Bacardi is a multinational spirits company with roots in mid-nineteenth-century Cuba. The brand is noted for elevating the perception of rum from a rough-edged, generally unwholesome drink of sailors to a lighter, more refined drink of sophisticated urban sippers. While the company remains closely associated with its Bacardi brand rum, in recent decades it has expanded and now also owns other prominent global spirit brands.
The company was founded by patriarch Facundo Bacardi y Maso, who emigrated with his family from Catalonia in Spain to Santiago de Cuba on the island’s southeast coast in 1836. In his twenties, he became a wine importer and merchant. By 1862 he had partnered with a brother to acquire a small distillery then owned by John Nunes, an Englishman.
Bacardi’s distillery flourished. Among his innovations was a visual logo in the form of a bat. Family lore ascribes this to the presence of bats in the Santiago distillery. The move proved sage in establishing the brand in an era when much rum was sold solely as a bulk commodity and in a region where many consumers were illiterate but could easily recognize and request the “rum with the bat.”
Bacardi also was acknowledged to produce a rum superior in taste to other Cuban rums then commonly available. He did this through careful attention to distilling, using traditional pot stills (Bacardi apparently did not introduce column stills until the late 1910s) and by filtering the distillate after maturation (presumably through charcoal and sand) to strip out some of the heavier congeners that then characterized rum, yielding a more refined product. “Beginning as a thick, dark-brown drink to make pirates drunk, and passing through its phase as a universal medicine, rum, by the grace of a family named Bacardi and of American Prohibition, had become, in fact, a gentleman’s drink,” wrote cocktail scribe Basil Woon in 1928. See Prohibition and temperance in America.
Bacardi’s rum won recognition at the 1876 World’s Fair in Philadelphia and continued to gain adherents through the late nineteenth century. But it was American Prohibition that boosted the brand’s fame far beyond earlier achievement. When the taps closed and liquor shelves emptied in the United States in 1919, the nearest place for many Americans to order a drink was in Cuba, ninety miles south of Florida. Seaplanes, steamers, and ferries fed a booming tourist trade, and many visitors were surprised to find upon arrival a refined rum. They brought back stories (and smuggled bottles).
Following the repeal of Prohibition, the emphasis on spirits branding became more prominent, and with its head start Bacardi grew to dominate the rum market. (This was aided by a distribution agreement with Schenley Distillers Corp., one of the most influential United States liquor companies.)
In the 1930s the Bacardi corporation sought to escape the heavy tariff on liquor imported into the United States by establishing a distillery in American territory. After considering Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and Florida, the family opted to set up operations in the US territory of Puerto Rico in 1936. The shift proved prescient; when political turmoil roiled Cuba in the late 1950s—first with consolidation of power around corrupt political strongman Fulgencio Batista, followed by the revolution led by Fidel Castro—the Bacardi family was well prepared to abandon Cuba, with both intellectual property and production facilities safely situated abroad.
More recently, the corporation has been engulfed in a legal battle with the government of Cuba over ownership of the Havana Club brand, to which Bacardi laid claim following its abandonment by the Arechabala family in 1973. Rulings by various national and international bodies have gone both for and against Bacardi. In the meantime it has expanded sales of its Havana Club rum. In recent years Bacardi has also sought to expand by moving aggressively into non-rum brands, including Bombay gin, Dewar’s whisky, and Grey Goose vodka. See Dewar’s and Grey Goose.
See also Havana Club and rum.
Foster, Peter. Family Spirits: The Bacardi Saga, Rum, Riches, and Revolution. Toronto: McFarlane, Walter & Ross, 1990.
Gjelten, Tom. Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause. New York: Viking, 2008.
Noel, John Vavasour. “Who Discovered ‘Bacardi?’” The South American, November 1916, 24.
Woon, Basil. When It’s Cocktail Time in Cuba. New York: Liveright, 1928.
By: Wayne Curtis