Rum Historian by Marco Pierini
HISTORY OF CUBAN RUM
4. LEGALIZATION
In this fourth article on the History of Cuban rum, I’m going again to dedicate ample space to Big History, and not only to rum. I apologize, but I assure you that the fortunes of our favorite distillate are closely intertwined with history in general and you need to know something about the latter, to truly understand the former. Moreover, for our new readers I have to repeat that aguardiente de caña (sugarcane burning water), is what in Cuba they called the spirit made from sugarcane, our Rum.
The Seven Years’ War 1756–1763 (better known in the US as the French and Indian War) is now almost forgotten, but it was of fundamental importance and shaped a great part of our modern world. It began as a colonial conflict between Great Britain and France in 1754, when the British sought to expand into territory claimed by the French in North America. Then the war involved the major European powers, many Indian nations and even various Asian powers. Spain joined the war in 1762 siding with France; the decision was taken after much hesitation, but apparently with full awareness of what was at stake. In fact, in the preamble to the Treaty of Alliance with France is written: “All of Europe must be aware of the risks that the maritime balance is exposed to, if we consider the ambitious projects of the British Court and the despotism which it tries to impose in all the seas. The English nation has shown, and shows clearly in its proceedings, especially over the last ten years, that it wants to make itself absolute master of the navigation, and does not intend to leave to all the others anything but a passive and dependent trade.”
The war involved all the continents, it was maybe the first real World War, and it ended with the final victory of Great Britain, due mainly to its naval superiority. The power achieved by the British Navy allowed it in 1762 to win the biggest prize of all, dreamed of by English pirates and privateers since the times of Francis Drake: capture Havana, seize the Key to the Indies from Spain.
On 7th June 1762 60 warships, 150 cargo vessels and 27,000 between soldiers and sailors attacked Havana. For the only time in its history Havana lived the experience of a siege and a bombardment. Two months later, on 12th August, the city surrendered with a number of conditions. In Great Britain and in North America the enthusiasm was enormous, but the city was handed back to Spain little more than a year later. In fact, in 1763 with the Peace Treaty, Britain obtained the recognition of its conquest the French Empire in North America, but handed back to France and Spain Louisiana, Florida the French Sugar Islands and Havana: British West Indian planters did not want dangerous competitors within the British Empire.
The British occupation of the city, although it lasted only 10 months, left an indelible mark. The Spanish monopoly was suspended and port traffic experienced a spiraling growth. London did not give Havana complete freedom of trade, but the freedom to trade within its empire, which was much richer than the Spanish one. Perhaps, in actual fact, this great commercial surge was due, at least in part, to the simple fact that smuggling came to light; anyways, it shook things up and had far-reaching consequences.The short period of booming business activity which British Havana experienced generated, as years went by, a kind of nostalgia that, emphasized by Cuban liberals and by the supporters of independence, influenced the opinion of historians to the point that they considered the year 1762 the real beginning of Cuban development, and indeed the year since which its history deserved to be studied. For example, according to Francisco de Arango y Parreño, the greatest champion of the Havana planters of the next generation: “It was a period of true resurrection for Havana ... With their negroes and their free trade, the English did more than we had done in the previous sixty years”. Actually, in 1762 Cuba was already a complex, comparatively developed society and the seeds of the progress that in a few decades would make Cuba the richest plantation island in the world had already been sown.
Anyway, one of the most enduring effects was the widening of the divide between peninsulares (that is, people born in Spain) and criollos (that is, people of European origin but born in Cuba). Among the conditions stipulated for the surrender, the British had agreed to respect the customs, religion and property of the inhabitants. And more or less they did with regard to the property of the inhabitants of the city, that is, basically, the Creole bourgeoisie. However, they seized the assets of the Crown and of the peninsulares merchants and landowners who had economic interests in Havana, but lived in Spain. The latter were numerous and often were business partners of local merchants, by whom they felt betrayed. The Creole bourgeoisie defended their own interests well, consorting and even collaborating with the occupants, so much so that a Spanish official wrote, after the end of the occupation: “One flag or the other was secondary, because the Cuban felt assured that he already had his homeland.”
In 1763 Cuban population was approaching 165,000 people, one third living in Havana and many others concentrated in the other towns, which made the island a predominantly urban society, a feature that, it seems to me, it has retained until the present. Despite immigration and births, the number of inhabitants was kept low by the high mortality rate. The two main scourges were smallpox and the yellow fever, known as black vomit. The former was of European origin, the latter of African origin. The criollos were relatively immunized, but the peninsulares, soldiers, sailors, officials etc died by the thousands. The exports were mainly hides, tobacco and sugar and, as we now, a bit of clandestine rum.
Alejandro O’ Reilly, born in Dublin around 1725, was an officer in the service of the King of Spain Charles III. Posted to Havana, he was commissioned to visit the whole island in order to reorganize and strengthen the local militia. But the Governor also instructed him to report to him about the general situation of the island, the problems and the possible solutions. He was a cultivated person, steeped in the ideas of the Enlightenment then hegemonic in European culture. A wonderful general culture, far away from the hyper specialization which, in my humble opinion, is one of the weaknesses of our present. O’ Reilly wrote a short report on his visit, in which, in a discerning, concise way, he described the situation of the island, its main predicaments and the possible solutions. The fundamental problem of the Cuban economy, he wrote, is the commercial monopoly of Cadiz and the consequent, massive spread of smuggling, unquestionably impossible to counter. The inhabitants cannot receive the goods they need, first of all clothes, from Spain, and at the same time they cannot export the fruits of their land and of their labor. The situation is particularly serious away from Havana: “Over a period of ten years, only what was enough for six-month consumption has reached Santiago, Bayamo, Porto del Principe (present day Camagüey) and the other villages of the interior.” Therefore, as in every prohibition, smuggling, illegality and crime rule, causing serious harm both to private citizens and the State. The solution offered by O’ Reilly is clear: to open Cuba to free trade with all the ports of the Spanish Empire and, in part, to foreign ports too. “The advantages for the King, for Spanish trade and the development of the island deriving from the liberalization of trade are countless. They were experienced first-hand during the English domination in Havana. Customs duties increased enormously and, in one year only, about 1.000 ships, carrying all sorts of commodities, entered the port.”
From 1763 on, the opening of Cuba to the world would be an irreversible fact, albeit slow and gradual. Eventually, in 1764 the liberalization of the production of aguardiente de caña was achieved in exchange for the payment of a duty on production and another, specific one on the alembics. The duty on aguardiente de caña was established with Royal Decree on 26th March, 1764. It consisted of 2 pesos for every barrel of distillate produced, or a sum that the planters had to agree with the officials of the Royal Treasury, by signing a sworn report. The following year it was replaced by a duty of 2% a barrel.
But what was this rum like? Obviously, we will never know, but we can say something. For all we know about the production of rum in the past, in all likelihood no drinker would enjoy it today (see “The Golden Age of Rum” in the December 2020 issue). And yet, considering its extensive use as medicine, it couldn’t have been that “hot, hellish and terrible liquor” of the previous century either. Definitely the quality of the raw material changed and distillation could be more or less accurate, therefore the quality of the rum produced varied; there were those who added flavors and aromas and those who simply adulterated it.
The legalization of 1764 was a special privilege granted to Cuba, whereas in New Spain (roughly present-day Mexico) the absolute prohibition remained. In 1788 Silvestre Diaz de la Vega wrote his great, antiprohibition “Discurso sobre la decadencia de la agricoltura en el Reyno de Nueva España” (Essay on the decline of agriculture in the realm of New Spain) claiming the need to legalize the production of rum in New Spain, he also asked that the law specify how it should be produced: “Aguardiente de Caña will have to be produced with good molasses, known as Curing, and water of good quality, without mixing it with any other things, not even honey; it will have to be made with the utmost cleanliness, and its quality will have to be among those known as oil-proof, Holland y bubble.”I think oil-proof and bubble tests were more or less the same ones I came across when studying rum in contemporary British Colonies. The former consisted in the addition of a small quantity of olive oil to the spirit: if the oil stayed on the surface it meant that the rum had a low alcoholic strength, below proof; if the oil sank, it was good, above proof. The latter involved the shaking of a small glass tube of the spirit and the subsequent examination of the disappearance of the bubbles. If they were small and disappeared slowly, the spirit was below proof; it they were large and disappeared rapidly, the spirit was above proof.” About Holland proof I have no idea.
Marco Pierini
