Bacardi Limited (/bəˈkɑːrdi/ bə-KAR-dee, Spanish: [bakaɾˈði], Catalan: [bəkəɾˈði]) is the largest privately held, family-owned spirits company in the world.

[2] Founded in Cuba in 1862 by the Spanish businessmen Facundo Bacardí Massó, Bacardi Limited has been family-owned for seven generations, and employs more than 8,000 people with sales in approximately 170 countries.

[4] Facundo Bacardí Massó, a Spanish wine merchant, was born in Sitges, Catalonia, Spain, on October 16, 1814, and immigrated to Santiago, Cuba, in 1830.

At the time, rum was cheaply made and not considered a refined drink, and rarely sold in upmarket taverns or purchased by the growing emerging middle class on the island.

[5] Facundo began attempting to "tame" rum by isolating a proprietary strain of yeast harvested from local sugar cane still used in Bacardí production today.

[6] Moving from the experimental stage to a more commercial endeavour as local sales began to grow, Facundo and his brother José purchased a Santiago de Cuba distillery on October 16, 1862, which housed a still made of copper and cast iron.

[9][page needed] Emilio's brothers, Facundo and José, and their brother-in-law Enrique 'Henri' Schueg, remained in Cuba with the difficult task of sustaining the company during a period of war.

During his time in public office, Emilio established schools and hospitals, completed municipal projects such as the famous Padre Pico Street and the Bacardi Dam, financed the creation of parks, and decorated the city of Santiago with monuments and sculptures.

[7] The New York plant was soon shut down due to Prohibition, yet during this time Cuba became a hotspot for US tourists, kicking off a period of rapid growth for the Bacardi company and the onset of cocktail culture in America.

[16] However, after the triumph of the revolutionaries, and turn to communism, the family maintained a fierce opposition to Fidel Castro's policies in Cuba in the 1960s.

In his book, Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba, Tom Gjelten describes how the Bacardí family and the company left Cuba in exile after the Cuban government confiscated the company's Cuban assets without compensation on 14 October 1960, particularly nationalizing and banning all private property on the island as well as all bank accounts.

[17] However, due to concerns over the previous Cuban leader, Fulgencio Batista, the company had started foreign branches a few years before the revolution; the company moved the ownership of its trademarks, assets and proprietary formulas out of the country to the Bahamas prior to the revolution and already produced Bacardí rum at other distillery sites in Puerto Rico and Mexico.

The building, raised 47 feet (14 m) off the ground around a central core, features four massive walls made of sections of inch-thick hammered glass mural tapestries designed and manufactured in France.

The main brand of rum in Cuba is Havana Club, produced by a company that was confiscated and nationalized by the government following the revolution.

In partnership with the French company Pernod Ricard, the Cuban government sells its Havana Club products internationally, except in the United States and its territories.

Bacardi created the Real Havana Club rum based on the original recipe from the Arechabala family, manufactures it in Puerto Rico, and sells it in the United States.

Martini Rosé Tequila: Camino Real, Cazadores, Corzo, Patrón Vermouth: Martini, Noilly Prat Vodka: Eristoff, Grey Goose, Russian Prince, Ultimat Vodka, 42 Below American whiskey: Angel's Envy, Stillhouse Irish whiskey: Teeling Scotch whisky: Single malt Scotch whisky: Aberfeldy, Aultmore, Craigellachie, Deveron, Royal Brackla Blended Scotch whisky: Dewar's, William Lawson's Bacardí rums have been entered for a number of international spirit ratings awards.

He lived at Finca Vigía, in the small town of San Francisco de Paula, located very close to Bacardi's Modelo Brewery for Hatuey Beer in Cotorro, Havana.

In 1954, Compañía Ron Bacardi S.A. threw Hemingway a party when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature – soon after the publication of his novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952) – in which he honored the company by mentioning its Hatuey beer.

In his account he described how "on one side there was a wooden stage with two streamers – Hatuey beer and Bacardi rum – on each end and a Cuban flag in the middle.

In his article "The Old Man and the Daiquiri", Wayne Curtis writes about how Hemingway's "home bar also held a bottle of Bacardí rum".

Hemingway wrote in Islands in the Stream, "...this frozen daiquirí, so well beaten as it is, looks like the sea where the wave falls away from the bow of a ship when she is doing thirty knots.

"[44] On August 16, 2012 temporary worker Lawrence Daquan "Day" Davis was crushed to death when a faulty palletizer he was cleaning was activated.