Via Notes from the Cuban Exile Quarter:
Bacardi as a Legacy and Symbol of Cuban Freedom
Bacardi is honoring its origins with a series of film shorts about Emilio Bacardi. It offers a very simplified version of Cuban history but that does have a large basis in truth.
The Bacardi family has played an important role throughout Cuba’s history. Bacardis fought for Cuban independence alongside Antonio Maceo and continued to engage in public service during the Cuban republic. Bacardi also has a tradition of resisting not only Spanish colonial rule but every dictatorship that has arisen in Cuba. Bacardis resisted Gerardo Machados’s usurpation of Cuban democracy as they did Fulgencio Batista’s and for half a century against the Castro dictatorship.
Continue reading HERE.
Alas, they got played by the “revolution,” and when they figured it out, it was too late.
As I have read Machado got re-elected after changing the constitution and was push out by Summer Wells in 1933 thanks to FDR. Anyways Machado and Batista were niños de teta next to Fidel and Raul. That commercial with Cuba libre is sad, really. The actress is she a Cuba from Columbia? How about Eva Mendes coño! ahora si Cuba libre y Buena que esta!! y por supuesto que Cuba no esta libre hace tiempo. How about Bacardi doing something anti- Castro Inc. in a commercial. How about Cuba Libre NOW! and showing the Berlin Wall or something?
Thanks, Alberto, for sharing the latest Bacardi marketing campaign – Vivimos!
The Bacardi family sided with the Cuban patriots in their fight to free their homeland from the Spanish yoke and, now, the Castro Cuban Mafia. This explains my insistence anywhere that I go to order a Cuba Libre with authentic Cuban “Bacardi” rum. I and my freedom-loving friends support those who help the cause of democracy.
When it comes to Bacardi, it’s personal with me. I will support anyone who extends a helping hand to the cause to restore democracy to Cuba. This is why I will always support Bacardi, as well as Andy Garcia.
Matusalem Rum did an anti-Castro campaign some years ago (link below) to reenter the market after so many years but they obviously don’t have the market share, nor the advertisement budget, that Bacardi has. Few do for that matter, Bacardi is the largest privately held, family-owned spirits company in the world and probably the second or third largest spirits producer in the world after Diageo (a public company). By now Bacardi also owns many other prominent liquor brands for which they have paid billions, these include tequilas, vodkas, gins, etc.
They were lucky to have had factories in Puerto Rico (and probably money abroad) before the Cuban ransack made possible by the CIA and sponsored by the USSR. Talk about “Drink Responsibly” or should I say “Revolt Responsibly”.
I remember seeing this Matusalem campaign ad in a magazine some years ago but that was that. When compared to Bacardi’s, their ad campaigns are seen everywhere and run much longer.
http://www.notcot.com/archives/2008/02/matusalem-rum.php
“GRACIAS FIDEL!”…read a HUGE banner that hung in front of the Bacardi Building in Havana to welcome Fidel Castro on Jan. 9th, 1959. Jose “Pepin” Bosch had been among the Julio 26 Movement’s main bankrollers. All those bombs, after all, cost mucho dinero!…seems that Bosch was a Castro “expert” well before Castro expertise was cool. Alas, unlike the case with today’s “experts” the consequences of Don Pepin’s “expertise” turned around and bit him in the ass BIG-TIME!…this always distinguishes a businessman from an academic.
https://babalublog.com/2013/05/29/cuba-expertise-from-the-beverage-industrys-leading-online-resource/
Cuba “Expertise!” from author and NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten circa Dec. 2008: “If you take the fact that we now have a Democratic Congress, a Democratic President, a new leader in Cuba, we have the ingredients for a possible real revision for US policy. But, I think, over the next four years, the chances of some real changes in US policy towards Cuba, and let’s also hope some changes in Cuba’s attitude towards the United States, may come…”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98864467&ft=1&f=1001
Humberto,
My father worked for Bacardi, knew Pepin and others even showed Fidel around the brewery grounds in Dec. 1958. Hatuey Beer. I can tell you that they knew that they had helped the wrong people. Manacas, Cuba to be exact. The rest is history. I read his book its ok. But he doesn’t know Cuba as well as he pretends. Otro que se la sabe todas.
I also read Gjelten’s book. Good book. By April 1959, Che at La Cabana, Raul in Oriente & elsewhere had murdered upwards of 1000 Cubans by firing squad. The Castro brothers and Che had been meeting nightly for three months with Soviet GRU agents to Stalinize Cuba– in April 1959 “Pepin” Bosch accompanied Castro on his U.S. tour of the U.S.–hellbent on selling Castro to the U.S. as everything Herbert Matthews claimed- and more!