Rum Historian by Marco Pierini
Between January 1899 and May 1902, Cuba was ruled by a US military administration. Then in June 1900 the first municipal elections took place and in December those for the Constituent Assembly. In spite of a very limited electorate, more or less100.000 men, the victory went to the independence-minded parties.
During the proceedings of the Assembly, in 1901 the notorious Platt Amendment was inserted in the Constitution, which gave the USA the right to intervene in Cuba when they deemed it necessary. It was a painful open wound in Cuban national pride, but also a tool available to the various political factions. Since the presidential elections of 1902, Cuban politics was characterized by fierce clashes and mutual delegitimization between the parties in struggle. The first president Tomas Estrada Palma himself was elected without opposition, because his rival withdrew denouncing fraud and irregularities. As a matter of fact, from the very beginning, the Cuban Republic was characterized by violence and disorder, in a sort of a permanent low intensity civil war, with widespread electoral fraud, dramatic political corruption, gangsterism and repeated American military interventions.
Yet, and it is not easy to understand how that was possible, violence and disorder coexisted with a spectacular demographic and economic growth. Not only did many Spaniards remain in Cuba after independence, but over the next 30 years one million Spanish immigrants arrived. Some returned to Spain or emigrated again, but many remained, leaving a deep mark on Cuban society. Many other immigrants arrived from all over Europe and to a lesser extent also from Asia. The economy grew, dynamic, modern, and prosperity spread to an important part of the society.
The success of some rum producers stands out in this context. They were companies with Cuban capital and management that grew and consolidated, conquered the local market, exported and, in the case of Bacardí, became real multinationals. A rare case in all of Latin America, one more sign of the strength of the Cuban economy.
From the very beginning, and then throughout its entire history, the promotion of the Brand and of the overall image of the Company has been the heart of the Bacardí marketing strategies. I am not an expert, but it is my understanding that the Company combined the most modern marketing techniques with attention to maintaining an image consistent with the origins, the real characteristics, the identity of the Company, starting from the creation of a myth of the origins and an exaltation of the figure of the founder, Don Facundo Bacardí Massó, and his son and successor, Don Emilio Bacardí Moreau. Myth of the origins from which the co-founder, the French distiller José León Bouteiller disappeared immediately and forever. Moreover, Bacardí was fortunate enough to have gifted business managers within the family and to continue to be chaired by Emilio Bacardí, one of the founder’s sons.
Anyway, at the beginning of the 1900s “Emilio was the public face of the firm, at a time when its image and reputation were still being established. In the postwar era, with the memories of struggle still fresh and the dream of a free Cuba not yet real-ized, national pride was still a powerful sentiment, and with Emilio at its head, Bacardi & Compañía could be represented as the most genuinely Cuban of the island’s rum companies. Cubans were regularly reminded that Bacardi rum was served in the bars and nightclubs of Madrid, París, and New York. It was ‘El Que a Cuba Ha Hecho Famosa’ (The One That Has Made Cuba Famous), and no one could represent the rum more prestigiously than Emilio Bacardi, the esteemed patriot.” (T. Gjelten “Bacardi and the long fight for Cuba” 2008)
First in Santiago and later all over Cuba, Rum Bacardí was from the beginning associated with civic involvement, political progressivism, and modernity. For in-stance, the pilot of the first airplane to arrive in Santiago, in 1911, was treated to a “complimentary bottle of Bacardi Elixir, a raisin-flavoured 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.” (Gjelten). And as early as 1910, Bacardí opens its first factory abroad, in Barcelona.
“By 1919, with rum production and sales growing from month-to-month, the Bacardi partners decided it was time to reorganize their firm as a stock corporation, to be known as the Compañía Ron Bacardi, SA (Bacardi Rum Company, Inc.). They declared it to be worth an astounding $3.7 million, about two thirds of which ($2.43 million) was their estimate of the value of the Bacardi name and all their trademarks … and indication of how vigorously they intended to defend them.” (Gjelten)
Investments in building and machinery, needed for the growth of the Company, were always attentive to promoting its mythology. Indeed in 1922, the sixtieth anniversary of the Company’s founding, a new, larger and more modern distillery was inaugurated, but built taking care not to damage the coconut palm that – they say - the fourteen-year-old Facundo Bacardi Jr. had planted in front of the distillery in 1862.
Meanwhile, the importance of Bacardí’s biggest competitor, Arechabala, also grew. In 1862, at the age of 15, José Arechabala y Aldama arrived in Havana. He was born in 1847 in the province of Vizcaya, in the Basque Country. He too, like Facundo Bacardì and like many young Spaniards before and after him, sought his fortune in Cuba. He was energetic and ambitious and in 1878, in the lively coastal town of Càrdenas, he founded his own Company which, perhaps with a little nostalgia, he called La Vizcaya. The Company dedicated itself to distilling rum with a small still. Business went well, very well, so much so that not even the great destruction caused by a terrible cyclone in 1888 stopped the growth of the enterprise. In 1921 the Company, by then one of the largest in Cuba, became a joint-stock Company with the name of “José Arechabala, S.A.” of which Don José became the first president. The Company grew into one of the most important companies on the island. The Havana Club brand itself was introduced in 1935 by the Arechabala family. A diarchy in the world of Cuban rum soon arose, a commercial and even political competition between Bacardí who continued to care for his progressive image and Arechabala who instead sided with the conservative side. Numerous other companies were born in Havana and elsewhere in the island, first of all Ron Matusalem, but none of them reached the importance of the two major contenders.I would now like to dwell a little on what I think I can call the Rum Inferiority Complex. Actually, our beloved spirit has suffered for a long time, and in part still suffers, from a real complex of inferiority towards the traditional and more “noble” European distillates, Scotch Whisky and Cognac in the first place. Born as a humble spirit for humble people, it has taken rum a long time to become proud and confident and to present itself to consumers as a quality, sipping, spirit drink. In Cuba this process was faster, but it took time and for many years Bacardí also suffered from this inferiority complex. Indeed, in the Bacardí entry of the 1918 Diario de la Marina special issue (See the article THE RON LIGERO CUBANO in the February 2024 issue), we read that Bacardí:
“is a very pure cane brandy, poorly named rum because with this name are called all the spirit drinks made from sugar cane, that are so different from ours. The drink known as ‘rum’ everywhere has a certain taste and smell of leather sole or maceration, as we have said before, something that is peculiar to it due to a defective, old style distillation. With its product, the house ‘Bacardi and Co.’ has created a new class of rum and a true National Industry, since this Industry was born and developed in the Island of Cuba. Bacardi is a unique product in its class, as good and as fine as are the best grape spirits made in Cognac. This is thanks to a special filtration technique, exclusively ours, that has returned to the cane spirit its true flavor and the natural delicacy of its aroma, making it the favorite drink of Cuba.” That is, it may seem strange to us today, but in that year 1918 Bacardí openly affirmed that rum was generally bad and poorly distilled while Bacardí was excellent because it was not really a rum, but something unique, different, a real cane brandy, as good as the traditional, prestigious, grape brandy.
It was only later that the bull was taken by the horns and it was finally declared that Bacardí rum was a real rum, even though superior to all the others, thanks also to the environmental characteristics of Cuba. And, as often in the history of rum, science was called upon to confirm this.
A Doctor Guilliermo García Cita López, member of the Havana University and former chief of the Department of Bromatology of the Ministry of Health of the Cuban Republic, in a work that [according to Gjelten, in 1934] he submitted to a Medical-Pharmaceutical Competition about the products of the Compañía Ron Bacardí, S.A., wrote:
“Some foreign industrialists have tried to transport molasses for the purpose of making rum. A very curious fact showed them that rum, with its physical-chemical characteristics, could not be obtained in that way in Europe, because they only obtained an unpleasant ethyl alcohol. Reliably, weather conditions play a role in the manufacture of rum. In the cane producing countries, high temperatures exert their action on fermentation. Attempts to ferment in Europe, even in places with high temperatures, have also failed. Some have come to think that, in addition to the character of molasses and ambient temperature, other causes could have an effect on the preparation of rum, and so have spoken of possible ferments diffused in the atmosphere of warm countries. ... Molasses has a natural yeast that adheres like a grey or whitish powder to the surface of the cane, next to the knots, which is what acts as a ferment. This leads to the same kind of fermentation as wine, already known, that is without the intervention of artificial ferments, as in the case of whisky” (H. Alonso Sánchez “El Arte del Cantinero”1948)
The prestige that imported foreign distillates enjoy among their national public is a problem that even today many South American countries have not been able to solve completely. In 1981 Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, published the short novel “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” (in my humble opinion the most important of his novels) that tells the story of the killing of a Santiago Nazar in a village in Colombia. The novel devotes ample space to the big, long, very expensive, wedding party offered by the rich groom, which the whole village attends together with his relatives and friends: “He said that forty turkeys and eleven pigs had been sacrificed for the guests, and four calves that the groom put to roast for the people in the public square. He said 205 boxes of smuggled spirits and nearly 2,000 bottles of cane rum were consumed and distributed to the crowd.” So, rum is for the crowd, those of lower rank, like the two reluctant young murderers who in the short, dramatic hours preceding the murder, try to make themselves strong by drinking bottles of rum.
And, if you’ll allow me a somewhat nostalgic personal note, I still remember some interesting conversations a few years ago with some Venezuelan producers, during the never-enough-regretted International Rum Congress in Madrid. Speaking freely, perhaps after a good dinner at the end of a busy day, they told me that even today, in their homeland, rum consumers who were able to move up the social ladder, often replaced the excellent Venezuelan rums with expensive, but prestigious, imported spirits.
And the Rum Inferiority Complex continues to exist not only in South America. It’s just my opinion and I don’t want to convince anyone, but it seems to me that even in the European and North American obsession with aging rum for a disproportionate number of years, there is at the root a desire to make it similar, at least in image, to whisky and brandy. Forgetting, or not knowing, or not wanting to know, that well fermented and well distilled rum does not really need it. (See my THE WHITE RUM RENAISSANCE in the January 1917 issue)
-Marco Pierini-
