Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause (Hardcover)

by Tom Gjelten (Author)
Key Phrases: José Espín, Máximo Gómez, family rum business, United States, Fidel Castro, Havana Club (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
The commonplace view of Cuba's prerevolutionary business establishment as a corrupt kleptocracy is revised in this intriguing history of the Bacardi rum company and its involvement in Cuban politics. NPR correspondent Gjelten (Sarajevo Daily) paints the 146-year-old distiller, once an icon of Cuban industry, as a model corporate citizen—efficient, innovative, socially responsible and union-tolerant. Its leaders were pillars of nationalist politics, he contends: company president Emilio Bacardi was a leader of Cuba's rebellion against Spain, and in the 1950s CEO José Bosch helped fund Castro's insurrection. (After Castro nationalized Bacardi's Cuban holdings, Bosch started funding anti-Castro exiles.) Bacardi's image as Cuban-nationalism-in-a-bottle becomes farcical when the company, now a multinational behemoth, fights an absurd court battle with Cuba's state rum company over the Havana Club trademark. But Gjelten's account of a liberal, progressive Cuban business clan complicates and enriches the conventional picture of a society torn between right and left dictatorships. (Sept.)
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From The New Yorker
Facundo Bacardi, who founded the eponymous rum company in 1862, came to Cuba from Spain as a teen-ager. By the turn of the century, as Gjelten lucidly recounts, the distilling operation that Facundo had begun in a shed was among the brands most closely identified with Cuba, and the Bacardis became inextricably entangled with the nations history. Facundo?s eldest son, Emilio, fought to overthrow the Spanish, thus inaugurating the firms long tradition of promoting revolutionary and progressive politics. But the Bacardis, despite their enthusiastic support for Castros revolution, were forced into exile in Miami in the nineteen-sixties; benevolent capitalists had no place in the new Cuban paradigm. Today, the family owns a multibillion-dollar global corporation that contributes heavily to the Republican Party.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (September 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067001978X
• ISBN-13: 978-0670019786
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #29,412 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Rum, Dictators and how Bacardi survived, October 14, 2008

By	Joseph D. Policano "DVD DEVOTEE" (New York, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a terrific book. It tells the tale of 150 years of Cuban and Bacardi history without burdening you with more facts, personalities , and anecdotes than you need to understand the company. In addition to the story of th Bacardi family it is a fast overview of how and why Cuba got to where it is today. Like most good
journalists,the author can compress a story yet give you the feeling that you know all the important stuff that needs to be known. The Bacardi family and company (it is still privately owned)certainly ranks as one of the most interesting and liberal I have ever come across reading about big businesses. They were not Johnnies come lately in the battle for Cuban freedom both from Spain and the native born dictators who followed after the American invaders left the island. They supported and financed the
Castro revolution and then had to flee the country when he turned into a communist dictator. They then fought him from the Bay of Pigs to this day.
At a time when Cuban workers were exploited under Spain and then under Cuban dictators, Bacardi seems to have been an enlightened employer providing its workers with benefits and security far beyond others.When one remembers that the company prospered under a series of ruthless and corrupt dictators who turned Havanna into a mafia controlled enclave, they seem all the more incredible that they could remain clean while they had so much mud around them In fact, with the exception of the rare philanderer or less than bright family member, the Bacardi family over this 150 year time span seems extraordinary for their compassion, accomplishments, and sense of duty and honor. Perhaps too extraordinary. Reading through the book I had to marvel how so many people could be so good over so many years. They make the Rockefellers seem like heartless aristocrats. The author received, by his own acknowledgement, priceless assistance from various family members who gave him unique access to their history and records and, understandably, this may have tilted him in their favor. But even with its flaws it still remains a very important book.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very nice read, September 28, 2008

By	Seth J. Frantzman (Jerusalem, Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

There has recently been a renewed interest in pre-revolutionary Cuba. This stems from the fact that Cuba today is so un-romantic, so poor and stricken with prostitution, that peopel want to understand not only the pre-history of Castro but also the time before Castro. This has given us new studies of the Mafia in Cuba (Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution) and recent books on the Americans who fought in the revolution. This book examines a previously unstudied subject, the history of the Bacardi family and Cuba. Most would have assumed the family, being some of the wealthier citizens of the island, would not have been Castro supporters or progressive in the least bit. But the truth is quite different. The patriarch of the dynasty was a fighter in the original war against Spain in the 1890s and by the 1950s they were disillusioned with Batista. This is an excellent history of this family and its biography, which in many ways is the biography of Cuba itself in this period. A very nice book that fills both a gap in history and sheds light on a fascinating story.

Seth J. Frantzman

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Double Pleasure to Read, September 28, 2008

By	Richard Lloyd Brown (Washington DC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Looking for insights on Cuban history, culture, politics, Castro--this is a good historical exposition of a country that has gone through more turmoil and experiments in government than perhaps any other in the Western hemisphere. Looking for an informative and exciting narrative about a family owned company--this is a very moving story of a strong-willed entrepreneurial family blessed with three masterful CEOs in succession who figured out how to succeed worldwide despite being headquartered in a relatively unsophisticated financial backwater. Put these two stories together and the result is the proverbial whole being greater than the sum of its parts: an excellent journey juxtaposing financial acumen combined with patriotism, on the one hand, against a variety of dismaying governmental experiments, on the other, including Spanish colonialism, years of revolution, US intervention, embryonic democracy, dictatorship, and a Marxist state economic system. This was obviously a labor of love for Gjelten, a first rate NPR reporter and analyst, as reflected in the source documentation provided unobtrusively at the end of the book, the very thorough and useful Bacardi family tree and the extensive photograph collection that brings even more life to the already well-drawn characters.