Castro's order to resume production of Cuban Bacardi was part of a wider
speech attacking the US embargoes
By Daniel Schweimler in Havana. Wednesday, 21 March, 2001,
11:48 GMT. BBC News Online
Cubans say that their rum lubricates and encourages friendship, but it seems
to be having the opposite affect in the long-running dispute between the
communist island and their enemy to the north - the United States.
The move is in retaliation for Bacardi's plans to start marketing Cuba's
most well-known brand of rum, Havana Club, for sale in the United States.
"We have given instructions for our industry to start producing
Bacardi, because it is ours... and there are a lot more things we can do to
respond to banditry and abuse," President Castro said.
"So we will then benefit from the millions that they have spent on
advertising."
President Castro is not just angry that the US is, as he sees it, stealing
Cuban's brands. He also says the Cubans make a better rum.
Courts in the United States ruled in 1999 that Bacardi Rum, owned by a
Cuban-exile family now based in Bermuda, could distribute rum using the Havana
Club name, because their distilleries were nationalised after Fidel Castro's
revolution in 1959.
The Havana Club brand, as thousands of holidaymakers to the Caribbean island
will testify, is internationally recognised as Cuban.
The rum is produced in Cuba and has been marketed internationally by
France's Pernod-Ricard since 1994, selling up to 38m bottles in direct
competition with Bacardi.
But, as a Cuban-made product it cannot be sold in the United States under
the terms of the 40-year-old US trade embargo on Cuba.
The French firm lost a case against Bacardi in a US court and with European
Union support has taken the issue to the World Trade Organisation.
Bacardi's owners are important financial contributors to the US-based Cuban
exile movement that opposes the communist government in Havana, and has pushed
legislation like the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which aims to strengthen the
embargo.
Bacardi was first produced in Cuba in the1860s as a by-product of the sugar
industry, which is still, along with tourism, one of the main industries on the
island.
In 1995, Bacardi registered the Havana Club name in the United States after
buying the rights from the original Cuban owner - whose trademark Castro's
government also confiscated in 1960 - and began producing its own Havana Club
rum made in the Bahamas.
The row over rum is merely the latest in the long-running battle between the
United States and Cuba.
President Castro's order to resume production of Cuban Bacardi was part of a
wider speech attacking the US embargo against the island.
He said the US should pay Cuba billions of dollars in compensation for
damage the embargo had caused to the Cuban economy. | 