Rum Historian by Marco Pierini
This article, again, is based mainly on “A Thousand Thirsty Beaches” by Lisa Lindquist Dorr, 2018; all the quotes are from this book.
Just few months after the entry into force of Prohibition, the American press noticed that something was not working: “By March 1920, the New York Times reported that bottles of illegal spirits were arriving in New York aboard steamers from Cuba. By October, the Times noted the increase in trade aboard rum-running ships. By December, signs outside saloons in New York City advertised ‘Why go to Cuba?”, slyly suggesting one need not to travel to find the liquor that increasingly drew tourists to Havana.”
One year later, “By the end of 1921, well before ‘Rum Row’ became common shorthand for the floating marketplaces of booze along the eastern seaboard, government officials across the country were wringing their hands at their inability to stop liquor from coming into the country by sea. Navy and Coast Guard fleets were small and outdated, and their efforts were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the traffic in liquor. As the New York Times noted at the end of that year, ‘For every rum-running schooner overhauled and captured, a dozen had escaped to land their cargoes on a thousand thirsty beaches from Cape Breton to the sunny shores of Florida.’”
“Alcohol traveled from liquor-exporting islands in the Caribbean to serve local markets in the South or passed through the southern coasts on its way to markets farther north. This wide-reaching, well-organized, and immensely profitable traffic in liquor eventually expanded to include other contraband cargoes – undocumented immigrants and narcotics – once federal laws restricting immigration and controlling drugs made smuggling them profitable.”
In front of the spectacle of the smugglers’ speedboats chased by the Coast Guard, the press would often make fun of the efforts of the Federal Authorities, with headlines like this: “Hide and Seek Adds Comedy to Rum Game”.
At first, the smugglers concentrated on the large coastal cities of the North East, then things changed and a large part of the trafficking moved towards the South of the US, adapting to what we can call the Geopolitics of smuggling. “Their enterprise shifts the focus from north-eastern cities to the seas along the southern coasts and the smaller towns, cities and sparsely settled coastal areas along the southern Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. Though these locations may have appeared isolated, they were nonetheless well connected to global trade networks that traveled through Havana, across the Straits of Florida, and throughout the South. Described as ‘the northern rim of [the] Caribbean’ the South shared colonial relationships, systems of slavery, monocrop of agriculture, trade, and cultural exchange with the region since the fifteenth century. Bootleggers merely took advantage of the long-standing networks to meet ongoing demands of liquor.”
“While the Coast Guard sought to prevent liquor from entering the United States by sea, other agencies sought to disrupt the source of supply more directly. To examine their efforts, the story now moves to Havana, Cuba, where a small band of quasi-official agents took on the liquor trade in the port where smugglers purchased their cargoes.” We must remember that, while the US went dry, the rest of the world did not. So, the U.S. tried to persuade the other countries to collaborate in the fight against alcohol smuggling, but with little success. Producing countries, shipping companies, trans-shipment ports etc.: all had too much to gain from the sales of alcohol to want to seriously collaborate with the American authorities.
A significant smuggling of alcohol, and not only that, developed immediately between Cuba and the US and some years later, in 1924, Havana was probably the most important center of rum smuggling into the United States. Cuba exported its own rum, but also a great quantity of spirits imported from Europe. Trading in alcohol was legal in Cuba, Customs duties were very profitable for the Cuban Treasury, and the Cuban authorities were more than willing to turn a blind eye to a few irregularities. “Havana was well positioned to play a central role in the black-market traffic in booze.” European producers of alcoholic beverages used Havana as a transshipment point to enter the American black market. “Europeans makers of cognac, whiskey, scotch, gin, vodka, wine, and champagne, unwilling to lose their American market entirely, shipped thousands of cases of liquor to ports like Havana, knowing that they would eventually end up as contraband arriving on the southern shores of the United States.”
“In 1925 in the face of a flood of booze from Cuba, the U.S. government sent Captain Peter A. del Valle of the U.S. marine corps to Havana to investigate the smuggling industry in Cuba. He eventually submitted a forty-page report outlining an extensive smuggling network for liquor as well as companion cargos of immigrants and drugs. During his investigation, del Valle posed as a businessman hoping to start a smuggling operation and met with a successful bootlegger at a local Havana café to learn the trade. Getting into the smuggling business, he was assured, was quite simple. One needed only a schooner, a relationship with a liquor wholesaler in Havana, and a relatively modest amount of capital to become a rum runner. Vessels that could carry 8,000 cases could be had for about $8,000 and the old hand in the trade even offered to locate a ship for a small commission. The smuggler also recommended a local liquor wholesaler, calling him a “square broker”. Wholesalers, del Valle learned, were useful beyond merely providing the liquor itself. A good one also took care of ‘fixing’ any inquisitive government officials and obtained the fake documents needed to enter and leave port. This helpful smuggler also suggested that Daytona, Florida, might provide a ready market for del Valle’s smuggled goods. In short, over the course of one evening and several rounds of drinks, del Valle was instructed in the intricacies of the liquor trade from equipment to supply to final customer. More than merely transporting liquor by boat from Havana to the southern coast, successful smuggling followed an established business model, with a little corruption, to ship liquor to its final destination in the glasses of thirsty Americans nationwide. … The business model the smuggler described to del Valle in 1925 involved largely legal transactions, at least until the product reached American waters. Purchasing large quantities of liquor from a wholesaler in Havana was perfectly legal, as was shipping that liquor to a foreign port, just not one in the United States. But it was no secret to U.S. officials in Cuba and to Cuban officials themselves that much of the liquor that left Cuba wound up in the United States. The traffic in liquor from Havana to those thirsty southerners veered from legal to illegal trade and built on existing trade relations established between Cuba and the United States. In many ways, the liquor traffic was a modern international business, using technological innovation, a focus on efficiency, and the delivery of a reliable product in which southerners played no small part.”
“Smuggling liquor was big business, worth many millions of dollars a year. Beginning with a few bottles smuggled aboard regular ferry service to the United States, it increased by 1923 and 1924 into a thriving well-organized industry. Henry Kime, a man-about-town working as an undercover agent in Havana, outlined the financial aspects of smuggling in a 1927 report to prohibition officials in Washington, D.C. He estimated there were at last twenty-eight ships engaged in smuggling docked in Havana at any one time and forty-five or so that regularly smuggled liquor from Havana to the United States. These ships could carry 2,000 to 10,000 cases of liquor, averaging about 5,000 per ship per voyage. Kime pointed out that Havana alone supplied the United States with approximately 500,000 cases of illegal booze every month, totaling 6 million cases per year.”
Far from the halo of romanticism surrounding it, smuggling was in a large part a question of paperwork. “Documents indicating that a cargo of liquor was destined for the United States represented a clear violation of American Prohibition laws, giving Cuban authorities the necessary justification to prevent the ship’s departure for sea. Consequently, liquor ships could only leave port if they carried authorized clearance papers indicating that they were headed or ‘clearing’ for ports where the trade in liquor was legal.”
Therefore, in Havana, a true and proper market for forged documents was born, and many foreign ports, especially in small Honduras, officially imported large quantities of spirits. For example, a schooner had returned to Havana after unloading its cargo; according to the ship’s papers she went from Havana to French St. Pierre off the coast of Canada, then to Trujillo in Honduras, and then to Habana again. The whole voyage in in six days! “It just proves that the days of the fast clipper ships are not over – seems like a rum cargo surely does put speed to a vessel.”
“Indeed, business was so brisk in the smuggling trade that by 1926 two shipping agencies in Havana … devoted themselves exclusively to rum running concerns. They provided comprehensive services to their clients, including ‘putting aboard liquor cargoes, arranging details at Havana Customs, supplying clearance papers and a dummy shipper [who would take delivery of the cargo], supplying return fraudulent papers from Honduras ports, and paying the small graft demanded by harbor officials’. By 1927, officials confirmed that virtually all of the Customs documents submitted by ships carrying liquor out of Havana were fraudulent. … As smuggling out of Havana increased, American officials expressed continual frustration with the seeming unwillingness of Cuban officials to address what Americans believed were clear and obvious frauds. Cuban officials responded to American complaints by throwing up their hands and insisting there was little they could do; the ships were not violating Cuban law.”
As we have said, massive smuggling operations also came from Canada, Saint Pierre, the Bahamas, Europe and Mexico. However, in these cases, the pressure that the US could exert was limited. The various countries defended their interests, and in the 1920s the US was not yet the superpower we have known since after the Second World War. Cuba, though, was a different case. The island had a substantial dependence on the US, which even threatened a direct military intervention. Therefore, American pressures couldn’t be ignored, at least officially. So, in 1926, the United States and Cuba negotiated a series of measures, soon known as the Rum Treaty, which allowed them to legally pursue booze smuggling towards the United States also in Cuban ports and the Cuban territory. And not only booze smuggling: “Cuba’s anti-smuggling treaty with the United States covered all three illicit cargoes – liquor, immigrants, and narcotics – theoretically uniting efforts between the two countries to stop all forms of illicit traffic. It was a fact often obscured by frequent references to the treaty as ‘Rum Treaty’. ”
And to enforce the Treaty, a specific group of undercover agents was also formed, tasked with gathering information on suspicious shipments and then informing the American and Cuban authorities. The purpose was to prevent shipments of alcohol from leaving for the US or to alert the Coast Guard in time so they could intercept the smuggling ships before they unloaded their precious cargo. “Rather than create a new bureaucracy in Havana, the federal government, through the Intelligence Division of the U.S. Coast Guard, funded and fostered a small group of civilians who acted, as they jokingly referred to themselves, as ‘Uncle Sam’s Booze Cops’. It was their efforts that shut down smuggling from Havana, if only temporarily.” For this gang of booze cops almost entirely wiped out the smuggling of liquor from Havana during 1926 and 1927.
The exploits of this handful of agents in 1920s Cuba would deserve a novel or a film, with some comedic aspects. Because, despite their commitment and the dangers they faced, owing to the continuous lack of adequate resources, bureaucratic red tape, competition among various federal agencies, and the lack of cooperation from the Cubans, their efforts ultimately proved futile. After a couple of years, smuggling resumed almost as before. Many smugglers left Havana, dispersing to other ports and landings, frequently changing them and hiding a bit better. Others learned to better forge the documents, relying on the lack of enthusiasm from Cuban authorities and on simple corruption. The stakes were too high, and it was objectively difficult to enforce in Cuba a law that the Americans blatantly failed to enforce even at home.
The work and the problems of the entire group are documented in a series of letters between the local chief of the group and his boss in Washington. I believe they are worthy of publication, because they are a first-hand testimony to the successes, the frame of mind and the ultimate failure of the efforts to stop the smuggling of booze from Cuba. Our heroes were fully aware of this and, utterly defeated, they relaxed in the bars of Havana with some booze, often in the company of their bosses arrived from the United States, for “Notably, no prohibition official practiced temperate habits in Havana.”
Marco Pierini
