Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

¡Que Suerte Tiene el Cubano!

I needed a guide for Cuba, something to ground me, to place me. I had only my mother’s whispering in my ear, as long as I could remember, viva Fidel, and while I appreciated the sentiment, I also needed some actual facts. Being a proud and ignorant American, I knew no history of the place beyond Hearst and the Maine and (long story, involving my Marine brother, semper fi!) Marine Corps hero Smedley Butler. “I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914,” Smedley Butler wrote. “I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.” Smedley Butler, ladies and gentlemen! Tiny, foul-mouthed, Quaker who after his retirement from the Corps spent his life grandly orating against U.S. imperialism. My brother really digs that cat!

Luckily, a friend had given me Tom Gjelten’s Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba for my birthday, and it was waiting on my coffee table, eager to inform me. Densely researched, going back generations to the first Bacardi to set up his still—like Kitty Kelley’s Bush family masterpiece The Family, which enumerates every sin of Poppy and Barbara’s respective family trees back to the first Bush and Pierce to ever grub for position and cash—it’s tough going at first. If I were to be honest, I might admit that the first 40 pages took me a month to slog through. But then, once one is better able to keep track of la familia, and once one gets at least a generation or two in, and once one has learned about three separate revolutions and their heroes and their goals and their inevitable squelching, it’s rich and fascinating going.

The Bacardis were a family of Cuban patriots in Santiago de Cuba, supporting the Cuban revolution under threat of firing squad all the way back to the first Cuban revolution in the 1870s—and the second one, the one that ended with “remember the Maine!” and the first stint of American occupation, 20 years later in the 1890s. That was when, under the law, there was to be racial equality (easier averred than adhered to, of course), and number one Cuban hero of all time and forever José Martí pronounced the goal of the revolution to be a “good, sound, just and equitable social system.” In the 1890s! I know! The family was progressive—a term Gjelten uses as a mark of approval, which is nice—and believed in just such a just and equitable social system, as long as they got to make their very fine rum. They supported the arts, they were liberal with their employees, and for the first few generations at least, they were industrious and savvy businessmen who made the finest product they could and never cut corners—captains of industry in the best senses of the term, and men who fulfilled their duty to their land in whatever ways were called for. Later generations might have been filled with partying Paris Hilton types, but there were always one or two who stepped forward to learn the business from the bottom, and who ended up making Bacardi a multibillion dollar empire.

Pepin Bosch

But Gjelten has some blind spots where the Bacardi family is concerned, and it’s the post-Castro generations who inspire his blinkers. Castro and Che seized the company from the Bacardis despite the fact that the Bacardis not only supported the revolution but were uniquely able to help run the Cuban economy—an economy that El Che himself ran into the ground by promoting people with no managerial or other experience based upon their being Party men—and the Bacardis fled to the U.S. and Europe and seem to have gone just a little bit batshit insane. They were all up in the Bay of Pigs, they were smuggling weapons to use in a revolt against Castro—calling for “democracy” by gun, despite the Revolution’s overwhelming popularity, and that is not “democracy” at all, duh. The company leader at the time the family went into exile, Pepin Bosch, went so far as to buy a plane so as to bomb the hell out of Cuban oil refineries, while White House memos were floating around with the subject line “a plot to assassinate Castro which would involve U.S. elements of the Mafia and which would be financed by Pepin Bosch.” After several pages detailing these and other acts by Bosch, Gjelten writes demurely that “obsession on occasion took him to the edge of illegal activity [italics mine].”

Oh, and Bosch also launched the career of our old amigo Luis Posada Carriles, the man who would down the Cubana charter plane, killing all 73 people on board, and who the U.S. has sheltered in Miami to this day. After a few pages on Posada Carriles and his buddy Jorge Mas Canosa, Gjelten pronounces this: “Though he and the Bacardi corporation were fiercely criticized later for having sponsored a ‘dirty war’ against Castro’s Cuba, Pepin Bosch did not promote terrorist acts.” His evidence for this pronouncement is given in a footnote: “When the violently anti-Castro militant Orlando Bosch requested a two-hundred-thousand-dollar contribution from Bacardi in February 1975, Pepin Bosch sent a representative to inquire what he was planning with the money, and he had an associate report the request to the FBI.” That’s the sum of his evidence, and he’s sticking to it.

It seems clear Gjelten was seduced by the erudite and intelligent and hard-working sons and sons-in-law who ran the Bacardi family’s fortunes, and it’s hard to fault him. They were progressive. They were patriots. But Gjelten’s attempts to whitewash what most would see as really despicable acts—at least “most” who aren’t Jesse Helms or Miami Cubans—mar his marvelous book and dense body of research. A biographer can admire his subjects without spinning for them like a rich man’s Ari Fleischer. (Ari Fleischer is the poor man’s Ari Fleischer.)

Still, the book’s totally awesome, and it will make you smart.

Comments

Comments closed.