Perhaps by virtue of geography, Cuba's history since the 19th century has been linked to the history of the United States. The island has been a lure for American interests for since at least the 1850s. It was eyed as a prospect for expansion of the slave territories by some in the South before our Civil War. The United States intervened in its revolt against Spain in the 1890s and inherited a global empire as a result. Thereafter, the United States was uncertain about what it should do with its new dependent.
Tom Gjelten has chosen an innovative way to explain Cuba's recent history and its tangled relationship with the U.S. by following the fortunes of one of its premier families, the Bacardis. Across several generations, members of the family had been important in commerce, in the revolution, in civil administration, and even in the Castro Revolution. At the same time, the family was introducing new distillation processes and moving to become the leading rum distillers on the island.
Although rum was easily found throughout the Caribbean, there was no Cuban rum industry at the start of the 19th century. Cubans produced a form of aguardiente from their sugar, but the molasses was refined into rum in New England and elsewhere. Facundo Bacardi returned to Santiago de Cuba from Spain in the 1850s after several years' absence to find his local warehouses had been looted and that he faced a financial struggle. Sugar had stopped rising in price and the demand for molasses from the United States was falling off. He chose to develop a distillation process that improved on the rather rough local distilled products. He experimented carefully with sugar concentrations, preparation, and distilling techniques until he achieved a satisfactory rum. He then developed a brand and a market for his rum.
Emilio Bacardi became involved in the business with his father after his return from study in Spain. He also became sensitive to the ills of slavery and to the rising aspirations of the Cuban people to be independent of Spain. He became a patriot and eventually joined the rebellious forces. The revolt ended after ten years, but soon Spain again began to neglect the rights of Cubans. After the U.S. intervention, Emilio Bacardi had to adapt to working with the new government as a functionary. It was still not complete independence. The U.S. government imposed its own restrictions on the autonomy of the Cuban government.
The twentieth century brought a series of changes. Prohibition in the United States encouraged American travel to Cuba. The government, however, decayed into a corrupt dictatorship under Fulgencio Batista which provoked a new revolution in the 1950s. The Bacardi Company was sympathetic to the Castro forces; Raul Castro even married a daughter of a senior Bacardi executive. Perhaps that is why the company felt betrayed when the Castro government nationalized the Bacardi holdings in Cuba. From that point forward, the Bacardi Company became a forceful member of the Cuban diaspora resistance.
With late twentieth century capitalism, the anti-Castro sentiment played out in rivalries among major liquor conglomerates such as Pernod Ricard, Diageo, and Bacardi Limited. The struggle came down to trademarks, labels, and import licenses. In this contest, once again American political considerations came into play. That challenge for Cuba is the underlying theme of the book.
The book can be detailed in trivial aspects of the Bacardi family life. It is, however, an engrossing history set against the history of one family. With the warning that some sections focus more on individual lives rather than the larger tides of history, this book is recommended.
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