What They Built, What They Lost, What They'll Build Again

Facundo Bacardí Massó founded the distillery in Santiago de Cuba in 1862. By 1959, Bacardí was Cuba's most famous export — distilleries, a brewery, office buildings across the island.

CEO Pepín Bosch saw the nationalization coming. Between 1955 and 1957, he quietly transferred the trademarks, formulas, and corporate ownership to Nassau. When soldiers seized every Bacardí facility on October 14, 1960, they got the buildings but not the brand. The family rebuilt from distilleries already running in Puerto Rico and Mexico.

Today Bacardí is the world's largest privately held spirits company. They lobbied for Section 211 of the 1998 Omnibus Act, blocking Cuba from renewing expropriated trademarks in the US.

José Arechabala founded La Vizcaya distillery in Cárdenas in 1878. His family created the Havana Club brand in 1934 — a premium aged rum that became a staple of Havana's golden age.

In 1960, soldiers took the distillery at gunpoint and family members were imprisoned. The US trademark quietly lapsed in 1973; Cuba re-registered it in 1976. In 1993, the Cuban state licensed the brand to a joint venture with France's Pernod Ricard.

In 1994, the surviving family sold their recipe and remaining rights to Bacardí, who now produces "The Real Havana Club" in Puerto Rico. The trademark war has been in courts on three continents for three decades.

Alfonso Fanjul Sr. married Lillian Gómez-Mena in 1936, merging two of Cuba's wealthiest sugar dynasties. Combined holdings: ten sugar mills, three distilleries, real estate across the island. Castro nationalized everything in 1959.

In 1960, Alfonso Sr. relocated to Florida, bought swampland near Lake Okeechobee, and started over. Today the family controls Florida Crystals, Domino Sugar, C&H, and ASR Group — the largest cane sugar refiner in the world, with revenue of roughly $5.5B (2024) and a family fortune Forbes estimated at about $4B (2025).

At his peak, Julio Lobo controlled 16 sugar mills, tens of thousands of acres, a bank, an insurance company, and offices from Havana to Manila. Net worth: approximately $200 million in 1959 dollars.

Unlike other moguls, Lobo stayed after the revolution, believing he could navigate Castro. On October 11, 1960, Che Guevara summoned him to a meeting and made a blunt offer: hand over everything, and you can run Cuba's entire sugar industry for us. Lobo asked for a night to think. The next morning he boarded his private plane and never returned.

He died in 1983 in a small apartment near the Paseo de la Castellana in Madrid.

The Cifuentes family acquired the Partagás brand in 1900, building it into one of Cuba's largest cigar houses by the 1950s, alongside Bolívar, Ramón Allones, and La Gloria Cubana.

On September 15, 1960, soldiers walked into the factory at 520 Industria Street and told Ramón Cifuentes: "We're here to intervene the company." They refused to let him take a single thing. He was offered the job of running Cuba's new tobacco monopoly. He refused.

In 1978, Cifuentes struck a deal with General Cigar to produce non-Cuban Partagás — production began in Jamaica and later moved to the Dominican Republic, using Cuban-seed tobacco and exiled rollers. The brand is still made there today.

In 1935, Alonso Menéndez created Montecristo — named because factory lectors read Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo aloud to rollers. He then bought the H. Upmann factory, expanding it to 1,100 workers, the largest in Havana.

At 5:30 PM on September 15, 1960, soldiers entered and took it all. The family left Cuba penniless. Son Benjamín Menéndez opened a factory in the Canary Islands in 1961, producing "Montecruz" — a near-clone.

The landmark 1972 case Menendez v. Faber, Coe and Gregg established exiled cigarmakers' legal right to produce their brands outside Cuba, creating Cuban Cigar Brands NV to hold the trademarks.

Jorge Mas Canosa was arrested at fourteen for an anti-Batista radio broadcast. He fled Cuba in 1960, volunteered for the CIA's Brigade 2506, but was placed on a decoy ship and missed the Bay of Pigs landing.

He enlisted in the US Army, graduated from Officer Training School at Fort Benning, then bought a small Miami construction firm with a $50,000 loan. He renamed it MasTec. Today it is the second-largest Hispanic-owned company in the U.S. — building energy and telecom infrastructure across North America.

In 1981, he co-founded the Cuban American National Foundation, becoming the most powerful anti-Castro voice in Washington. He died in 1997, still planning to return. His sons Jorge Jr. and José now run MasTec and co-own Inter Miami CF.

Goar Mestre built CMQ into Latin America's most advanced broadcast network — seven TV stations plus a national radio network across Cuba. By 1954, Cuba was the second country in the world, after the US, to have a national television network.

Castro seized it all in 1960. Mestre fled to Buenos Aires and did it again — founding Canal 13 through Proartel, partnering with CBS and Time-Life. He ran Argentina's top network for 14 years — until Isabel Perón's government nationalized that one too, in 1974.

Two television empires built. Two seized by the state. He became an Argentine citizen and died in Buenos Aires in 1994.