Cuba libre
Bacardi.
Bacardi, the world's largest privately owned alcohol seller, has been engaged in a long running legal war with the Fidel Castro regime over the trademark for Havana Club rum. The trademark, initially owned by the Arechabala family, expired in 1973 - whereupon the Cuban government in association with a French company applied for and received it. Bacardi bought the rights to the name from the Arechabalas and subsequently stripped the trademark from Castro, primarily through Section 211 of the U.S. trademark law which forbids trademarks connected to property seized by governments without compensation.
Castro nationalized the Cuban Bacardi plants in 1960, earning the wrath of a company that had long been agitators for Cuban liberty. As one of the few companies that publicly opposed Fulgencio Batista, Bacardi was forced to transfer its trademarks from Cuba to the Bahamas in 1957. A generation earlier, son of company founder Emilio Bacardi was exiled from Cuba for his participation in anti-colonial activities. Consequently, Bacardi has helped establish the anti-Castro Cuban American National Foundation in the United States, and was a major backer of the the Helms-Burton Act of 1996. The Cuban government has responded by threatening to produce its own "Bacardi" products as well as invalidating the trademarks of other American corporations within Cuba.
The likelyhood of a resolution to this dispute is small as long as the Castro regime remains in control of Cuba. The communist government there has a long established history of theft via "nationalization" and is more than willing to illegally trade using the intellectual property of corporations they have forced off the island nation. Fortunately for both the Bacardi family and the Cuban people, Castro's advancing age promises an inevitable change in leadership, regardless of how many sycophantic documentaries Oliver Stone produces.
08.05.2004 © ljr