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STUDENTS at Middlesex University in North London have voted to stop selling Bacardi Rum in their Students' Union bar and to stock Havana Club instead.
The motion, proposed by the University union's CSC group at the AGM in December was passed overwhelmingly with only three votes against.
Unfortunately, it was passed with only 288 students present -twelve short of the required 300 quorum- which means the vote is not binding on the executive. Group chair Rhys McCarthy told CSC:
"We are now trying to force the issue through the student councils. It is hard slog to meet all the requirements of the bureaucracy but I'm confident that we will get the policy instituted eventually."
The idea came when Rhys learned that Middlesex had banned the sale of Nestle products in the union shop two years ago because of that company's policies in Third World.
"Since Bacardi supports the illegal blockade of Cuba and was instrumental in writing up the Helms Burton Law, I thought the least we could do was stop people putting money into their pockets. If they want to drink white rum, they ought to drink the real stuff and that's Havana Club." Says Rhys.
If successful Rhys hopes to take the resolution all the way to the national NUS conference. "That would be fantastic if we could get every student union bar in the country to stop stocking Bacardi and only selling Havana Club," he adds.
Recently Bacardi have been heavily promoting the brand's Cuban heritage in advertising and even organising cocktail nights in bars in which mojitos and Cuba Libres are sold. In Britain Bacardi have even run promotional competitions in which the prize has been a trip to Cuba. Such a cynical policy is typical of a company whose lawyers framed whole chunks of the Helms-Burton Law.
Bacardi's exploitation of its Cuban image does not square with reality. In fact although the brewing and distilling company was founded in Cuba in 1862, it became internationalised during the 1920s prohibition period when Havana became the centre of the 'holidays on hooch' tourist boom. By the time 1959 came around the families who controlled the enterprise were about as Cuban as the Queen of England is English.
According to the renowned historian Robin Blackburn the so-called 'Bacardi clan' were typical of the rootless and expatriate nature of much of the Cuban bourgeoisie of the time. The two families that owned it then were the Bosches of German origin and the French Espin family.
They had already set up breweries and distilleries in other countries including the Bahamas, where they are still based today.
In 1995 Bacardi sales world-wide had dropped by $25m thanks mainly to competition from the Cuban Havana Club brand which is being marketed by Pernod Ricard of France.