by Gjelten, Tom
In September, Gómez came to Santiago on a presidential campaign visit. Emilio did not support the Gómez candidacy, but he was worried about the possibility of a violent confrontation and rode his horse four miles out of town to meet the Gómez party on its way in. After greeting the candidate, Emilio accompanied him and his entourage all the way into the city, having ordered the Santiago police force to salute the Cuban flags the group was carrying. As a result, the rally in Santiago occurred without any incidents. But Emilio’s civic spirit was the exception rather than the rule in Cuba in those days. Barely a week later, a Gómez campaign event in the city of Santa Clara ended in a bloody brawl, with a leading Liberal politician and the police chief both killed. The Liberals withdrew their candidates in all major races, saying it was clear that their ruling party opponents would resort to violence if necessary to defeat them.
Emilio’s term in the Senate was his first exposure to national politics, but he arrived in Havana as a star, due partly to the national fame of Bacardi rum and partly to Emilio’s highly regarded record as Santiago mayor. Within days of taking his seat in April 1906, he was engaging in floor debates on a variety of issues, generally taking progressive positions. He argued that anarchist labor agitators should not be covered by Cuba’s extradition treaty with Spain, because they were not common criminals but defenders of socialist ideas. “It would be a travesty,” Emilio said, “for a country like Cuba, having achieved freedom thanks to the unbreakable idealism of its sons, now to deport men who fight for other ideas, wrongly or not, to Spain, where they will be condemned to the worst punishment.” He introduced legislation to provide a form of workmen’s compensation insurance, not yet existent in Cuba, and he told his fellow senators that if they could appropriate money for a new Senate building they should be able to provide housing for flood victims. Emilio Bacardi was clearly headed for a position of major national leadership.
His country, however, was fast slipping back into crisis. The opposition Liberals, concluding they had been forcibly excluded from political life, decided to seize power by force. Armed struggle had produced a whole generation of Cuban heroes, and the Liberal Party ranks included many former rebel army officers and fighters. By August 1906, the party leadership had mobilized a militia force of about twenty-four thousand disgruntled men, many of them black, and they were marching toward Havana. The insurrection was by no means suicidal. The United States, as the occupying authority, had successfully dismantled the old Cuban army and barred the creation of a new one, so the government in Havana had few troops to defend itself. President Estrada Palma warned the Liberals that if they did not back down he was prepared to ask the U.S. military to return to Cuba and reoccupy the island.
Emilio saw his country descending into chaos yet again, to his enormous frustration. He could not comprehend the shortsightedness of Cuban politicians—on the Liberal side for threatening the security of the nation itself in order to gain political power, and on the side of the ruling government party for having refused to bring the Liberals into the political process. Most alarming by far was President Tomás Estrada Palma’s threat to request U.S. military intervention. Another American occupation of the island would wipe out the whole structure of self-government the Cubans were trying to erect and destroy their fragile new sense of national purpose. Emilio resolved to do whatever he could by himself to avert a final showdown. “For winners and losers alike, the consequences will be the loss of our independence,” he warned in a public message. On September 8, when he realized neither side was compromising and his fellow senators were doing nothing on their own, Emilio sent an urgent telegram to the Senate president, Ricardo Dolz:IT ASTONISHES ME THAT IN THESE GRAVE MOMENTS THERE IS SO MUCH INDIFFERENCE, NOT CALLING CONGRESS INTO EXTRAORDINARY SESSION.
Dolz replied:I DON’T HAVE AUTHORITY TO CONVENE CONGRESS IN EXTRAORDINARY SESSION.
Within hours, Emilio sent another:I EXPECTED THAT ANSWER. BUT UNDER THE CURRENT CIRCUMSTANCES, WHEN ALL CUBANS NEED TO COME TOGETHER, CONGRESSIONAL AND PARTY LEADERS WILL SHARE THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR NOT HAVING CONVENED CONGRESS. TO SAY A MATTER OF SUCH IMPORTANCE IS THE DOMAIN OF THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH SHOWS INDIFFERENCE.
But Emilio was almost alone among his colleagues in recognizing the threat to Cuba’s nationhood. His efforts to get the Senate to intervene and forestall a U.S. intervention went nowhere. Estrada Palma asked President Theodore Roosevelt to send two ships to Cuba, and he followed that request by asking that two thousand to three thousand U.S. troops be sent “with the greatest secrecy and rapidity.” Roosevelt chose instead to dispatch Secretary of War William Howard Taft to mediate between the opposing sides. The Liberal revolutionaries agreed to lay down their arms if new elections were called. Estrada Palma and his vice president would themselves stay in office until a new government could be formed. But Estrada Palma rejected the compromise. He was determined to provoke a U.S. intervention by any means necessary, believing it would save him. On September 25, he said he and his vice president were resigning, fully aware the move would leave Cuba without any functioning government and thus force the United States to take charge.
Emilio Bacardi was furious; at the Liberals, at Estrada Palma, and—to an extent he had not expressed before—at the United States, for having put Cuba in this situation. “My increasingly firm idea,” he wrote to Elvira on September 27, “is that the American [side] is playing with the two parties. They will get a president to their liking ... and then they will come.” A day later, he was even more discouraged, writing to Elvira that he and a handful of other senators were pursuing a futile effort to get their chamber to reject Estrada Palma’s resignation. “The die is cast,” he wrote. “What we’re doing is a waste of time.” Estrada left office the next day with the rest of his government. William Howard Taft took official control of Cuba on behalf of the United States, establishing the second U.S. occupation of the country in less than ten years. Emilio left Havana, never to return to national politics.
The collapse of the Cuban Republic was a greater personal blow to Emilio Bacardi than it was to other Cuban patriots. A free and independent Cuban nation had been his sacred cause, the ideal that inspired and sustained him through exile and imprisonment. It would have been easier if he had carried a weapon during the independence war and fought on a battlefield, like his son Emilito and all the former generals who were now making a name in politics. In their Cuba Libre experience, they had worried about their ammunition supplies and food for their soldiers, with less time or reason to idealize their struggle. To the extent they were subsequently disillusioned, it was less painful than what Emilio felt.
He simmered for months, trying to understand what had happened and why. In February 1907, Leonard Wood wrote from the Philippines, where he was again a colonial administrator, asking for news about Cuba. Emilio wrote back to say that the sugar mills were grinding cane and the countryside was quiet but that there was much uncertainty about the country’s future. He laid much of the blame for his country’s suffering on Tomás Estrada Palma.
Cuba needs to be governed by someone who knows the country and its people, and this has perhaps been President Estrada Palma’s major failing. His long stay in the United States made him forget his own kind, and when he tried to govern them, he didn’t know them at all.
As Emilio knew well, Estrada Palma had been Wood’s personal choice to take over the Cuban presidency, precisely because of his loyalty to the United States, so the letter amounted to a rare rebuke of the U.S. general.
Emilio’s anger at what had happened to his country boiled over one day in April 1908. Charles Magoon, sent by Theodore Roosevelt to administer Cuba after the 1906 intervention, had ordered all the provincial governors and their legislative councils to resign as part of the preparation for new elections. The idea that democratically chosen Cuban officials could be ousted by an occupying foreign power infuriated Emilio, and he promptly wrote a commentary for a local newspaper:To my people:
We have taken anot
her step backwards. ... We have ratified our own incompetence. [We hear:] Governors and Councils, Stop Working!!! And this is not a cry to eliminate this useless cog in the gear of our state; that would be a sign of progress. No. What is sought is that we proclaim before the whole world that it is better to bow down before a foreigner than to obey a brother. And to stay bowed down, because we have no faith in ourselves and no civic consciousness. We believe it is only under the yoke of someone dominating us that we will not be a hindrance to civilization.
After years of admiring America, Emilio was coming to the conclusion that the United States—by its sheer size, its expansionist impulse, and its instinctive tendency to flex its muscles and dominate its neighbors—inevitably presented a danger to smaller, weaker neighbors. It was not that the United States was especially aggressive; its behavior was typical of all the big colonial powers of the day. In his commentary, Emilio cited the anti-imperialist views of Guglielmo Ferrero, an Italian historian and socialist of that era. “Never—not in the past nor today—has any nation governed another people with a spirit of justice,” he quoted Ferrero as saying. “It is not to stop them from falling that it extends a hand, but rather to push them all the faster toward the bottom of the abyss.” The United States had extended a hand to Cuba in 1898 but doomed its development. Emilio returned to the theme in a December 1908 letter to Carlos García, the son of Calixto García, the Cuban general spurned by U.S. commanders. In the letter, Emilio referred to “the American enemy, wise and astute, that for many years has been entangling us in the meshes of a preconceived plan.”
He was making a rhetorical point. Emilio’s admiration for the United States was undiminished, as was his affection for Americans, even those whom he held responsible for Cuba’s troubles. His March 1907 letter to Leonard Wood ended with an invitation to visit Cuba the following fall. Even in his anti-imperialist newspaper commentary, Emilio described the American nation as “a big, generous, and honest people,” and he and Elvira sent their daughters to be schooled in the United States. With other Cuban nationalists, however, he had drawn a lesson from the intervention experience: Small countries like Cuba need to keep their distance from large countries like the United States if they want their independence preserved, just as José Martí had forewarned.
In the years that followed, Emilio worked on his ten-volume Crónicas de Santiago de Cuba. His hometown seemed to him a purer representation of the Cuban nation whose development as a whole had been so tragic. He briefly returned to political life in 1916, though only to be on the Santiago city council. On this occasion, he ran on the Liberal ticket. When a young writer asked why he had switched parties, Emilio said his party identity had become irrelevant. “My only affiliation is santiaguero,” he said. Even that engagement proved disappointing, however. After the first council meeting was marked by partisan disagreements, Emilio announced his immediate resignation. He devoted the rest of his life to writing and to the Bacardi rum business.
Chapter 8
The One That Made Cuba Famous
In the first decade of the twentieth century, “Cuba Libre” went from being a cause to being a cocktail. As patriots, the Bacardis were disappointed that the dream of a genuinely free Cuba had mostly fizzled. As rum makers, they could not have imagined more promising business opportunities than what they soon saw, due to the popularity of new rum-based drinks such as the Cuba libre. The U.S. soldiers, businessmen, and tourists who came to patronize bars and nightclubs from Havana to Santiago found that light Cuban rum mixed well with everything, giving rise to an era of libation. American companies supplied the ice machines and the Coca-Cola, and drinking history was made.
The Bacardi story of the first Cuba libre comes from Fausto Rodríguez, who worked in his teenage years as a messenger for General Leonard Wood when Wood was military governor. He went on to become the Bacardi advertising chief in New York City, which raises questions about his impartiality, but he did tell a good tale. By his recollection, there was a barman named Barrio who presided at one of the many turn-of-the-century establishments in Havana that catered to U.S. military personnel. Eager to please his American customers, Barrio set in a supply of Coca-Cola. One day, on a whim, the Cuban bartender decided to mix some Bacardi rum with Coke and offer the drink to his patrons. They liked it, so Barrio refilled the glasses and made a toast: “¡Por Cuba Libre!” To Free Cuba!
“¡Cuba Libre!” the soldiers answered, holding their glasses high, and the rum-and-Coke cocktail got its proper name.
The daiquiri was another postwar innovation. The iron mines near Daiquirí, like most of the mines in eastern Cuba, were owned by U.S. corporations. The U.S. personnel who managed the mines received a gallon of Bacardi rum each month as part of their pay allotment and were always looking for creative ways to drink it. Jennings Cox, the general manager, is credited with the idea of mixing the rum with lime juice, raw sugar, and crushed ice and shaking it vigorously. The drink caught on among the other mine workers, and within a few years it was the most popular cocktail in Cuba.
Sensing the moment had come for a big marketing push, the Bacardi partners promoted their product wherever they could, both at home and abroad. Enrique Schueg sent Bacardi rum samples to every international exhibition or fair: Paris 1900, Buffalo 1901, Charleston 1902, St. Louis 1904. For the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, Schueg had an elaborate pavilion built, featuring fourteen-foot columns of mahogany and other exotic Cuban woods. The centerpiece was a huge replica of a Bacardi rum bottle, complete with a painted label and crowned by a bat, the symbol of the firm, along with a bundle of sugarcane. It might have been ugly, but it made a statement: The Bacardis had arrived. Their rum beat out eleven Cuban competitors in Buffalo to win a gold medal. At the St. Louis World’s Fair, the Bacardis won a grand prize.
In Santiago, the Bacardi name was soon associated with progress and celebration. Mayor Emilio Bacardi negotiated the first contract to bring electric lights to Santiago, and the big moments of modernization in the years that followed often had some Bacardi connection. So it was on the day in 1911 when the first airplane appeared in Santiago, flown by an intrepid American named James Ward. The historic event took place on San Juan Hill, before a crowd of wide-eyed townspeople. A few local men had to give Ward a push to get him started, but then he zoomed off toward the mountains, circled back toward the city, and landed on the same field where he had taken off. He was greeted at planeside by a Bacardi & Compañía agent who on behalf of the company and the city of Santiago presented Ward with a complimentary bottle of Bacardi Elixir, a raisin-flavored rum drink the company had just introduced. In the nineteenth century, civic involvement for a Cuban company like Bacardi meant supporting the independence movement. In the twentieth century, it could mean promoting air shows or sponsoring professional baseball teams, as Bacardi also did.
As the reputation of its rum spread, the company increased production, bringing molasses to the distillery in railroad tank cars. No longer was their company a rustic operation with a few dozen workers and old-fashioned technology, hovering constantly on the verge of bankruptcy. It had become a modern firm and was set to outlive those who were present at its birth. Bacardi & Compañía had established its own identity, separate from the lives of its founders, and its own corporate interests to be defended. It was still a family firm, but in the new century, under different conditions, the way this private Cuban enterprise could serve its nation would inevitably change.
A big part of the Bacardi success story was the company’s extraordinary good fortune in having three gifted business partners in the same family, with talents that complemented each other perfectly. Facundo Bacardi Moreau, Emilio’s brother, had the deepest history with the company, having worked at the distillery almost from the day it opened and directing it during the years Emilio was imprisoned. Facundo mastered every aspect of the rum-making operation, from the distillation to the charcoal filtration to the aging and the blending. No technical problem was beyond his under
standing, and it was hard to imagine the distillery, the factory, or even the bottling plant operating smoothly without the benefit of his expertise.
Unlike Emilio and Enrique, who arrived at the Bacardi offices in a carriage—in later years, by automobile—the unpretentious Facundo walked to work, generally going straight to the factory on Matadero Street. He was quiet in demeanor, steady in times of crisis, and the workers considered him the most approachable of the partners. A tidy dresser like his father, Facundo in later years showed up at the factory in a white shirt and a vest, with a watch on a gold chain tucked in the vest pocket. He kept his white beard neatly trimmed, though his long, thick mustache drooped at the corners of his mouth. Like Emilio, Facundo married a santiaguera of French descent (though born in Uruguay), Ernestina Gaillard, with whom he had two daughters, Laura and María, and two sons, Luis and “Facundito,” both of whom would go on to play roles in the business.