The Bacardi family lost one of its forward looking members last week, and I ran across a very enlightening obituary that not only shed a lot of light on Manuel Cutillas, but a n interesting information about the Bacardi Company from the 30's Cuba to the nationalization of the Bacardi Company by Fidel Castro. It also brings to light to changes the company has gone through from its exile until today.
November 8, 2013 5:08 pm
Master
of rum who shook Bacardi into a cocktail of brands
By Phil Davison
As head of Bacardi, Manuel Cutillas
launched the rum producer’s transformation into the multi-brand global
enterprise it is today, owning some 200 notable industry names including
Dewar’s scotch, Bombay Sapphire gin, Martini vermouth and Grey Goose vodka.
With net sales last
year of more than $4.5bn, it ranks as the world’s biggest privately owned
spirits company and third overall behind Diageo and Pernod Ricard.
Yet Cutillas, great-great-grandson of the
founder, was unable to fulfill his main dream – of returning to Cuba, where the
family’s distilleries were confiscated by Fidel Castro after the 1959
revolution.
Cutillas had fled
soon afterwards – initially to Miami, on a packed boat of illegal migrants –
and the family dispersed. It was he who pulled them together in 1992 to
consolidate five separate Bacardi companies they had variously spawned – in the
US, Bermuda, the Bahamas (the branch he headed before then), Puerto Rico and
Mexico – into a single entity now based in Hamilton, Bermuda. Cutillas became
its first chairman.
He remained a passionate anti-Castro
campaigner, belonging to several organizations that seek the regime’s downfall
and a democratic Cuba. Although a cigar lover and able to get his hands on Havana’s
he refused to smoke them, at least in public. On his retirement in 2000 he said
of Cuba: “We would love one day to be back in there. You know, I believe that
perhaps I will even see that.” His death this month at the age of 81 means he
did not.
Cutillas had been with the family firm
since 1955 when it was based in Santiago de Cuba, in the east of the island. It
had been founded there four generations earlier in 1862 by Facundo Bacardi
Massó, an immigrant from Sitges, Catalonia, who, in effect, created white rum
as we know it today. But by the 1990s the cane-based spirit was being overtaken
by vodka and tequila in world markets, while rival drinks multinationals were
growing bigger.
“We saw consolidation happening and with a
single brand it would have been very difficult for us to compete,” he said. “We
had to grow. Had we not done that, we would have found ourselves having to sell
or merge with a larger company.”
