Rum Historian by Marco Pierini
Born in 1749, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German poet, playwright, novelist, and scientist whose influence shaped European culture. His early, huge and long-lasting success came with “The Sorrows of Young Werther” (1774), a novel that captured the spirit of Romanticism, emphasizing emotion and individualism and the importance of love in our lives. In 1832, on his deathbed, his last words seem to have been: “more light”. Since then, people have been debating whether it was simply a request to open the window, or a reference to his illuminist passion for the truth, or the desire to know, to know more.
Si parva licet, La Vizcaya, Arechabala and Havana Club are today too little known compared to their great importance in the history and even the present of rum. We need to know more and fortunately now, at least in part, that is possible. Recently I have read two works that shed more light on the history of Cuban rum in general and on Arechabala in particular.
In 2023, María Victoria Arechabala Fernández, a descendant of the family, and Antonío Santamaría García, a renowned Spanish Historian, published “ARECHABALA Azúcar y Ron”. I only found out last spring and, after the summer break during which I also have to work for a living, I have finally read it.
It is a large volume, a beautiful object, full of family stories, period photos, rare documents, and a wealth of information, which sometimes differs from mainstream narratives. All the quotations in this article are taken from this book. The translation is mine, and I apologize in advance to the authors and our readers.
Also, the authors were kind enough to answer my questions and gave me the opportunity to finally read a book I had been searching for years, Manuel Bonera Miranda’s “ORO BLANCO Una Historia Empresarial del Ron Cubano”, 2.000. I want to publicly thank them here.
Having said this, let’s start from the beginning, that is, from the very foundation of the company.
“They emerged in Cuba from the ranks of employees, entrepreneurs in areas where a large investment was not needed. This was the case of José Arechabala, who in 1877 set up his own business after working four years for Julián de Zulueta and raising the capital necessary to establish his own business in Cárdenas. Arechabala was dedicated to the storage and trade of sugar and honey, an activity that he knew well ...”
The following year, in 1878, he bought a still “thanks to the payment facilities offered by its owners” who also originated from his native town, Gordejuela. This is another example of the importance of the networks of relations between immigrants that we talked about in the November article. Evidently the business went well, because already in 1880, he managed to pay the entire debt and remain sole owner of his company. Growth was rapid, profits increased and Don José invested heavily in modernizing and diversifying his company.
In 1891 “the Arechabala factory possessed - as part of its machinery - two of the most modern columns existing in Cuba, an analyzer and a rectifier for alcohols. Thanks to an ingenious design, which used heat exchange physics, the fermentation is separated into its constituent vapors with the first apparatus and then selectively condensed in the second. The technology used in La Vizcaya made it possible to control the strength of the rums processed, since the spirit could be removed from the rectifier at various heights - the higher, the stronger the liquor - so that it was possible to achieve, whenever desired, a distillate with 95 percent alcohol per volume of liquid processed.”
It produced around 70 pipas (a barrel of circa 470 liters) of rum and 2.500 gallons of alcohol per day.
In this way, “La Vizcaya completed its improvement process, which began in 1885 when the owner decided to convert it into a modern factory. Batch distillation in the pot still, which was the most traditional and ancient practice of obtaining alcohol and rum, was left behind forever, to be done by continuous distillation in a column. This technique had been introduced in Cuba in the second half of the nineteenth century and was the most widely used, effective and economical method to obtain a strong and pure liquor. With the installation, in 1891, of the efficient alcohol rectifier, José Arechabala showed himself as an entrepreneur interested in the cutting-edge technological advances of his time, especially those coming from the United States.”
So, now we know that young José Arechabala had started with a traditional pot still, and that only later, in 1891, thanks to his success and more resources at his disposal, did he buy modern columns of continuous distillation.
As his company grew, so did Don José’s personal prestige and social and political role. Meanwhile, Big History went on. Relations between Spain and Cuba were getting worse. In the last years of the nineteenth century, the Spanish tax burden on Cuba and in particular on its rum industry was constantly growing. The Cuban producers reacted with protests and petitions. Don José was now one of the leading figures of his town and had a leading role in trying to make the government of Madrid understand the reasons of the Cuban producers. It was a decisive moment in the history of Cuba, in which perhaps they could still have avoided the break with Spain and to which I will probably dedicate a future article. For now, it is sufficient to say that his efforts were not successful and the gap between Cuba and Spain continued to widen until the outbreak of the second great War of Independence in 1895, which ended with the intervention of the United States in 1898. (See 13. TOWARDS INDEPENDENCE: SUGAR, WARS AND THE US, in the August 2023 issue).
As we know, the war was very harsh, but Cárdenas, La Vizcaya and the Arechabala family suffered relatively little from it and were ready to start again as soon as it ended. At the end of the war, Cuba had just under 2,000,000 inhabitants and its economy was in ruins. But things improved rapidly.
“... a great many Spaniards went back to Spain during the War of Independence, taking their money with them, but only for a short period, since in 1900 they began to return to Cuba, so that the number of the then ex-metropolitans coming back to the Island soon exceeded the number of those who had fled because of the conflict. Peace treaty agreements guaranteed that there would be no expropriations ... The post-war reconstruction, in terms of restoring basic living conditions and producing sugar, Cubas’ main export, was largely due to the efforts of the population and to private capital, both insular and Spanish.”
The Cuban economy recovered, and in a few years bounced back to the levels before the war and then did not cease to grow, also helped by the reconciliation between the fighters of the two sides. The producers of alcoholic beverages and rum played an important part in the recovery: in the early 1900s they accounted for about 15% of all industrial enterprises.
“The factories of Bacardí and Arechabala and others in Santiago and Cárdenas expanded and improved their technology, and the Havana rum firms formed an association to defend their interests and cooperate in manufacturing and marketing. Besides, thanks to cocktails like Mojito, Cuba Libre and Daiquiri the demand for rum expanded to the well-off and female population.” (See HISTORY OF CUBAN RUM 16. THE RON LIGERO CUBANO in the February 2024 issue)
Arechabala won a silver medal in the Paris International Exposition of 1900 and later bought also some sugar plantations, as far I know a unique case in the Cuban rum world. The company continued to grow and in 1921 it was transformed into a modern corporation, JASA, that is, José Arechabala Sociedad Anonima.
As we know, the First Word War (1914-1918) disrupted the European sugar beet cultivation while the demand for sugar to manufacture alcohol for war purposes grew enormously, so the price of sugar skyrocketed. This situation gave Cuba a sudden and gigantic bonanza: the cultivation of sugarcane grew enormously, even at the expense of the forest heritage, and money, a lot of money, flowed into Cuba in the so called “Dance of the Millions”. But then the war ended, in a few years the sugar market returned to normal, prices collapsed and the island experienced a serious economic crisis. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the catastrophe, two figures are enough: the price of sugar fell in a few weeks from 22.5 to 4 cents a pound. A terrible blow for the whole island, and ruin for the many planters who had borrowed money to increase production in the fat cow years and for the banks that had financed them.
“The crisis caused by the sharp drop in the price of sugar constituted a real cataclysm ... Panic ensued and the banks declared bankruptcy one after another, a catastrophe to which only the American banks survived, because they had strong support from their parent companies. Most of the indebted properties passed into the hands of these banks, including dozens of sugar plantations ... The crash of 1920 represented a terrible blow for the Cuban and also the Spanish capitalists, since the latter still predominated in trade and certain manufactures. And above all, it came to show the fragile foundation of national prosperity.”
In this dramatic picture, JASA held up better than other companies for its financial strength, its diversification into many different sectors and also because the domestic market of distillates endured, also thanks to the influx of many thirsty American tourists on the run from Prohibition. (See HISTORY OF CUBAN RUM 21. UNCLE SAM’S BOOZE COPS in the August 2024’s issue)
In 1923, Don José died and the following year another unexpected loss struck the company: his successor José Arechabala Sainz was murdered by a former worker who had been sacked, who then fled and committed suicide. In the following years, the family remained owner, but no longer dealt with the day-to-day management of the company, many shareholders moved abroad and a new management took over.
According to the sources, it seems that in the 1920s the most important activities of the company were the refining, storage and export of both raw and refined sugar, and the storage and export of molasses, whereas instead the production of rum was rather low.
No wonder too. As we know, JASA controlled the entire processing cycle of sugarcane and its derivatives. It was therefore able to produce sugar, both raw and refined, molasses of various qualities, alcohol for industrial uses and rum. In the 1920s sugar prices were erratic, constantly changing. For example, for decades Cuba exported only raw sugar to the United States, which was then refined locally, because there was a high duty on the import of refined sugar. Then, at a certain point in the 1920s, the import duty on raw sugar rose sharply, therefore JASA focused on the sale of refined sugar instead. For what little I know, this trend still exists in the (few) companies that control the complete cycle of cane processing. I remember, for example, that during a beautiful trip to Mauritius more than 10 years ago, some producers explained to me that from year to year they chose to make more sugar and less rum or the other way around, depending on the vagaries of the market.
However, in 1925 the new management of JASA decided to focus again on rum. They invested a lot of money to improve the quantity and quality of fermentation and stored large quantities of rum for aging. Evidently, they were laying the ground for something new, and big. As we will see.
POST SCRIPTUM
Mike Kunekta, who every month keeps us posted about the news in the world of rum and who I thank because he has repeatedly directed me to works I had not known before, asked me how far I would like to go on with the history of Cuban rum. Well, I would like to reach the present day. A day that, I anticipate, sees great successes, but also great risks. There will therefore be many more articles, but from time to time I will interrupt the series to tell you about other aspects of the history of rum.
-Marco Pierini-
