Havana Club | The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails

is a popular brand of Cuban rums distributed globally (except in the United States) by the French Pernod-Ricard company. The brand grew out of a distillery founded by the Arechabala family in Cardenas, Cuba, in 1878. The Havana Club brand was created in 1934, following the repeal of US Prohibition, as a light, crisp rum targeted at the American market. The family left Cuba for Spain with the rise of Fidel Castro, who nationalized the distillery in 1960.

The Arechabala family allowed its trademark registration to lapse in 1973, believing it had no further value. Cubaexport, an enterprise owned by the Cuban government, registered the lapsed mark in the United States in 1976 and sold limited quantities in Cuba and some Eastern European countries. In 1993, Pernod-Ricard formed a joint venture with the government of Cuba to expand global distribution and marketing. Havana Club, like all Cuban goods, was blocked from sales in the United States by a blanket embargo. Nonetheless, by 1998, Havana Club was among the fastest-growing rums in the world, producing more than one million cases annually (both in previously existing distilleries and in ones built expressly for the brand) and gaining adherents in Italy, England, Canada, and elsewhere. As is the Cuban style, Havana Club is a blend of column-distilled molasses-based rums, some quite rich, that are aged and charcoal-filtered before bottling or further aging.In 1997, the Bacardi family, which by and large had been unchallenged in rum sales globally, purchased from the Arechabala family the claim to any remaining rights in the lapsed trademark. Bacardi then launched a years-long battle over the trademark in the United States, claiming in part that it had been seized illegally. The legal battle has yet to conclude. Both Pernod Ricard and Bacardi currently produce versions of Havana Club, although Bacardi’s two versions (Havana Club Puerto Rican Rum) are sold only in the United States. For the rest of the world, the Cuban Havana Club remains the flagship for that country’s rum industry. In 2018, it sold some 4.6 million cases, making it the world’s fifth-largest rum brand.