Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

by Gjelten, Tom

  In Fidel Castro’s Cuba, loyalty to the revolutionary state took precedence over all other allegiances. Political trustworthiness was also the paramount consideration in the selection of personnel to manage the state and the economy, even if it meant putting people in positions for which they lacked the most rudimentary skills. Nationalization resulted in a spectacular downgrading of management competence across Cuba in 1960 and 1961, with bus drivers or typists taking charge of factories and farm laborers assigned to manage cattle ranches and orange groves. The Bacardi family’s Hatuey brewery in Manacas was put under the control of a pro-Castro militant whose previous job had been as a handyman at a nearby motel.

  Bacardi engineer Manuel Jorge Cutillas had seen the consequences of this political approach to enterprise management several months before his own company was nationalized. The Cuban authorities expropriated U.S.-owned mining operations in Cuba in the summer of 1960, and shortly thereafter an official at the Ministry of Mines called Cutillas to ask him to provide some technical advice to the newly appointed manager of a nearby manganese mine. “We’re having some problems with the ore processing at that mine,” the official told Cutillas. “Would you be willing to help us?” Cutillas, who had a part-time job teaching chemical engineering at the local university, agreed to do what he could, and the new mine manager came to see him. “The American engineers all left when we took over the mine,” the man said, “and we don’t have anyone who really knows what to do.”

  Cutillas said he didn’t know what process the American engineers had been using with their ore. “There are hundreds of possibilities,” he said, “and they probably had a proprietary, patented process of their own.”

  “Well, can you tell me something at least?” the mine manager said. “I think they were using some acids or something.” When the man said his previous job had been as a surveyor’s helper, Cutillas told him there was nothing he could do to help him.

  At Compañía Ron Bacardi, S.A., the nationalization changes took a few weeks to play out. Many of the technical people and some of the managers remained on the job while considering their next move. Andres Yebra, the new company administrator, was more practical than many of the other new enterprise managers around the country and asked all Bacardi employees to stay. Even Daniel Bacardi, though excluded from all management decision making, encouraged personnel to remain on the job. “Don’t worry,” he told them. “We’ll solve this. Something will happen. Fidel will see he made a mistake, and they’ll change this back, I promise.”

  One Bacardi worker who stayed for a time was a Cuban of British ancestry named Richard Gardner, a supervisor at the Hatuey brewery in Santiago. Shortly after nationalization, Gardner had a confrontation at the brewery with a union leader who wanted him to assign two workers to a machine that only needed one. “This place belongs to us now,” the union leader said. Gardner said no.

  “Whether this place belongs to the Bacardis or to the government, what’s right is right,” he said, “and that machine only needs one worker.” Gardner expected to be dismissed, but to his amazement, Yebra supported him. After two more senior Hatuey brewers left Cuba, Yebra made Gardner the master brewer and begged him to stay, even though he knew Gardner was no fan of the revolution.

  It was a revealing moment. Fidel Castro and other revolutionary leaders were of two minds about professionals like Gardner. On the one hand, they recognized that the country needed technical and professional expertise in order to keep Cuba working. Anyone wishing to leave Cuba needed a permiso de salida—an exit permit—from a military intelligence unit, and for those Cubans with essential skills, it could be nearly impossible to get. On the other hand, professional Cubans were considered politically unreliable, with a “bourgeois” and individualist mentality, and they often found themselves ridiculed and insulted.

  Manuel Jorge Cutillas decided he wanted to leave Cuba, but his passport identified him as an engineer and therefore presented special problems. His second son had been born with a heart defect, and he and his wife were desperate to get the boy to a specialist in the United States. They applied for restricted exit permits for the specific purpose of taking their boy out of the country for medical treatment. When Cutillas went to pick the permits up in Havana, however, he noticed that his own had not been signed. The army captain in charge, it seemed, had a few questions.

  “Where do you work, Señor Cutillas, and why do you want to leave Cuba?” he asked. Hoping to conceal his Bacardi identity, Cutillas said he was teaching chemical engineering at the University of the Oriente in Santiago and that he and his wife wanted to take their son to the United States to see a heart specialist. “O.K.,” the captain said, “but you’ll have to bring a letter from the university rector giving his permission.” Cutillas silently cursed. The university rector had only recently been appointed, and he was an ardent Santiago fidelista. Keeping a brave face, however, Cutillas told the captain he would return to Santiago and get the letter. “Well, in the meantime,” the captain said, “give me your passport.” Cutillas had no choice but to hand it over.

  Cutillas’s wife, Rosa, was waiting outside in a car, packed and ready to go to the airport with their two sons. As he approached the car, Rosa could see by the look on Manuel Jorge’s face that he did not have the permit. “This guy,” he told her, “just proved beyond any doubt that we have to leave Cuba. You can’t live in a country where something like this happens.” Rosa decided to hold off on leaving Cuba until she saw whether Manuel Jorge would get his permit. A few days later, however, the Cutillas boy died of his heart ailment. Now desperate to leave Cuba, Manuel Jorge sent his wife and surviving son on to Miami, then made contact with the anti-Castro underground in hopes of finding a way to flee the island secretly. It would be a risky move; anyone caught leaving Cuba “illegally” could be imprisoned or worse. Cutillas eventually managed to leave on an aging cargo boat with a half dozen other disgruntled Cubans, taking nothing with him but the clothes on his back. After six terrifying days at sea, the group finally made it to Miami.

  Daniel Bacardi considered his prospects for a few weeks, but after a tearful encounter with Víctor Schueg, his longtime ally and close friend, he decided to join the exodus. Feeling betrayed by his old allies in the government and estranged from those family members with whom he had argued often about Fidel, Daniel and his wife Graciela and their children headed to Madrid rather than Miami. He remained in seclusion there for several months before reuniting with Pepín Bosch and rejoining the rum business. His sister, Ana María Bacardi, married to a physician named Adolfo Comas, left Cuba at about the same time. Her husband had been pressing her to leave for weeks, and they had sent their two draft-age sons to Florida at a time when it was still possible to do so. Ana María, however, was devoted to her brother Daniel, and she had followed his lead on Fidel, defending him almost to the end. By the time she was ready to leave, the act of getting a U.S. visa required running a gauntlet of Cuban hostility. Her teenage daughters Amelia and Marlena had to stand in line at the U.S. embassy in Havana all night long, enduring the taunts of the fidelistas who had been sent there to harass Cubans headed for the United States.

  When Cubans did get permission to leave the island, they could take only what they could fit in a suitcase or two. They had to prepare an inventory of their household goods, valuables, and Cuban bank accounts and leave all such assets behind. The Comas Bacardi family gave their house key to their neighbor, telling her she could have whatever she wanted of their art, antiques, and furniture. Travelers could bring only the jewelry they were wearing, and some women showed up at the airport looking like ornamented Christmas trees, with one earring dangling from the end of another. Even so, the inspectors often confiscated anything that appeared to be of value. Pepín Bosch’s son Carlos and his wife left with their infant son, who was clutching a silver drinking cup. The customs guard took one look at the cup and snatched it away.

  Within a few weeks of the government’s seizure of the Bacardi
properties, virtually all the top management and technical staff were gone from the company, but operations at the rum factory and the breweries continued. The government said the enterprise would be known as the Compañía Ron Bacardi (Nacionalizada), as if the change of ownership warranted only a parenthetical note. The company was so closely identified with the Bacardi name that changing it seemed unthinkable. After Richard Gardner and the other brewers left, the government brought in technical advisors from Czechoslovakia to keep the breweries operating. The rum factory was more critical, but along with the physical facilities the revolutionary government had taken possession of thousands of barrels of aging rum, and those reserves were enough to keep production going for years to come.

  The new management also had the services of two veteran rum workers in Alfonso Matamoros and Mariano Lavigne, who between them had nearly sixty years of Bacardi experience. Lavigne started at the company as a thirteen-year-old errand boy and subsequently rose to a position of confidence. When Pepe Bacardi was sent to Mexico in the early 1930s, Lavigne went along. Alfonso Matamoros had worked alongside Daniel Bacardi for more than twenty years. Neither man had much formal education or professional training, but through practical experience they had learned almost everything there was to know about rum making, and they were among the select few inside or outside the family who could replicate at least a portion of the Bacardi “secret formula.”

  Given their experience and skills, both men could have gotten jobs at one of the Bacardi distilleries outside Cuba. A few months after leaving Santiago, in fact, Daniel Bacardi wrote to both Matamoros and Lavigne from Spain, saying they could count on his help if they wanted it. The first letters were intercepted by authorities and never delivered. Lavigne was able to retrieve a third letter from the rum factory only after a colleague told him about it. In the letter, Daniel made veiled suggestions that Lavigne and Matamoros leave Cuba under the pretext of going on holiday to Mexico and Puerto Rico. “I imagine by this point you all deserve a rest,” Daniel wrote. He gave Lavigne the name of a doctor in Santiago who could help make arrangements for the trip, and he offered to pay the airfare and all other expenses for Lavigne and his family. Daniel wrote as if his own separation from Cuba were temporary (“Any day now I intend to return and go back to work”), and he was careful not to suggest that he was asking Lavigne to abandon Cuba, saying the “vacation” would enable him to go back to work “with a better spirit.” But thousands of Cubans had already fled the island at that point, and Lavigne well understood what Daniel was suggesting.

  His offer to help Matamoros and Lavigne get out of Cuba may have been an indication of how much the two Bacardi veterans meant to Daniel personally and how much he missed the camaraderie of the rum factory, but he also wanted to keep the revolutionary state from taking advantage of the men’s rum-making experience and knowledge. The Cuban authorities understood that as well, which is probably why Daniel’s letters were intercepted. In the end, either man would have had great difficulty securing an exit permit, even to take a “vacation.”

  Furthermore, while the Bacardis and their upper-class friends were leaving the island en masse, exile was less imaginable for Cubans like Matamoros and Lavigne, who were anchored to the island in a way that more worldly people were not. The Bacardis had family members outside Cuba to help them get reestablished, and some of them even had overseas bank accounts that the Cuban government could not touch, but Matamoros and Lavigne were both of humble origin. When the revolution tore Cuba along class lines, Alfonso Matamoros and Mariano Lavigne found themselves on the side that generally stayed put. Lavigne put Daniel’s letter carefully away in the cabinet where he kept all his Bacardi things, and it stayed there as long as he lived. More than forty years later, Lavigne’s daughter Felicita was still guarding the letter and wondering how her life would have been different had her father taken his family out of Cuba when Daniel invited him to do so. “He stayed here for family reasons,” she said. “It had nothing to do with politics.”

  Most of the thousands of Cubans who went into exile in 1960 and early 1961 were convinced they would soon return to the island, that Fidel could not last: His more pragmatic government partners would unseat him, or there would be a popular uprising against him, like the one that overthrew Fulgencio Batista. Indeed, the same methods Fidel and his allies had used in their revolution were now being turned against them. The peasants in the Escambray Mountains, an independent group even during the anti-Batista struggle, took up arms again, this time in opposition to the government’s heavy hand.

  Castro had taken a lesson from Batista’s hapless efforts at counterinsurgency, however, and he responded to the Escambray guerrillas with more force and ruthlessness than Batista had dared employ. With the guidance of Soviet counterinsurgency experts, Castro sent thousands of army troops into the mountains to pursue the guerrillas. Captured Escambray insurgents were often executed on the spot, and in a move reminiscent of the Spanish army’s “reconcentration” strategy during the independence war, Castro ordered the relocation of entire villages where the guerrillas enjoyed mass support. The villagers were moved en masse to western Cuba, where they could be closely monitored. Castro’s successful suppression of the resistance fighters discouraged the U.S. government, which had settled on the Escambray guerrillas as the spearhead for a broader anti-Castro resistance movement. The CIA resolved instead to organize an exile army that would carry out a full-scale invasion of Cuba the following spring.

  The result was the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. The new U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, fearing that the operation would be seen as a U.S. military intervention, barred the use of U.S. air bases and ordered that all military training take place outside U.S. territory. At nearly the last minute, he moved the invasion site from Trinidad, on Cuba’s southern coast, to the “less spectacular” Bay of Pigs location. He also canceled a series of air strikes that were to have destroyed Castro’s air force. As a consequence, the force was vulnerable to air attack. Fidel Castro’s troops quickly surrounded the invading army, capturing nearly 1,200 of the approximately 1,300 exiles who managed to make it to shore.

  Among the exile fighters was Manolo Puig, the older brother (and Olympic rowing partner) of Rino Puig, the Hatuey sales manager arrested in Havana the previous October. Deeply shaken by Rino’s imprisonment, Manolo volunteered to join a reconnaissance unit that went in ahead of the main invading force. They were promptly discovered, however, and Manolo was brought before a firing squad and shot. Rino Puig, in the Isle of Pines prison, got the news several days later, with a report that Manolo was unflinching to the end. For the remaining fourteen and a half years of his own imprisonment, Rino clung to the idea of his brother’s courage in the face of death and later credited his own survival to the inspiration he drew from that thought.

  The Bay of Pigs disaster was a turning point—for Cuba, for the United States, for Fidel Castro, for Cuban exiles, and for the anti-Castro movement, which never recovered from the defeat. Castro described the attack as a “Yankee-sponsored invasion” and portrayed its failure as “the first imperialist defeat in America.” In a May Day speech, he declared for the first time that Cuba was a socialist nation and need not bother with elections. His Bay of Pigs victory boosted Castro’s popularity on the island and so demoralized the opposition forces that they were never again able to mount a serious challenge to Castro’s rule. In December 1961, secure in power, Castro announced that Cuba would follow “a Marxist-Leninist program adjusted to the precise objective conditions of our country.”

  Had he been a Communist all along? The question remains unanswered, largely because Castro himself made contradictory declarations. During his rise to power and for about two years afterward, Castro insisted he was not a Communist and even offered cogent criticisms of Communist systems. As late as the summer of 1960, he insisted that the Cuban revolution had to steer “between capitalism, which starves people to death, and Communism, which resolves the econo
mic problems, but suppresses freedoms, the freedoms which are so dear to man.” (emphasis added) Such rhetoric earned Castro the support of progressive but non-Communist Cubans like Daniel Bacardi.

  On later occasions, however, Castro said he had always been in the Communist camp. In a 2003 interview with the French writer Ignacio Ramonet, Castro said he was already “a convinced Marxist-Leninist” at the time of the Batista coup in 1952, using the writings of Marx and Lenin as a political “compass.” His younger brother Raúl aligned himself earlier with the Communists, but in that 2003 interview, Fidel disputed the notion that Raúl was more of a Communist than he was. “Raúl was on the left, but really it was I who introduced Marxist-Leninist ideas to him,” Castro said. Many historians, however, took such arguments as revisionist boasting, meant to show how he had fooled people into thinking he was someone other than who he really was.

  During his rise to power, Castro was probably too much of an individualist to have been a good Communist. There were aspects of Marxism-Leninism that undoubtedly appealed to him, however, such as its hierarchical conception of political power and its rejection of pluralist approaches. Carlos Franqui, a prominent M-26-7 member and journalist who was himself a Communist Party member, once quoted Castro as saying the lesson he took from reading Joseph Stalin’s The Fundamentals of Leninism was that “a revolution must have only one leader if it is to remain whole and not be defeated.” Nothing characterized Fidel’s rule more consistently than his refusal to share power with anyone.

  Castro’s own interest in ideology was always more opportunistic than dog matic. By following a Marxist-Leninist path, Castro set himself on a collision course with the United States and tore his own country apart, driving a half million Cubans—about 6 percent of the population—into exile by 1970. But for Castro and his allies, that was just fine. They intended from the beginning to have an adversarial relationship with the United States and also to turn Cuban society upside down. “I measure the depth of the social transformation,” Che Guevara once told Egyptian President Gamal Nasser, “by the number of people who are affected by it and feel they have no place in the new society.”