There are products sold in two versions in different parts of the planet not because of marketing, but because two corporations simultaneously own the same name — and both are right.
January 1, 1960 — the Cuban government nationalized the assets of José Arechabala, S.A. without compensation. The family fled, the factories remained. A classic revolution story — but with an engineering peculiarity: along with the distillation columns, the state received an intangible asset that in 1960 was not yet perceived as a weapon. A trademark.
From 1972 to 1993, the state company Cubaexport exported rum and in 1976 registered the Havana Club trademark in the United States. The logic was simple: the factory is ours, the recipe is ours, the name is ours. Registration went through without resistance — because the original owners were in exile, and the U.S. Patent Office operated on the "first come, first served" principle. In 1993, Cubaexport transferred the rights to Havana Rum & Liquors, which transferred them to Havana Club Holding — a joint venture with French Pernod Ricard. The conveyor belt worked, bottles went to Europe, Asia, Latin America.
A parallel universe launched in 1995 when the Arechabala family — half a century after fleeing — tried to make a deal. In April 1997, they signed a Share Purchase Agreement with Bacardi, selling the trademark rights and remaining assets for $1.25 million. The deal looked absurd: rights were being sold to a name that had already belonged to others for twenty years. But Bacardi bought not just paper — it bought a legal hook.
OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) issued license C-18147 in November 1995, authorizing the deal. But on April 17, 1997, it revoked it retroactively — meaning it declared retroactively that the authorization had never been valid. Imagine: you bought a house, moved in, and two years later they tell you the authorization for the deal was fake from the start. Bacardi found itself the owner of a name it had no right to buy.
In 1996, Havana Club Holding and Havana Club International filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Judge Shira Scheindlin got a case that was not so much a legal dispute as an engineering problem: how to reconcile the irreconcilable — Cuban nationalization, American embargo, French corporation, and a family of emigrants.
Havana Club I, II, III, IV — four decisions, each adding a new layer. In the first round, Scheindlin ruled that the defendants had no right to challenge the OFAC license — that was the prerogative of the agency itself. In the second, she established: the transfer of the trademark from the Arechabala family to Bacardi required a special license, which didn't exist. In the third, she ruled that the 1997 deal was invalid and restored Cubaexport's registration rights.
But in the fourth round, she applied Section 211 Omnibus Consolidated and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act of 1998. This law — a product of Bacardi's lobbying in the U.S. Congress — prohibited American courts from recognizing rights to trademarks confiscated by the Cuban government after the revolution if the owner had not received compensation. Formally, the law protected the rights of refugees. In practice — it blocked Havana Club International from defending its name in the U.S. based on international treaties, particularly the Inter-American Convention.
Scheindlin didn't invent the law — she applied it. But the application was like installing a check valve in a pipeline: water flows one way, can't go back. Havana Club International owned the name everywhere except the U.S. Bacardi owned it only in the U.S. Two bottles with one name, two corporations with mutually exclusive rights.
Section 211 is not a philosophical manifesto, but an engineering tool. The law consists of two parts. The first prohibits American courts from recognizing rights to confiscated trademarks without compensation to the original owners. The second blocks the use of these marks by any persons connected with the confiscation, even if they own the rights in other jurisdictions.
This is not a sanction and not an embargo. It's a rule that turns a trademark into quantum superposition: it simultaneously belongs and doesn't belong, depending on which country you're standing in. In 2002, the WTO ruled Section 211 a violation of international law, particularly the TRIPS agreement (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights). The decision was unambiguous: the law discriminates against Cuban rights holders and contradicts the principle of national treatment.
The U.S. ignored the decision. Formally, the WTO has no enforcement mechanism — it can allow the injured party to impose retaliatory sanctions, but that's it. Cuba couldn't impose sanctions against the U.S. because there was almost no trade between them. A vicious circle emerged: international law recognized the violation, but there was no one to enforce the decision.
Section 211 worked as a one-way lock. Pernod Ricard could sell Havana Club in 70+ countries, including all of Europe, Asia, Latin America. Bacardi sold its rum only in the U.S., but this was a market with a population of 330 million and purchasing power exceeding half the world. Geographically, Bacardi was losing. Economically — it held the defense.
In 2016, Pernod Ricard won a key case in the U.S. appeals court. The decision was technical: the court ruled that Section 211 could not be applied retroactively to registrations made before 1998. Since Cubaexport registered the trademark in 1976, the law didn't apply to it. Impeccable logic — but short-lived.
In 2020, the decision was overturned. Reason: changing political circumstances and a new interpretation of Section 211. The appeals court ruled that the law applies not to the moment of registration, but to the moment of rights protection. That is, even if you registered the mark before 1998, an attempt to defend it in American court after that date falls under the ban. It's like a rule that says: you can own a house, but you can't call the police if someone breaks into it.
The reversal of 2016 became a turning point not because of legal arguments, but because of the demonstration of a principle: American courts can revisit decisions depending on the foreign policy climate. The trademark ceased to be a stable asset and became a variable depending on which administration sits in the White House.
By 2022, two versions of Havana Club were being sold on the planet. One — produced in Cuba by a Pernod Ricard joint venture, exported to most countries in the world. The second — produced by Bacardi in Puerto Rico, sold only in the U.S. The bottles looked different, the composition differed, but the name was one.
This is not a marketing ploy. This is the result of legal bifurcation: the moment when one trademark split into two incompatible versions. Bacardi was losing in the EU, Asia, Latin America — courts in these regions recognized Pernod Ricard's rights. But in the U.S., the embargo and Section 211 created an impenetrable wall.
The Cold War ended in 1991. But for Havana Club, it continued. The rum became a fossil of geopolitics — a product whose existence depends not on the quality of distillation, but on whether a country recognizes WTO decisions. In a sense, this is the purest experiment: what happens when international law collides with national sovereignty, and corporations use this collision as a business model.
Section 211 only worked because there was a U.S. embargo against Cuba, imposed in 1962. Without the embargo, the law would be a declaration — with it, it became a tool. The embargo prohibited American companies from trading with Cuba, and Cuban ones from trading with the U.S. This created a vacuum in which Bacardi could sell its rum without competition from the original.
In 2016, the Obama administration began easing the embargo. Tourists got the right to go to Cuba, companies — to open offices. Pernod Ricard filed an application to register the trademark in the U.S., counting on the embargo being lifted and Section 211 losing force. But the Trump administration in 2017 tightened sanctions back, and the application hung in the air.
The embargo was not just a political decision — it became a load-bearing structure for Bacardi's business model. Remove the embargo — and Section 211 will remain law, but will stop working, because Cuban rum will flood the American market. Bacardi understood this and lobbied to maintain sanctions not out of ideology, but out of pragmatism.
By 2022, the two versions of Havana Club coexisted as parallel universes with an impermeable boundary. In one universe, rum was made in Cuba, in the other — in Puerto Rico. In one, the owner was Pernod Ricard, in the other — Bacardi. In one, international law applied, in the other — American law. The border ran not across the ocean, but through a coordinate system: which court you recognize, that's the rum you drink.