Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba is a unique history of Cuba, captured in the life and times of the famous rum dynasty. In chronicling the saga of this remarkable family and the company that bears its name, Tom Gjelten describes the intersection of business and power, family and politics, community and exile. Click on an image to enlarge.

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“It’s hard to imagine that any (Cuban history) is as enjoyable as “Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba” by Tom Gjelten, a correspondent for National Public Radio. His book is as smooth and refreshing as a well-made daiquiri.” 

–Barry Gewen, New York Times (read the entire NY Times review)

“A gripping saga that tells us just as much about human nature and the struggle between power and freedom as it does about Bacardi’s transformation from a fledgling business into the world’s top family-owned distiller.”

–Alvaro Vargas Llosa, The Wall Street Journal (read the entire Wall Street Journal review)

“A thoughtful, thorough piece of reporting. Tom Gjelten subtly and skillfully details the saga of the Bacardi family. You may never look at a mojito or a daiquiri quite the same way.”

–Peter M. Gianotti, Newsday (New York)

“With its fabulous triumphs and poignant defeats, this stirring tale of rum, money, and revolutions has all the markings of a great epic movie.”

–Richard Feinberg, Foreign Affairs (read the entire Foreign Affairs review)

“Absorbing history, at once a colorful family saga and a carefully researched corrective to caricatures of decadent pre-revolutionary Cuba.”

–Linda Robinson, The Washington Post (read the entire review) (Listen to the Washington Post Book World podcast interview with Tom Gjelten)

“Mr. Gjelten masterfully illuminates the biography of a cause personified by a proud family that pioneered a major business and shaped the recent past of Cuba, a neighbor whose still uncertain future will almost certainly affect America and the rest of the Western Hemisphere.”

–Harry Hurt III, New York Times Business Section (read the entire NY Times review)

“With thorough reporting and an eye for rich, often quirky detail, veteran National Public Radio correspondent Tom Gjelten traces the story of the Bacardi family, whose product helped shape Cuba’s soul until Fidel Castro nationalized its company’s facilities in 1960.”

–Will Weissert, The Chicago Tribune (read the entire review)

“Exhaustively researched, succeeds in painting a vivid portrait of the company’s early, scrappy years and its prominent role in the fight against Spanish rule. Gjelten provides a fascinating look at how the company built itself into the multinational giant it has become.”

–Randy Kennedy, New York Times Sunday Book Review (read the entire Sunday Book Review review)

“National Public Radio correspondent Tom Gjelten writes an appealingly smooth and colorful history – thorough and open-minded.”

–Peter Lewis, San Francisco Chronicle (read the entire SF Chronicle review)

“Gjelten has managed to capture in a single book almost all that one needs to know of Cuban history. His exhaustive reporting allowed him to delve deeply into the Cuban character and soul and reach conclusions that many Cubans will not like to hear, but which are nevertheless true.”

–Mirta Ojito, CJR (Columbia Journalism Review) (read the entire CJR review)

“A thoroughly researched and lively history of the family-owned drinks business, currently the third largest liquor producer in the world.”

–Christopher Silvester,  Spectator Business  (London)

“Gjelten leaves nothing unrecorded in his objective, warts and all, history of an unusual company, illustrating Cuban history without the canonizations by leftist apologists for Fidel and the demonizations by conservative Cuban exiles and their friends.”

–Ian Williams, World Policy Blog

“Tom Gjelten traces the history of the Bacardi family, their business, and their involvement in Cuban history with consummate skill. This is a first-rate distillation, at once illuminating and entrancing; a sweeping narrative that rivals the best of historical novels. This book will definitely enhance the buzz in every Daiquiri and Mojito, and give added meaning to every Cuba Libre served anywhere in the world”

—Carlos Eire, author of Waiting for Snow in Havana, winner of the National Book Award

“With a novelist’s sense of drama and a historian’s understanding of the social forces that shape our lives, Tom Gjelten has captured vividly — through the chronicle of a powerful family’s fortunes — one of the great political dramas of our time.”

–Ronald Steel, author of Walter Lippmann and the American Century

“Contained within family genealogy are often found profound insights into the history of an entire people. The Bacardís represent one such family. Gjelten has fashioned a splendid prism through which to cast new light on the human dimensions of the Cuban past. The epochal transitions of Cuban national formation are experienced through successive generations of Bacardís, revealing the complex ways that a people are overtaken by the forces of their own creation. Anyone with an interest in Cuban history–and a fondness for Cuban rum–will find the Bacardí family history irresistible.”

–Louis A. Perez, Jr., J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba explores and illuminates the story of our nearest and largest Caribbean island neighbor in an utterly unique and fundamentally revealing way. Tom Gjelten has written a book that is a ‘must read’ for scholars, policy makers, and indeed anyone interested in the long, hard journey of Cuba — and for what will happen there next. A brilliant job!”

–Admiral Jim Stavridis, U.S. Navy, Commander, U.S. Southern Command

“A marvelous blend of biography and vivid history. This book will surely become essential reading to understanding both Cuba’s tragic past and the island’s post-Castro future. A stunning achievement from a versatile journalist.”

–Kai Bird, co-author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

A bottle of white Bacardi rum sold in the United States bears a small logo—mysteriously, a bat—and a label that says “Established 1862.” Just above the date are the words “PUERTO RICAN RUM.” There is no mention of Cuba.

The Bacardi distillery in San Juan is the largest in the world, but the Bacardis are not from Puerto Rico. This family company for nearly a century was Cuban, cubanísima in fact—Cuban to the nth degree. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Don Facundo Bacardi, the company founder and family patriarch, pioneered Cuban-style rum, lighter and drier than the rough spirit that preceded it. Bacardi rum became the drink of choice on the island just as Cuba was becoming a nation. Bacardi sons and daughters were famous for their patriotism, standing up first against Spanish tyranny and then, in the next century, against the island’s home-grown dictators. The family company played another supporting role as Cuba established its cultural identity, becoming the leading corporate patron of Cuban baseball and salsa music. Bacardi was Ernest Hemingway’s rum and the rum of the Cuban casino crowd. When Fidel Castro launched his uprising in the mountains outside Santiago de Cuba, their hometown, the Bacardis cheered him on. They did not abandon Castro so much as they were abandoned by him; they left Cuba only after the revolutionary government expropriated their rum business. Nearly fifty years later, the family name is still revered on the island, and the Bacardis are thinking about making rum there again.

Over many tellings, the Cuba story has hardened around a few stale themes—Havana in its debauchedheyday or Fidel Castro and his dour revolution—and it has lost much of its vitality and wholeness. This book originated in my search for a new narrative, with new Cuban characters and a plot that does justice to this island that produced the conga line and “Guantanamera” as well as Che Guevara’s five-year-plans. I have tried to give a nuanced view of the nation’s experience over the last century and a half. Cuban history was not preordained. There were choices made and paths not taken, and the men and women who were excluded and then exiled deserve to have their contributions recognized, if only to understand why so many became so angry. The Bacardi saga serves all these purposes.

For Cubans, patriotism began with the effort of poets and intellectuals to define the idea of a distinctly Cuban people out of the mix of Europeans, Africans, and natives who inhabited the island. Cuba then needed to free itself from three centuries of harsh Spanish rule and the dominating U.S. influence and become a sovereign, viable, and honorable country. Given the island’s cultural mix and plantation-based social structure, this fight necessarily incorporated a struggle for racial equality and economic justice, but it cannot be reduced to a story that ends inevitably with Fidel Castro’s socialist revolution. Other threads can guide us, such as that of the Bacardi family in the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba, the cradle of Cuban nationalism.

There was a time when no name in Santiago carried more prestige. Emilio Bacardi, the son of the patriarch Don Facundo, spent much of his adult life conspiring against Spanish rule and later served as Santiago’s first Cuban mayor. Emilio’s own son Emilito fought heroically in Cuba’s war for independence. But the Bacardis were also remembered in Santiago for their class and character. While they lived in elegant homes, rode in chauffeured carriages, and sent their children to exclusive private schools, they were also known as good Santiago citizens, generous and warm-hearted and fair. And they loved to party. The Bacardis probably contributed more than any other local family to Santiago’s reputation as a playful, joyous city with a vibrant night life. There was no festival in Santiago without Bacardi rum.

In Fidel Castro’s revised version of Cuban history, the era before his revolution was characterized mainly by decadence, and the country’s elites were corrupt. The Bacardis are barely mentioned, because their record of patriotism and integrity does not match the Castro stereotype. Their family business was widely recognized as among the best run enterprises in Cuba, and the company management was known for progressive policies and good labor relations. The Bacardi chairman in the 1950s, José “Pepín” Bosch (married to the founder’s granddaughter), served for a time as Cuba’s Finance Minister and broke precedent by pursuing wealthy tax cheats. When Castro went to Washington, D.C., shortly after taking power, Bosch was the one Cuban businessman he brought with him. Their break came after Castro embraced socialism; the Bacardi example had inconveniently demonstrated that there actually were capitalists who could play a responsible role in a democratic Cuba.

I do not, however, propose the Bacardis as would-be saviors of Cuba. The Bacardi story appeals to me in part simply because it contains so many critical but unfamiliar elements of the modern Cuban drama. At every stage of the nation’s development over the past century and a half, there is some Bacardi angle, some family member who is a key witness or behind-the-scenes player, or some Bacardi-related episode that epitomizes the historic moment. Countless families in eastern Cuba, for example, shared their Catalan and French roots, and by making and selling rum from Cuban molasses, the Bacardis pursued an enterprise tied directly to the country’s social and economic development. They came of age with the Cuban nation, and the epic tale of their lives and adventures across several generations features classic Cuban themes: revolution, romance, partying, and intrigue.

After Fidel Castro ordered the confiscation of their property and made clear they and others like them were no longer welcome in the new Cuba, the Bacardis left the island, rebuilding their rum enterprise through their operations in Puerto Rico and Mexico. In exile, they took on a new leadership role, this time as organizers and financiers of the anti-Castro opposition. Fidel lost an important ally when he pushed the Bacardis out, and he gained a determined adversary. The Bacardi-Castro conflict came to symbolize the division of the Cuban nation and the rival claims on the country’s history. In the first years of the twenty-first century, when the burning Cuban question was what would follow the Castro era, the Bacardis were once again players. Few products are so associated with Cuba as rum, and the family that made Cuban rum famous was anxious to reclaim a piece of that industry, one of the few on the island with promising growth prospects no matter who was in charge.

There is another story buried in this tale, too. Just as Bacardi history helps explain modern Cuba, the company’s Cuba connection helps us trace the evolution of a unique family firm. Bacardi Limited entered the twenty-first century as a genuine multinational, headquartered in Bermuda, with a product line that included whisky, gin, vermouth, vodka, and tequila, as well as rum. It nevertheless remained a private business wholly owned by a single family still feeling its Cuban identity. Its evolution reflects the strengths—and also the risks and challenges—of a closed, dynastic enterprise in an interconnected global economy. The company’s sense of heritage helped it survive after the loss of its Cuban headquarters, but there was inevitable tension between the old political values and the new focus on investment returns. On the eve of the post-Castro era, the Bacardi-Cuba connection set up a test that would reveal how the company had changed over the years: If it went back to Cuba—as it said it would—would it prove to be just another big, soulless corporation vying for a piece of the action, or would it return as the family company playing a patriotic role?

bacardi bat logoThe most distinctive element on a bottle of Bacardi rum is the peculiar icon at the top of the label: a black bat inscribed in a red circle. The bat’s wings are outstretched, and its head is turned slightly to one side, highlighting its big eyes and pointy ears. No marketing executive today would allow such a creepy image to identify a popular brand. But the Bacardi symbol dates from an era when bats were viewed more tenderly, and the story of its adoption reflects the company’s humble Cuban origins. Santiago was a small city full of merchants, slaves, and traders. Don Facundo’s home-made rum was occasionally sold in recycled olive oil tins that came with a picture of a bat on the side. As Bacardi rum gained in popularity, some customers in Santiago referred to it as el ron del murciélago, “the rum of the bat,” and the association took hold.

For good reason. The bat was a symbol of good fortune, and it figured prominently in the heraldry of Don Facundo’s native Catalonia. As creatures, bats exemplified the ideal of brotherhood, because they lived and flew together; they symbolized self-confidence, because they could fly in the dark without hitting anything; they stood for discretion, because they kept silent; and they represented faithfulness, because they always returned home.

“A marvelous blend of biography and vivid history. This book will surely become essential reading to understanding both Cuba’s tragic past and the island’s post-Castro future. A stunning achievement from a versatile journalist.” –Kai Bird, co-author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

“Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba explores and illuminates the story of our nearest and largest Caribbean island neighbor in an utterly unique and fundamentally revealing way. Tom Gjelten has written a book that is a ‘must read’ for scholars, policy makers, and indeed anyone interested in the long, hard journey of Cuba — and for what will happen there next. A brilliant job!” –Admiral Jim Stavridis, U.S. Navy, Commander, U.S. Southern Command

“Contained within family genealogy are often found profound insights into the history of an entire people. The Bacardís represent one such family. Gjelten has fashioned a splendid prism through which to cast new light on the human dimensions of the Cuban past. The epochal transitions of Cuban national formation are experienced through successive generations of Bacardís, revealing the complex ways that a people are overtaken by the forces of their own creation. Anyone with an interest in Cuban history–and a fondness for Cuban rum–will find the Bacardí family history irresistible.” –Louis A. Perez, Jr., J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“With a novelist’s sense of drama and a historian’s understanding of the social forces that shape our lives, Tom Gjelten has captured vividly — through the chronicle of a powerful family’s fortunes — one of the great political dramas of our time.” –Ronald Steel, author of Walter Lippmann and the American Century

“Tom Gjelten traces the history of the Bacardi family, their business, and their involvement in Cuban history with consummate skill. This is a first-rate distillation, at once illuminating and entrancing; a sweeping narrative that rivals the best of historical novels. This book will definitely enhance the buzz in every Daiquiri and Mojito, and give added meaning to every Cuba Libre served anywhere in the world” —Carlos Eire, author of Waiting for Snow in Havana, winner of the National Book Award

“Gjelten leaves nothing unrecorded in his objective, warts and all, history of an unusual company, illustrating Cuban history without the canonizations by leftist apologists for Fidel and the demonizations by conservative Cuban exiles and their friends.” –Ian Williams, World Policy Blog

“A thoroughly researched and lively history of the family-owned drinks business, currently the third largest liquor producer in the world.” –Christopher Silvester,  Spectator Business  (London)