On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. The original Bacardi distillery in Santiago de Cuba. The Bacardi Building in Havana was constructed by the company in 1930 but abandoned when the company fled Cuba following the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Originally known for its Bacardi rum punch calories brand of white rum, it now has a portfolio of more than 200 brands and labels.

Bacardi Limited is headquartered in Hamilton, Bermuda, and has a board of directors led by the original founder’s great-great grandson, Facundo L. Bacardí, the chairman of the board. Facundo Bacardí Massó, a Spanish wine merchant, was born in Sitges, Catalonia, Spain, on October 16, 1814, and emigrated to Santiago, Cuba, in 1830. Moving from the experimental stage to a more commercial endeavour as local sales began to grow, Facundo and his brother José purchased a Santiago de Cuba distillery on October 16, 1862, which housed a still made of copper and cast iron. The 1880s and 1890s were turbulent times for Cuba and the company.

Emilio’s brothers, Facundo and José, and their brother-in-law Enrique ‘Henri’ Schueg, remained in Cuba with the difficult task of sustaining the company during a period of war. With Don Facundo’s passing in 1886, Doña Amalia sought refuge by exile in Kingston, Jamaica. During his time in public office, Emilio established schools and hospitals, completed municipal projects such as the famous Padre Pico Street and the Bacardi Dam, financed the creation of parks, and decorated the city of Santiago with monuments and sculptures. In 1922 the family completed the expansion and renovation of the original distillery in Santiago, increasing the sites rum production capacity. In 1930 Schueg oversaw the construction and opening of Edificio Bacardí in Havana, regarded as one of the finest Art Deco buildings in Latin America, as the third generation of the Bacardí family entered the business. Bacardi’s success in transitioning into an international brand and company was due mostly to Schueg, who branded Cuba as “The home of rum”, and Bacardi as “The king of rums and the rum of Kings”. Expansion began overseas, first to Mexico in 1931 where it had architects Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe and Felix Candela design office buildings and a bottling plant in Mexico City during the 1950s.

During World War II, the company was led by Schueg’s son-in-law, José “Pepin” Bosch. Pepin founded Bacardi Imports in New York City, and became Cuba’s Minister of the Treasury in 1949. However, after the triumph of the revolutionaries, and turn to Communism, the family maintained a fierce opposition to Fidel Castro’s policies in Cuba in the 1960s. In 1965, over 100 years after the company was established in Cuba, Bacardi established new roots and found a new home with global headquarters in Hamilton, Bermuda. In February 2019, Bacardi’s CEO, Mahesh Madhavan, stated that Bacardí’s global headquarters would remain in Bermuda for the next “500 years” and that “Bermuda is our home now. In 1999, Otto Reich, a lobbyist in Washington on behalf of Bacardí, drafted section 211 of the Omnibus Consolidated and Emergency Appropriations Act, FY1999, a bill that became known as the Bacardi Act.

Bacardi rekindled the story of the Arechabala family and Havana Club in the United States when it launched the AMPARO Experience in 2018, an immersive play experience based in Miami, the city with the highest population of Cuban exiles. Bacardi drinks are not easily found in Cuba today. The main brand of rum in Cuba is Havana Club, produced by a company that was confiscated and nationalized by the government following the revolution. Bacardi later bought the brand from the original owners, the Arechabala family.