managed entirely by native-born criollo Cubans (and proven patriots), without one peso of foreign capital. The Bacardis were generating Cuban wealth and employing Cuban workers at a time when many criollo firms were being displaced by foreign companies. As a Cuban firm making a totally Cuban product and supporting the cause of Cuban freedom, Bacardi & Compañía had reason to see its presence at world fairs and even in the Spanish royal court as a promotion of Cuban national interests.

  How long the company would be able to retain its pure Cuban identity was unclear. With foreign investors trolling the island for takeover targets, it was only a matter of time before Bacardi & Compañía attracted someone’s interest. In 1889 an English firm offered to buy the rum company outright. The Bacardi brothers patriotically rejected the offer, but in their response they left open the possibility of accepting a foreign capital investment, especially if it could lead to the opening of a new overseas market. “A trifling increase of no more than $2000 in the estimate[d] expenses of production [is all that] would be needed to double the amount of Rum upon which we have based our Estimate,” they wrote, in decent but imperfect English. “We might be able to reach markets of such importance as Germany, Russia, and the very England, where the importation would be materially helped by placing at the head of the enterprise a respectable English sindicate [sic].” Though nothing came of the exchange, it showed that the Bacardi partners had expansive commercial ambitions in spite of the setbacks they had endured.

  By November 1889, Emilio Bacardi had fully rejoined the political debate in Cuba. Writing in El espíritu del siglo, the newspaper of his Freethinker Group, Emilio turned his wrath on a local campaign to raise $1,500 to buy a velvet cloak to drape over a statue of the Virgin in one of the local churches. “At a time when most of the streets of Santiago are full of mud and puddles of contaminated water,” Emilio fumed, “when the casa de Beneficencia [poorhouse] is forced to hold a concert to raise money for necessary repairs, when everything around us suggests our community is crying out in hunger and pain, just now, is when a number of people who call themselves Christians, who say they are Catholics, use their spare time going door to door trying to raise 1000 or 1500 pesos to buy the Virgin a new cloak. It seems incredible, but it is true.”

  Such bold, provocative commentary did not go over well with the Spanish authorities in Santiago. Emilio and his Freethinker friends challenged the colonial power at every opportunity, and the Spanish administration in Santiago was quick to strike back. When El espíritu published the text of Article 13 of the Spanish constitution, declaring that every Spaniard “has the right to freely express his ideas and opinions, through speech or through writing ... without being subject to previous censorship,” the local Spanish authorities confiscated all copies of the newspaper.

  The independence movement was heating up again. In Santiago, it initially produced only these small political confrontations over whether Cubans could speak freely or read the books they wanted. Emilio and his Freethinker associates tried to establish a public library, only to be rebuffed by local ecclesiastical authorities who said it might disturb “the tranquility of the Catholic neighbors.” But it was a start. Ideological debate was precisely what José Martí had been seeking in his effort to provide the revolutionary movement with a sharper political identity. The next step would be to broaden the critique. The geopolitical situation had evolved since Emilio Bacardi and his associates in Santiago had last conspired, and the work to establish an ideological base for the Cuban independence movement had to involve more than a challenge to the antiliberal positions of the Catholic Church.

  In New York, José Martí was focusing increasingly on U.S. imperialist attitudes as a threat to Cuban national interests. The Western Hemisphere had changed since the era when Latin American nations aimed only to free themselves from Spain. The United States was the new ascendant power, and, in Martí’s words, the political challenge for the Latin countries was to resist the “powerful and ambitious neighbor” to the north. “Spanish America learned how to save itself from the tyranny of Spain,” Martí wrote in December 1889, “and now... the time has come for Spanish America to declare its second independence.”

  In Cuba’s earlier struggle with Spain, some of the most ardent supporters, both in Cuba and in the United States, believed that the island’s best interests lay in being annexed as a U.S. state. “Annexationists” had supplied arms to the Cuban rebels and promoted the anti-Spanish cause in the U.S. press. Eager for help from any quarter, Cuban rebel leaders overlooked the question of what ties would be established in the future between the United States and a free Cuba, focused as they were on the immediate struggle. By 1889, however, that issue could no longer be avoided.

  Within the United States, Cuban views hardly seemed to matter. Cuba’s fate was to be resolved in negotiations between Madrid and Washington. The possibility of purchasing Cuba from Spain, an idea first proposed by Thomas Jefferson, was considered in relation to such issues as the desirability of increased Cuban sugar imports. Opponents of annexation did not base their arguments on what Cubans wanted, but on the burden that Cuba would present to the United States as a new territory or state. In March 1889, a Philadelphia trade magazine published an article titled “Do We Want Cuba?” that laid out the arguments for and against acquiring the island. Among the disadvantages cited was the “undesirability” of the Cuban people:To the faults of the parent [Spanish] race they add effeminacy and a distaste for exertion which amounts really to disease. They are helpless, idle, of defective morals, and unfitted by nature and experience for discharging the obligations of citizenship in a great and free republic. Their lack of manly force and of self-respect is demonstrated by the supineness with which they have so long submitted to Spanish oppression, and even their attempts at rebellion have been so pitifully ineffective that they have risen little above the dignity of farce.

  A long excerpt from the article was published approvingly in the New York Evening Post, outraging the Cuban community in New York.

  As soon as he read it, José Martí wrote a blistering response, in English, published in the Post four days later. He did not bother to address the annexation question directly, except to say that “no self-respecting Cuban would like to see his country annexed to a nation where the leaders of opinion share towards him the prejudices excusable only to vulgar jingoism or rampant ignorance.” Most offensive to Martí was what he called the “sneer” with which the Philadelphia writer dismissed the Cuban independence fighters. “These city-bred young men and poorly built half-breeds knew in one day how to rise against a cruel government,” Martí wrote, “to obey as soldiers, sleep in the mud, eat roots, fight ten years without salary, conquer foes with the branch of a tree, die ... a death not to be spoken of without uncovering the head.”

  In the eight years Martí had lived and worked in New York as a correspondent for Latin American newspapers, his view of the United States had grown more critical. Having lived in Cuba, Mexico, Guatemala, and Spain, he was initially struck by the creativity and energy of a country where “everyone looks like his own master.... Everyone works; everyone reads.” In time, however, he was repulsed by what he called “the excessive worship of wealth” in the United States, a tendency, he wrote, which “disillusions people or develops them in a one-sided manner, giving them at once the characteristics of giants and of children.” The treatment of blacks and Indians appalled him, as di
d the influence of money in U.S. politics. By 1889, when Martí responded to the Post article, he was focused on what appeared to be the country’s intentions “to extend its dominions in America.” Still, Martí had to be careful in what he said about the United States, especially when writing for a Cuban audience. He wanted to protect his nation against U.S. encroachment, but he had to remember that tens of thousands of Cubans were moving to the United States every year. “They admire this nation, the greatest ever built by liberty,” he acknowledged. His fear was that deeper Cuban ties with the United States would undermine support on the island for total independence.

  In 1890 Antonio Maceo, the former rebel commander, was able to visit Cuba, ostensibly to sell some properties there belonging to his mother but actually, he wrote later, to promote “war and the extermination of the colonial system.” In Santiago, his hometown, Maceo was greeted as a hero. A dinner party there in July, attended by Emilio Bacardi, concluded with a champagne toast—¡Por Cuba Libre!—albeit “in a low voice,” Emilio reported, “as the circumstances demanded.” During the after-dinner conversation, however, a young man named José Hernández approached Maceo and suggested that it was probably Cuba’s fate “to be one more star in the great American constellation.”

  “Young man,” Maceo responded, speaking slowly and softly, “that sounds impossible to me, but in that one situation I might actually be on the side of the Spaniards.” Such moments reinforced for Maceo, as for Martí and other revolutionaries, how important it was to carry out grassroots political work before launching a new independence war.

  In Santiago, concern about U.S. hegemony seemed a bit abstract. The acute oppression that Cubans experienced every day was the product of Spain’s unrelenting grip on the island, and the battles being fought by Emilio Bacardi and his friend Federico Pérez Carbó were largely with the local colonial authorities.

  In October 1892, Cuba marked the four hundredth anniversary of the island’s “discovery” by Christopher Columbus. The Victor Hugo Freethinkers and other island liberals, unlike the Spanish authorities, viewed the anniversary with some shame, and its commemoration sparked a vicious debate. Federico Pérez Carbó noted the occasion with a biting commentary in El espíritu del siglo, titled “¡Maldición!” (Damn!) He described how the Spanish sailors who arrived in Cuba found “an island crowned by palms,” where tribes of gentle Indians lived “without malice, fear, or hate,” and he related how the Spanish conquistadores chased the Indians into the jungle, killing many of those they caught. In his version of the Hatuey story, a night breeze stirred the ashes where the Indian chief had been burned, causing them to glow brightly for an instant, and in that moment a voice was heard echoing across the hills: “Damn you!” He went on to say how the slaughter of the Indians was followed in Cuba by the enslavement of blacks, and he told the story of one rebellious slave hung along with eight companions.

  They say that as his body dangled from the rope, still twitching in the throes of death, that echoing voice was heard again: “Damn you!”

  Does the curse invoked by those two prisoners hang now over this island? ... Evil triumphs over good, crime over justice, shadows eclipse the light ... [and] when the sky darkens, and the sea roars, and the burst of wind fells the tree ... the traveler hears in those terrible sounds that same voice—“Damn you!”

  Not surprisingly, the publication of “¡Maldición!” caused a major stir among pro-Spain elements in Santiago. The town council held a special closed-door session to consider what should be done about Pérez Carbó, who worked as an accountant for the local government. The deputy mayor solemnly reported that his article “has produced a feeling of indignation among all those who love and respect Mother Spain, because far from honoring the great event that is now being commemorated, it tends to place a stain on the Spanish Nation and on the memory of the immortal Christopher Columbus.”

  In the end, no punitive action was taken. The mayor defused the uproar by suggesting that Pérez Carbó be called before the council to explain the article. Pérez Carbó ignored the summons, and the matter was dropped. The polemic nevertheless served to illustrate lingering questions about Cuba’s identity. Was it to be defined by its Spanish colonial origin, as a nation where the Catholic Church and traditional conservative values held sway and where society was dominated by an enterprising white elite? Or did the Cuban story concern the oppression of the colored population—first the Indians and then blacks and mulattoes—and the effort to construct a new, multiracial nation that valued individual freedom and allowed democracy to flourish?

  Such issues had been left unresolved in the first war, largely because some independence advocates were white slaveholders who were ambivalent about the role of blacks in the struggle. José Martí and others were convinced that another revolution in Cuba would be definitive only if these social questions were confronted early. The goal of the next Cuban revolution, he wrote, would be “not so much a mere political change as a good, sound, just and equitable social system.”

  The first independence war had at least represented a start toward this goal, if only because blacks and whites fought side by side throughout that conflict and because one of the war’s most heroic and admired figures, Antonio Maceo, was himself a mulatto. By the early 1890s, racial prejudice was still deep in Cuba, but some progress had been made in counteracting it. The official abolition of slavery in 1886 caused less unrest than had been anticipated, because most slaves were simply converted into wage laborers. Many planters, in fact, concluded that it was more costly to buy and maintain slaves and their families than to hire free workers. Whites in Cuba also saw that freed blacks on the island were not organizing en masse to establish a “black republic,” as had been widely feared; instead, a process of racial integration was under way. After 1887, Cubans could not be excluded from public employment on the basis of race. Discrimination in theaters, cafés, and bars was outlawed in 1889. After 1893, state schools had to accept black or mulatto children on the same basis as white children.

  Among progressive white Cubans, the Bacardis held typical views on racial issues for the time: not without prejudice, but more enlightened than those of most peers. Emilio’s second wife, Elvira Cape, grew up in a slave-owning family and had her own slave attendant until the day slavery was abolished.4 Emilio often addressed the slavery issue in his own essays and fiction, making clear his opposition to the institution and his support for a multiracial state with equal rights for all. At the same time, he sometimes adopted a paternalistic tone, portraying blacks as malleable and even childlike.

  In Vía crucis, one of his published novels, Emilio tells the story of a Cuban family whose conflicted ideas about slavery may have matched his own family’s mixed feelings. Philosophically, the family opposes the institution, but some slave-owning characters in the book are presented as good-hearted and adored by their slaves. One former slave named Juan joins the rebel army alongside his former owner Pablito to fight together for Cuba’s independence. On the battlefield, they are equals, but when Pablito dies in combat and is buried beneath some rocks, the former slave throws himself on the makeshift tomb, weeping. “And he stayed there,” Emilio wrote, “like a faithful dog lying on his master’s grave.” Such literary creations showed that Emilio Bacardi was a prisoner of his own socioeconomic background and life experience. What is also beyond dispute, however, is that he was willing to face imprisonment and even death for the cause of a sweeping social revolution in Cuba that had as a central aim the establishment of racial equality and justice on the island.

  By 1892, preparations for another war in Cuba were under way. José Martí dropped journalism and began organizing a new Cuban Revolutionary Party among exiles in Florida and New York, with the idea that it would provide the framework around which a democratic movement could be built. When he felt the party was ready, Martí traveled to Santo Domingo, where Máximo Gómez was living, and later to Costa Rica to find Antonio Maceo. Both men readily agreed to renew the
independence fight. By the fall of 1894, rebel leaders from the previous war had begun quietly assembling in the countryside and stashing weapons.

  Santiago had been in a state of revolutionary agitation ever since the visit of Antonio Maceo in 1890. Emilio, Federico Pérez Carbó, and a handful of other santiagueros were meeting secretly to make conspiratorial arrangements. Though Emilio remained suspect in the eyes of colonial authorities, his position as a respected and successful Santiago businessman offered him protection. From 1894 until he was arrested again in 1896, Emilio was chief of the revolution’s underground network in Santiago and its principal treasurer. Using commercial matters as a pretext, Emilio traveled to New York to see Martí. (Though illness caused Martí to miss his appointment, he sent an apologetic note to Emilio, referring to him as his “dear friend.”) When rebel leaders needed to travel outside Cuba, Emilio arranged their transportation. Such activities were kept secret, of course; around the same time, Emilio became a director of the Santiago Chamber of Commerce, representing the chamber’s “industry” section.

  In 1894 a trade dispute between the United States and Spain, waged over the heads of the Cubans, resulted in Spain’s imposition of duties on U.S. products imported into Cuba and steep new U.S. tariffs on Cuban goods sent to the United States. Planters, traders, and merchants who had redirected their commerce away from Spain toward the United States were devastated. To make matters worse, the Spanish authorities were charging Cuba for the cost of the Ten Years’ War. Annual interest on the war debt cost the island nearly half its total annual public revenue; another twelve million dollars went to pay the Spanish army in Cuba, leaving only 2.5 million for all other public expenditures, including education. The economic crisis heightened Cubans’ anger over their lack of political control and fueled revolutionary sentiment even among many members of the upper classes. By early 1895, it was clear that a new armed revolt was about to begin. In a house just down the street from the Bacardi offices on Marina Baja Street, Emilio met secretly with a handful of other men to set up a commercial trading firm that would have offices in both Santiago and New York and serve as a front for channeling war funds and messages between the revolution’s New York headquarters and the field commanders in eastern Cuba.