Region & History

Havana Club is Cuba's best-known rum brand, and its story doesn't begin in Havana but in Cárdenas, a port town on the north coast of Matanzas province. There, the Arechabala family ran a distillery, reportedly since 1878. In 1934 they launched the Havana Club brand and sold the rum in Cuba and the United States.

In the 19th century, the land around Havana and Matanzas lived off sugar. Enslaved people from Africa worked the plantations, cutting the cane and keeping the mills running. Slavery did not end in Cuba until 1886. Rum was distilled from the molasses left behind in the sugar factories.

In 1960 the Cuban state expropriated the Arechabala company, and much of the family left the island. The name Havana Club stayed in the country. The distillery in Santa Cruz del Norte, east of Havana in what is now Mayabeque, was built in 1970 and supplied the brand's entire production until 2007.

Who owns Havana Club today? It depends on the country. Since 1993, a joint venture between the Cuban state company Corporación Cuba Ron and the French group Pernod Ricard has distributed the brand worldwide, including in Germany. In the United States, Bacardí sells its own Havana Club made in Puerto Rico, based on rights it bought from the Arechabala family in 1994. Whether the trademark lapsed in 1973 is the heart of a dispute that remains in the courts to this day.

Two distilleries in Mayabeque belong to the state-owned Corporación Cuba Ron. The newer one, in San José de las Lajas, was added in 2007. Cuba has protected the name "Cuba" nationally as a geographical indication since April 2, 2010. The application for EU protection was published in the Official Journal in 2023, but the name has not yet been registered.