Cuba Ron

 

 

Cuba Rum

If you like rum, like Jerry likes rum, you’ll be a pig in mud in Cuba.  Cubans are proud of their “Ron”.  It is inexpensive and available everywhere. 

 

Jerry has been on a mission to find “the best rum in Cuba” thinking it would be hard to beat his favorite Bacardi Reserve Anjeo whose origin is Cuban but is no longer made here.

Cuban rum is legendary not only because it shaped the course of the Caribbean history but in its cocktails, including the ubiquitous Cuba Libre and the Daiquiri. We learned these two and many different rum cocktails were invented in Cuba. With the arrival of Coca-Cola in 1900, Coke was mixed with rum as a drink to celebrate the independence of Cuba from Spain--Cuba Libre. American soldiers & sailors that were stationed here during the Spanish-American War, brought these drinks back to the US.  Cuban rum soon became world famous.

 Daiquiri is the name of a beach and an iron mine near Santiago de Cuba, and is a word of Taino origin. The drink was supposedly invented by an American mining engineer, named Jennings Cox, who was in Cuba at the time of the Spanish-American War. The Daiquiri remained localized until 1909, when Rear Admiral Lucius W. Johnson, a U.S. Navy medical officer, tried Cox's drink. Johnson subsequently introduced it to the Army and Navy Club in Washington, DC, and drinkers of the Daiquiri increased over the space of a few decades. It was one of the favorite drinks of writer Ernest Hemingway and President John F. Kennedy.

 

  

Bacardi, founded in Cuba, whose rum is readily available throughout the US and the world but no longer in Cuba has an interesting past. 

 

In 1862, in the port of Santiago de Cuba, the Bacardi family opened its first rum distillery and pioneered key rum making techniques including the isolation of a single strain of yeast from nearby sugarcane fields.  In celebration of their opening, the owner’s son planted a coconut palm, El Coco, at the entrance to the distillery.  As the roots took hold, so did a popular legend: “….the Bacardi Company will survive in Cuba so long as the coconut palm lives…”

 

In 1874 a competing company emerged to challenge Bacardi’s share of the rum market.  The Havana Club Rum brand competed with Bacardi for sixty years until, in 1934, Bacardi bought its trademark but continued to produce the Havana Club brand.

 

Trouble came for the Bacardi family and its rum empire when Castro’s revolutionary government forces confiscated all Bacardi Company assets, along with all other foreign assets in Cuba-a devastating event for a family owned business just shy of its 100th anniversary.  Fortunately, shortly before the revolution, the forward thinking Bacardi management, had moved its trademarks and yeast strain out of Cuba for safekeeping.  Soon after the closing of the Santiago de Cuba distillery El Coco, planted 98 years prior, withered and died.

 

Today Bacardi continues as a private company outside of Cuba headquartered in Bermuda with operations in the Caribbean islands.  

Since the departure of Bacardi there are now two rum companies operating in Cuba.  The Cuban government has claimed rights to the Havana Club brand and jointly with its partner, Pernod Ricard, owns Cuban Havana Club which reigns supreme today as the rum brand available everywhere in Cuba. The Cuban government also started another government-owned rum company, Corporation Cuba Ron, which now operates in the Santiago de Cuba facility formerly owned and occupied by Bacardi.   

There is a 20-year ongoing dispute between the Cuban government and Bacardi on who owns the Havana Club international brand.  Now that the embargo with the US. Is about to end, both want to have the brand in North America. There is sure to be a lot more litigation before this is resolved. 

 

In the meantime, the Corporation Cuba Ron is quietly challenging in the marketplace both Bacardi and Cuban Havana Club with its newly released rum, Ron Santiago de Cuba. We have sampled the famous Cuba Libre, Daiquiri and an occasional Mojito and have discovered the Ron Santiago de Cuba to be smoother and more flavorful. The Santiago de Cuba, aged 11 years, we have read, is one of the world’s best rums. We haven’t yet found the 11 year old vintage but did buy to take home several bottles of the 7 year old Santiago de Chile, which Jerry likes better than the Bacardi Reserve Anjeo he gets in the States.

 

Hey, whose been into the rum?!