Bacardi Biography Details The 'Fight For Cuba'

RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

We turn now from the hurricane ripping across Cuba to a happier time, the 1950s, when you could hear this on the radio every night.

(Soundbite of TV show, "Party with Bacardi")

Unidentified Announcer: (Spanish spoken)

MONTAGNE: "Party with Bacardi" was the hit show presented by the premier Cuban company Bacardi Rum. It was an era when Cuba was the tourist capital of the Caribbean, an island of tropical delights, nightclubs and casinos. NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten has written a new book. It's called "Bacardi and the Long Fight For Cuba." It's about the Bacardi family and the family's fortunes, which, he writes, have been intertwined with Cuba's ever since Cuba's wars from independence from Spain during the mid-1800s, when the company was founded.

TOM GJELTEN: Rum up until that period was, really, you'd have to say it was a man's drink, and it was a rough man's drink. I mean, it was drunk by sailors and, you know, buccaneers. And it was very harsh in its taste. And Facundo Bacardi, the founder of the Bacardi Rum Company, decided to make rum a much lighter drink, one that would be enjoyed by a broader group of consumers, and one that could be mixed with other things. And of course, Coca Cola became famous, and the daiquiri, and so forth.

MONTAGNE: And the thread of revolution starts with the son of the founder of Bacardi, who was involved in Cuba's war of independence from Spain in the 19th century.

GJELTEN: Right, Renee. That's Emilio Bacardi, who was the first Bacardi born in Cuba, was arrested twice, and exiled to Spain for years on end. He is the original person that intertwined this kind of entrepreneurial identity as the president of Bacardi Rum with this nationalist political identity as one of the real patriots of the Cuban independence movement.

MONTAGNE: So, how do these two things mesh - if they do at all - with how Bacardi was run as a company, putting out quite a famous product, popular as a party drink?

GJELTEN: It's interesting that in the late 19th century, just as the Bacardi family was deeply involved in this anti-Spanish struggle, they were at the same time trying to court favor with the Spanish crown, and actually were named as the purveyor to the royal household. One of the ways that they really established their reputation as a Cuban company was by emphasizing their patriotic credentials and their close association with Cuba. One of their first advertising slogans, Renee, was "The One That Has Made Cuba Famous," and this was because many American tourists came to Cuba, and one of the things they enjoyed doing in the 1920s and 1930s and after was to drink rum. And so Bacardi became associated with Cuba in the mind of tourists, in the minds of Cubans, both for its political profile and for its contribution to, sort of, the cultural image of Cuba.

MONTAGNE: So then it was a natural, Tom, that this family would support the revolution in the '50s led by Fidel Castro?

GJELTEN: You're right. The Bacardi relationship with the Cuban revolution was in many ways a sort of a carryover of 100 years of involvement in, you know, what they regarded as progressive causes in Cuba and Cuban nationalistic movements. When Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, there was no Cuban company more closely associated with the revolution than the Bacardi Rum Company. Pepin Bosch, who was the chairman of Bacardi Rum at that time, gave tens of thousands of dollars of his own money to buy weapons for Castro's rebels, as did other members of the Bacardi family. And it was really a year and a half after Fidel was in power that the Bacardis finally turned against him, and it came only after Fidel expropriated all their properties in Cuba. This was in October 1960 and - when almost all the Bacardis then went into exile.

MONTAGNE: Tom, tell us the story of the Bacardi family member who actually plotted or hoped to attack Castro's Cuba.

GJELTEN: Right, Renee. This is Pepin Bosch, the Bacardi chief and the same businessman who was so close to the revolutionary movement in the 1950s and then, of course, turned against it. His son Carlos Bosch, living in exile in south Florida, in the early 1960s had this idea of starting an air-freight business. But then for some reason, he couldn't get the requisite permissions from the U.S. aviation authorities to go ahead with his business. And finally he says to his father, Pepin Bosch, for some reason I can't get the approvals to get this business going. I have no idea what's the problem. And his father says, maybe it's the plane I'm keeping in Costa Rica.

Pepin Bosch then proceeds to tell him that he has bought a B-26 bomber, and he is looking for someone to fly it on bombing missions to Cuba. In fact, it never happened. He was never able to find anyone to fly that mission. But it's just - it's just an example of one of the many sabotage activities that were hatched in those first crazy years after Fidel came to power. And the Bacardis, as leading members of the Cuban exile community, were involved in a good number of them.

MONTAGNE: But the Bacardis did continue to do in exile quite well, didn't they? In fact, in some respects even better.

GJELTEN: That's really true, Renee. I mean, partly it reflects some very farsighted decisions they made in the 1950s at a time when their biggest enemy was Batista, the Cuban dictator. And they actually worried that because of their political profile in Cuba in the 1950s, the Batista regime might move against them. And so you saw in the 1950s the creation of independent companies outside Cuba, and this made it much easier for the Bacardis to reorganize without their Cuban assets, without their Cuban headquarters.

MONTAGNE: What is the likelihood that, you know, post-Castro era, the Bacardi family and Bacardi Rum will return to Cuba?

GJELTEN: Again, one of the things about this whole Bacardi story is that there is a deep Cuban identity in this company, and it is a family company, Renee. To this day, even though it's worth billions and billions of dollars, it's still almost entirely owned by the Bacardi family. And so you would see the Bacardis then going back to Cuba in a way sort of representative of all that Cuban exile capital, Cuban exile money, that could conceivably be made available in the rebuilding of Cuba. Just as the Bacardis have been a big force in Cuba for over a century, I think we cannot at all discount the possibility that they could be a force in Cuba in the future.

MONTAGNE: Tom, thanks very much.

GJELTEN: It's my pleasure, Renee.

MONTAGNE: NPR's Tom Gjelten is the author of "Bacardi and The Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause." Read an excerpt from the book and view a gallery of vintage Bacardi ads at our Web site, npr.org. This is Morning Edition from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.