Daughter of the revolution

When the news broke last week that President Obama was re-opening communication between the United States and Cuba – after five decades of Cold War-era status quo – Mari Aixala-Dawson’s thoughts turned to a different time, a different century.

It wasn’t the same old stories of Fidel Castro, Russian missiles, or CIA shenanigans that captured the attention of Mari – a Miami-born filmmaker whose family had fled the Caribbean island in the wake of the 1959 overthrow of the Batista government. Rather, it was her great-great-grandfather’s legacy of struggle against the Spanish in the late 19th century which drew her thoughts – a story of love, imprisonment, and revolution that reads like a Victor Hugo novel, and tastes of the soft sugars in a warm snifter of rum.

Mari lives on the north end of Kenwood, and is executive producer of AniMari Films, a movie production company that focuses on projects about Cuban women. She’s also a member of the storied Bacardi rum family, whose patriarch, the Spanish-born Don Facundo Bacardi Masso, founded their namesake rum company in Cuba in 1862, and today is said to be the largest family-owned spirits company in the world.

Mari was born nearly eight years after Castro took power, exerting his communist political philosophy on the 42,000-square-mile island nation of 11 million people. She recalls her relatives’ stories about the revolution in brief snippets – she says the older generation didn’t like to talk about it that much. But what she did hear was telling.

“When my godfather tried to leave the Bacardi offices,” she says, “he went to grab his reading glasses. But they wouldn’t let him take them – they were to be confiscated by the government.”

Mari’s great aunt was made to remove her earrings for the same purpose.

But what Mari wants people to understand, is that the struggles of Cuba didn’t begin under the shadow of Castro – whose zeal for far-left politics was matched only by a surprising knack for American baseball – but date back centuries, from the landing of Christopher Columbus in 1492 and 400 years of Spanish colonization to attempts at control by the British, and later American, governments, to military-backed “home rule” and, most recently, 50-plus years of Cold War isolation from the West.

“There’s so much more to Cuba than what people have known,” she says. “I’m hoping that what’s coming is the ability for the world to understand the origins of the Cuban culture, that creativity and ability to overcome all challenges.”

To Mari, emblematic of those challenges was her great-great-grandfather, Emilio Bacardi Moreau – a father, a lover, a 19th-century revolutionary.

Unlike his father, Emilio’s passions were more about rebellion against Spanish rule and the fight for Cuban freedom than they were Facundo’s innovative “white rum” recipes.

Emilio had been dodging Spanish authorities for nearly 10 years, says Mari, when he was finally captured in 1879, and shipped to a prison somewhere in Spanish North Africa. The father of six was held in North Africa for four years.

His eventual release and return to Cuba came with tragic news – his wife had died of natural causes during his incarceration.

Bereft, and losing his fire for the revolution, Emilio soon met Elvira Cape Lombard – Mari’s great-great-grandmother – who “would become his muse and incite him to rejoin the fighting.” When Emilio was taken prisoner by the Spanish a second time, in 1896, Elvira carried on his torch – writing to the rebels hiding in the Cuban hills, inspiring them and letting them know they still had her and Emilio’s support.

“That’s a story that really speaks to me,” says Mari. “The Spanish finally left in 1902 and, for a moment, it looked like my great-great-grandparents’ dream had been realized.” But then “corruption eventually returns,” says Mari. “It’s history repeating itself.”

Still, to Mari, the fact that President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro were announcing to the world, at the same time on Dec. 17, about softening relations between the two countries is evidence that her great-great-grandparents’ struggles were just another step in Cuba’s long march forward for its people.

“We’re once again seeing the people coming back. We will see that renaissance. It’s happening. It is a step,” Mari says. “It’s about changing the conversation.”

If any culture is capable of this, says Mari, it would be the Cuban culture. “It’s got a history of reinventing itself,” she says. “I want to pick up this flag and walk with it like my great-great-grandfather.”