Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

by Gjelten, Tom

  With Pepín Bosch’s departure in July 1960, Daniel became the top Bacardi executive in Cuba. Their contrasting views of Castro and his intentions put him and Bosch at cross-purposes: Daniel tried his best to keep the company on cooperative terms with the Castro government even as Bosch began discreetly supporting efforts to undermine it. Whether Daniel knew it or not, other family members and Bacardi people, including Daniel’s first cousin Emilio Bacardi Rosell, whose father was a twin brother of Daniel’s father, had already begun to work secretly with opposition groups. The only Bacardi of his generation named after his celebrated grandfather, Emilio got involved in anti-Castro underground work in Santiago with his wife Josefina; the two of them later escaped arrest only by climbing a fence at the U.S. Guantánamo naval base and taking refuge there. Augusto “Polo” Miranda, the manager of the Hatuey brewery in Manacas, and Rino Puig, the sales manager for Hatuey beer in Santiago, were also collaborating with the resistance movement. Miranda, having supported the 26th of July rebels during the anti-Batista uprising, switched sides and joined the anti-Castro opposition in 1960 after his brewery workers denounced him as a capitalist. Puig, who had lived in Spain in childhood, told his Bacardi colleagues that Fidel reminded him of the Nazi, Fascist, and Communist leaders who had ruined Europe.

  Puig was an energetic and athletic man who had competed along with his brother in the 1948 Olympics in London as a member of the Cuban rowing team, and he was prepared to do whatever he could to oppose the Castro government. He kept his contacts with the anti-Castro underground secret, but his opposition views soon resulted in a tense confrontation with Daniel Bacardi at the El Cotorro brewery outside Havana. Daniel had taken charge of the company, and when Puig saw him at a business meeting at the brewery, he asked to speak to Daniel privately.

  “Daniel,” Puig said quietly, staring him hard in the eyes. “You know we’re fucked, don’t you?”

  “What are you talking about, Rino?”

  “This is Communism, Daniel.”

  Daniel’s face reddened. For months, he had been having these arguments with others in his family and in the company. The harsh antibusiness rhetoric from Che Guevara and others, the elimination of independent voices, and the expanding alliance with the Soviet bloc had made his position no easier, but he was determined not to waver. Daniel had seen how the landless plantation workers, the laborers, and the marginalized black Cubans for the first time in their lives felt they had a government that cared about their interests. He knew that young people were volunteering to go into remote mountain areas to teach illiterate peasants how to read, and he had seen teams of medical workers for the first time carrying out mass vaccinations and other public health campaigns. Of all the Bacardis, Daniel was the most beloved in his community, the one with friends in every corner of the city, famous for his warmth and generosity. “Rino,” he said, his voice rising, “this is not Communism. This is the Revolution.”

  Rino—a full head taller than Daniel, nearly twenty years younger, and strong as a horse—did not flinch. “I swear to you, Daniel. They’re going to take all this away. We’ve got haciendas, we’ve got enormous businesses, and it’s all lost. I promise you.”

  “Rino,” Daniel responded, his eyes flashing, “it was at your mother’s house that I met my wife, and I have great admiration for you. But if anyone else were talking like this to me, I would pick up the phone and have him arrested!”

  “Daniel!” Puig shouted back. “They’re going to fuck you completely!”

  “If they take me, they take me! We can’t let imperialism defeat us!”

  The conversation was over. Daniel Bacardi was in an impossible situation, and he knew it. With Bosch gone, he was now the head of Cuba’s largest private industrial enterprise, and the company was a tempting takeover target, no matter his personal loyalty. Che Guevara was already saying the Cuban revolution was guided by Marxist principles, and that as the official in charge of the economy he wanted all strategic industries in the hands of the state.

  Daniel simply could not bring himself to believe that Bacardi Rum, nearly a century old and arguably the Cuban company most closely identified with the national soul, would be taken away from the Bacardi family. He began to recognize the political reality, however, when an official from the local labor department showed up at the rum-bottling plant in Santiago on September 30, 1960, and ordered a fifteen-minute halt in operations. The official said he was acting at the request of the bottling workers’ union, though he could not tell Daniel what labor complaint prompted the action. Daniel immediately wrote an angry letter to the labor office, asking how he could respond to the workers’ complaint if he didn’t even know what it was.

  Manuel Jorge Cutillas overslept a few minutes on the morning of October 14, just enough to miss the top of the 6 A.M. newscast on the clock radio by his bed. The first thing he heard was the announcer reading a list of Cuban firms: “... Compañía Azucarera Yatefas, Compañía Azucarera Fidelidad, S.A., Azucarera Oriental San Ramón, S.A. ...” It was a group of sugar mills. The announcer then started with a new list, what he called Grupo B: “Compañía Destiladora San Nicolás, S.A., José Arechabala, S.A. ...” At the mention of the latter, Cutillas sat up quickly, wide awake. Arechabala made Havana Club rum, the chief Bacardi rival in Cuba. Cutillas instantly suspected what was coming: “Compañía Ron Bacardi, S.A., Cervecería Modelo, S.A., Cervecería Central, S.A. ...”

  “Oh my God,” he said quietly to his wife. “It’s happening.” The Bacardi rum and beer business in Cuba, founded by Don Facundo in 1862 and maintained by four succeeding Bacardi generations, had become the property of the Cuban government. A few hours earlier, Fidel Castro had signed a decree ordering the nationalization of the Cuban and U.S. banks on the island, plus 382 private companies, of which all but twenty were entirely Cuban owned. In addition to the Bacardi Rum Company and its affiliated Hatuey breweries, the Castro government seized thirteen department stores, sixty-one textile factories, 105 sugar mills, sixteen rice mills, thirteen grocery suppliers, nineteen construction firms, four paint factories, and eleven movie houses, as well as more than a hundred other private companies.

  The government justified the nationalizations by saying that Cuba’s private entrepreneurs followed “a policy contrary to the interests of the Revolution” by taking profits in cash rather than reinvesting them, by borrowing money rather than risking their own operating capital, and by abandoning their firms and thus their workers. The Bacardi firm was guilty of none of these things. What was “contrary to the interests of the Revolution” was merely that the company was continuing to exist as a capitalist firm. The nationalization law made clear that socialism was to be the official guiding ideology in Cuba. The country’s economic development, the government declared, “can only be achieved through economic planning ... and national control of all basic industries,” just as Che Guevara had argued for months.15

  Cutillas, the fourth-generation Bacardi son, dressed quickly and rushed to the distillery on Matadero Street, half expecting to find it surrounded by armed troops. Though just twenty-eight years old, he was already one of the key figures in the family business. His grandfather Radamés Covani was second vice president, his father, Manuel Cutillas Sr., was administrator of the Hatuey brewery, and Manuel Jorge himself was the top chemical engineer at the distillery. He showed up at the plant itching for a fight, but to his astonishment he found everything operating normally. The guard posted at the entrance was the same man who was there every morning, and the workers were going on with their jobs as if nothing had changed. Everyone had heard about the nationalization decree, but no government agent had arrived to take charge.

  Despite what they had done to prepare for the nationalization, the revolutionary authorities had not bothered to determine where the Bacardi Rum Company was actually headquartered. Instead of going to the main company office on Aguilera Street in Santiago, the Cuban military officers in charge of the expropriation had headed that morning to the Baca
rdi building in downtown Havana, where the company had only a sales office. The most senior company employee they could find there was Juan Prado, the thirty-year-old sales manager. Prado, cheerful and engaging, was a born salesman and a rising star within the company. Impressed by his early performance, Pepín Bosch had put him in charge of the Havana region at the age of twenty-six. Nothing Prado had previously encountered, however, prepared him to deal with the sudden appearance in his office of two Cuban marines and several armed milicianos. The senior officer clutched a copy of the Bacardi expropriation order, a one-page mimeographed document with several misspellings and ungrammatical phrases.

  “You need to take the paper to Santiago,” Prado said. “That’s the company headquarters.” But the marines said their orders were to come to the Bacardi building in Havana and get the keys to the office. Not knowing what else to say, Prado asked the senior revolutionary officer for a receipt. “I have to have something to show my boss,” he said awkwardly. The officer scribbled something on a piece of paper, and Prado handed him the keys.

  The two men had met previously around town, and the officer did his best to be friendly with Prado. “You don’t owe Bacardi anything,” he said. “You’re not family. This will be a people’s company from now on. It’ll be a big opportunity for you. Why don’t you stay with us?” Prado acknowledged the offer, but said nothing. Anxious to consult with Daniel Bacardi and other executives over the next steps but reluctant to talk on the phone, he immediately booked a seat on an afternoon flight to Santiago. To his unpleasant surprise, the two marines were on the same flight, having belatedly realized they should have gone to Santiago in the first place.

  In the meantime, several dozen armed milicianos had shown up at the company facilities in Santiago and established a perimeter around the property. As he left the distillery that afternoon, Manuel Jorge Cutillas was stopped at the front gate by one of the milicianos and asked to open his trunk. Cutillas was furious, but the milicianos all had guns, and with clenched teeth he went along with the request. When Juan Prado arrived from Havana, he told Daniel that he had been invited to stay with the company and asked him whether that would be helpful. “I can’t tell you to do that,” Daniel said. He was still trying to grasp what had happened and didn’t know what to say.

  Early the next morning, Daniel sat down at a table in the company offices with two representatives of the state conglomerate into which the rum and beer companies were to be absorbed, a lawyer from the “industrialization” office of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, and the man designated by the revolutionary government to be the new administrator of the Bacardi enterprise, a mild-mannered accountant by the name of Andres Yebra. Three Bacardi union leaders were also there. Daniel represented the company, assisted by the treasurer, Orfilio Peláez, and three executives who had married granddaughters of Emilio Bacardi: Manuel Cutillas Sr., from the Hatuey brewery, José Argamasilla Sr., the public relations chief, and deputy manager Luis del Rosal. At 8:40 A.M. on October 15, 1960—designated by the revolutionary government as “the Year of Agrarian Reform”—Daniel Bacardi and the other company executives affixed their signatures to an acta de entrega, delivering the ninety-eight-year-old Bacardi enterprise to the Cuban state. The expropriation covered every physical asset the company held in Cuba, from the distillery and bottling plants to the warehouse where thousands of barrels of Bacardi rum were aging to the company’s administrative offices on Aguilera Street to the three Hatuey breweries to the Edificio Bacardi in downtown Havana. Accountants estimated that the seized properties had a total value at the time of about $76 million. The Cuban enterprise founded by Facundo Bacardi Massó, kept alive by his sons Emilio and Facundo Jr., and developed by his son-in-law Enrique Schueg and his granddaughter’s husband Pepín Bosch, had been taken away from the Bacardi family.

  Among the first people Daniel called after signing over the company’s Cuban assets was Rino Puig, the Hatuey sales manager with whom he had clashed so fiercely at the brewery in El Cotorro. Reaching him at home, Daniel tried his best to be cheerful. “Rino, how are you? Feeling screwed? I’m calling you to say you were right and I was wrong.” Even so, Daniel didn’t want to admit that all was lost. “You’ll see, Rino,” he promised. “They’re going to have to give it all back to us.” Rino only grunted.

  Castro’s confiscation of the family rum business was a blow to the Bacardi soul, with family members feeling they had lost the foundation of their identity. Many had no idea what to do or where to go. Some of the nonfamily employees who had spent their lives with the company were just as grief-stricken. Juan Prado, another who had defended the revolution against its critics, had no other job prospects, but he was close to the Bacardi family and would not consider staying at the company under conditions of state ownership. After two days in Santiago, Prado flew back to Havana, and early the next morning he went to his office to collect his belongings. Arriving early, he was surprised to hear voices coming from the manager’s office. He recognized one of the speakers as Gustavo Rodríguez Bacardi, the fifty-two-year-old son of Carmen Bacardi—Emilio’s youngest daughter by his first wife María—and a minor executive in the export department. When Gustavo emerged from the manager’s office, Prado noticed that he was accompanied by men dressed in olive green M-26-7 uniforms.

  “Prado,” Gustavo said airily, “what are you doing here so early?”

  “I came here to resign,” Prado said. “What about you?”

  “They just reconfirmed me,” Gustavo said. “I’m staying on.” Prado was stunned. Even as a nonfamily member, he was so angered by the Bacardi nationalization that he wanted nothing to do with it.

  The new managers recognized Prado’s talents, however, and tried repeatedly to get him to stay, even offering him the management of the nationalized Coca-Cola subsidiary in Havana as an alternative. Prado said he would consider the offer and make up his mind within the next week or two. It was only a stall for time to manage his affairs. Within a month, Prado had left Cuba with his wife and two small children. In the aftermath of the confiscation, a stream of senior Bacardi managers and family members went into exile. Of those who stayed on the island, many did so in the hope (and expectation) that the United States would soon intervene in Cuba and bring an end to Castro’s rule.

  Within days of the seizure of the brewery at El Cotorro, Hatuey sales manager Rino Puig was devoting all his time and efforts to the resistance. On October 22, accompanied by two comrades in arms, Puig went to a house where he had been told an arms cache had been left for him and his fellow rebels. When he knocked, a man came to the door and asked his name.

  “Rino,” he answered.

  “We’ve been looking for you,” the man said. “You’re the head of the counterrevolution in this area.” Armed men immediately emerged from the house to arrest him and the two men with him. Puig was taken away to prison and quickly convicted of counterrevolutionary conspiracy. He was spared execution only because he was unarmed at the time of his arrest and the authorities had no proof against him. Puig was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, however, and because he refused to acknowledge his guilt, he served his entire term and was released only in October 1975.

  Anyone in the extended Bacardi community who remained loyal to Fidel Castro after October 1960 was siding with a government that had imprisoned Rino Puig and seized the family business. Among those who nevertheless did so was Manolo Ortega, the Bacardi television announcer, who went on to become the chief broadcaster of the Cuban revolution, exhorting his compatriots to help out with the sugarcane harvest and follow Fidel. Another was Raúl Gutiérrez, who designed and produced most of the Bacardi advertising campaigns and was a close friend of many Bacardi executives. José Espín, who had faithfully served Enrique Schueg and Luis J. Bacardi and had once been in line to become the company manager, also sided with the Castro government, though in his case it was mostly a matter of loyalty to his daughter Vilma, Fidel’s sister-in-law and the most powerful woman in revolu
tionary Cuba.

  The old radical Herminia Cape continued to applaud Castro, though at ninety-five she had moments of confusion, and some of those who cared for her doubted she was genuinely a fidelista. The most important family members still supporting the revolution were Gustavo Rodríguez Bacardi and his two children, Gilda and Gustavín. By staying with the government even after the Bacardi confiscation, Rodríguez earned the wrath of his seventy-six-year-old mother, Carmen Bacardi, who saw him as betraying the life work of her father Emilio. Even worse for her was the day her grandson Gustavín, just twenty-one years old, showed up at her door in the uniform of a miliciano and informed her he had been appointed as the agent responsible for taking over the Royal Bank of Canada, where she had her money on deposit. The idea that her own grandson would be complicit in the seizure of her life savings so upset Carmen that she ordered Gustavín out of her house and said she never wanted to see him again. She left Cuba for Puerto Rico shortly thereafter and had no more contact with Gustavín, who went on to become a state security agent for the Castro regime, serving in a variety of overseas posts.