I would like to thank Mike Kunetka for pointing out this book to me, it had slipped under my radar and it would have been a shame.
The real focus of the book is not exactly rum, but rather the marketing campaigns of Havana Club and other Cuban brands and their relationship with complex, controversial issues such as the political situation of the island, the complicated definition of Cuban identity, and the role of the Cuban diaspora. It is an important book, rich in reflections and information, which I highly recommend to all rum and Cuba enthusiasts. I especially appreciated the online bibliography which, as a pre-digital born who only discovered the Internet as an adult, regretfully I tend to overlook. Instead, the author lists many websites I did not know and I will explore with great attention.
As our readers know, the significance and allure of the history of rum lie in the fact that, as well as being a great distilled spirit, rum is a prism through which many aspects of our world can be better understood. And today, no rum is as laden with political, cultural and other meanings as Havana Club. But let’s hear the author’s voice directly.
Isle of Rum by Christopher Chávez
“Focusing on Havana Club as a case study, I examine the ways in which various cultural producers, based primarily in Western Europe and the United States, have assumed responsibility for representing Cuba to the outside world. I focus specifically on the role of corporate executives, working in collaboration with advertising practitioners, music producers, filmmakers, and art curators, who collectively broker between the Cuban State and Western consumers, who desperately crave authentic experiences that exist outside the purview of the marketplace.”
“In 1934, the company released its Havana Club label, which was part of a larger growth strategy to expand into the U.S. market. Launched just after the repeal of U.S. Prohibition, the Havana Club label was designed to meet a growing demand for Cuban rum. As part of its strategy, the company’s Ron Añejo Arechabala 75 would be designated Cuba’s domestic brand, while Havana Club would represent the company in the U.S. markets. To facilitate its sale in the United States, its label featured an English rather than Spanish spelling (Havana rather than La Habana).”
“This book lies at the intersection of two lines of inquiry: First, it follows in the tradition of other scholarship, which has looked at how national and regional histories are embodied in the production, consumption, and promotion of their alcohol. …
Second, I analyzed the advertising campaigns, public relation efforts, music projects, and art installation that have been produced under the auspices of the Havana Club brand. … Finally, I conducted field research.”
Like many other companies, including Bacardi, Arechabala was nationalised in 1960.
“Many of the Arechabala’s family’s assets were invested in Cuban infrastructure, which ultimately left the business vulnerable to expropriation. The family fled Cuba, but its financial assets became property of the state, leaving the family economically depleted. Attempts to restart the Arechabala family business in exile never came to fruition, and the family faded into obscurity.”
“After the revolution, Havana Club was reinvented as a state-owned product, and when state officials took control of Havana Club, they divested the brand of the Arechabala’s family’s presence by removing the Vizcaya coat of arms, a symbol that had previously appeared on the labels of all Arechabala products. In its place, the redesigned bottle now featured Havana’s recognizable status. La Girardilla, which signaled Havana Club’s transformation from a private commodity into public good. … As a state-produced product, Havana Club, more than other rum brands in the marketplace, has come to represent Cuba itself. But … Cuba has ambivalent meaning in the geopolitical landscape. … The challenge for advertisers, therefore, is to cultivate a version of Cuban authenticity in more appealing ways. In doing so, advertising agencies do not attempt to represent Cuba as it is but rather to invoke positive associations that already exists in the minds of Western consumers.”
Havana Club Rum
“Havana Club has utilized Cuban culture both as a kind of experiential marketing and a form of cultural diplomacy. The state’s use of Cuban culture for strategic purposes is an extension of an ongoing project. Since the revolution, Cuban culture has been employed as a form of soft power that advanced the ideal of the revolution to publics in Europe, Latin America, and Africa.”
For decades after the revolution, the fundamental market for Cuban rum was the Soviet Union and the other countries of Eastern Europe. After the disappearance of that world, the Cuban government established a joint venture in 1993 with the French beverage giant Pernod Ricard to promote the Havana Club brand all over the world.
The project has been and continues to be successful, but it has also sparked a fierce legal battle with Bacardi. We will return to this topic extensively in the future, but for now it is sufficient to remember that by the mid-1990s, Bacardí’s legal strategy shifted from protecting its own trademark to challenging the Cuban State’s right to the Havana Club name. As a consequence, the Havana Club rum produced in Cuba and distributed by Pernod Ricard is sold all over the world, but not in the United States.
At stake is not only rum and the profits it can generate, “The campaign is consistent with larger narratives promoted by the Cuban exile community, which assert that Cuba has not evolved under Castro but merely crumbled. … Because the “real Cuba” has been corrupted by the state, Cuban authenticity can only be found in the diaspora. … For Bacardí, authenticity has little to do with place and everything to do with Cuban people. Not the Cuban nationals who continue to reside on the island, of course, but those ‘true’ Cubans who left the island after 1959.”
“Despite its transnational structure, Havana Club has become the face of Cuba, so there is the assumption that Havana Club’s marketing might be congruent, to some degree, with the socialist ideals of the state. The degree to which Havana Club performs various kinds of labor on behalf of the Cuban government has been a key question of this book. Advertising is, after all, a powerful form of public discourse, which can shape how consumers make sense of the world, or at least an aspect of it.”
Meanwhile things go on and Havana Club now seeks new opportunities in other parts of the world, focusing also on new markets such as Asia and Africa.
-Review written by Marco Pierini-
About the Book’s Author
CHRISTOPHER CHÁVEZ is the Caroline S. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Advertising and the director of the Center for Latina/o and Latin American Studies (CLLAS) in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon in Eugene. He is the author of The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public and Reinventing the Latino Television Viewer: Language Ideology and Practice.
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Publication date: September 13, 2024
Language: English
Print length: 190 pages
ISBN-10: 1978838832
ISBN-13: 978-1978838833
Item Weight: 10.4 ounces
Reading age: 18 years and up
Dimensions: 6 x 0.3 x 9 inches
