CHAPTER

2

College was the toughest point in my life because I knew that the reality of making it on my own was on the horizon, and yet I had absolutely no vocational calling. I considered my education to be the highest priority, clasping onto my grades like a security blanket, but I had to work to pay for my studies. Juggling a job while trying desperately to get a degree made me panic even more about being able to fully commit to either.

I worried so much that I developed a weak stomach. I started to feel frequent pangs of nausea and pain in my abdomen. I lost a ton of weight and when I went to the doctor, he diagnosed me with duodenal ulcers. I went to see a psychiatrist as the ulcers were being caused by stress, but after a month of treatment the doctor confronted me, “Do you want me to change you or are you happy being who you are?”

He offered to prescribe some anti-anxiety pills but told me that I would eventually kick myself for taking them. They would calm me down but they would also affect my drive. What the hell? I decided to keep my drive and my anxiety. I would just have to find a way to channel my carcinogenic emotions into something positive.

I began to think about my life in forward motion, creating a philosophy for myself that I have expanded and deepened over the years. I realized that it’s my natural instinct to seek the comfort I had as a child when my parents took care of me. In adult life, everyone secretly desires to have a knight in shining armor come and save them in some shape or form. Despite the strong façade we create, deep inside we long for our lovers, boss, friends or an apparition sent from the gods to solve all our problems and tell us everything is going to be all right.

However, I knew I needed to take responsibility for myself and accept that no one else can save me or make decisions on my behalf. Instead of working for someone else and helping them exercise their abilities and ambitions, I concluded I needed to realize my own. In the work environment, employees look for bosses to nurture them and look after their interests. They rely on them to build them up and then one day promote them to the position they secretly desire.

The harsh reality is that if an executive can find someone cheaper or more experienced, the employees’ interests will be a distant memory. It’s natural for employers to want to keep employees dependent on them and hide information from them to protect themselves. I realized that it is up to me to seek knowledge, fight for information and think of myself as a detective on a lifelong investigation for the truth.

Remember, everyone is looking out for their own self-interests, and the less we rely on other people, the less room we leave for disappointment. It’s so easy to become dependent. It’s like an addiction, and our culture is the master enabler, offering us pills to ease the slightest hint of pain, short-term entertainment to distract us from our underachievements, drugs and alcohol to help us temporarily forget that we are unhappy with ourselves and our unfulfilling jobs. It is rarely in the interests of the people in power to push us to achieve more than they require. Lobbyists, representing the interests of the world’s dominating corporations —from the pharmaceutical to arms and automotive industries, to oil, tobacco and alcohol trade—strive to conceal information from the rest of us in order to retain the biggest share of power for the big boys.

Education systems in the world’s leading countries barely teach independent or lateral ways of thinking, and it may come across as far-fetched, but it is also in the interests of the world leaders to keep people from thinking too far outside the box. This idea is nothing revelatory. It was recognized by the great thinkers decades ago. George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was published in 1932, warning us to think independently or risk losing our identity for good.

And thinking independently is exactly what I did.

During the summer of 1966, I went home to visit my parents. A friend of my father’s, David Martin, offered me a summer job as he had a multi-million-dollar project building offices in Cocoa Beach and needed help. He was a partner at an architectural firm in Tennessee and when he went back to Memphis, he offered to take me with him. My mind was already packing my bags.

I left the University of Florida and moved to Tennessee with David and his Southern wife Bonnie. When I got there, the first thing I did was go to the hospital and get my tonsils taken out. Even though I seemed to permanently have tonsillitis, my mother was terrified of me having them taken out, so I called my parents the day of the operation and told them what I was in for. Five months later, my mother had all my brothers’ tonsils removed!

I worked for David for two months, during which time I arrived at the conclusion that I was going to save the world by being a doctor. My English grammar was diabolical, which put a damper on that prospect. Even passing the initial medical school entrance examination was determined by scores in English language, but nevertheless I decided to stay in Memphis and give it a go. I enrolled at Memphis State University and majored in psychology and got a job at the City of Memphis Hospital as a “vampire,” sucking and analyzing blood from patients. It was an unforgettable experience as I witnessed all kinds of atrocities. One man was rushed in with a knife in his head and another had a gun shot in his balls, claiming his wife had fired at him during an argument.

After two years of studying psychology and trying to understand my own hang-ups, I applied for medical school. I didn’t think I’d stand a chance as my English was still far from perfect and it was an elitist system… but I managed to circumvent it. My father’s business partner was an old Floridian named Steve Calder, a Florida carpetbagger who had plenty of land and wanted to put it to use. He was a very well-connected guy, who ultimately was able to pass legislation in Florida that allowed him to name a racetrack after himself, the Calder Race Track in Miami.

One summer, my father asked me to take a gift from Steve to Tallahassee, so I dutifully hand-delivered a bunch of cigar boxes to some State Senators in the Florida capital. I was so gloriously received that I had to see what type of cigars the boxes contained. I wasn’t expecting thick wads of cash when I opened one. Needless to say, I was the flavor of the month, and shortly after I was offered the opportunity to study medicine at the University of Florida.

By then I had realized that my quest to save the world was not the answer, so instead I returned to the University of Florida to complete my architectural engineering degree in building construction, start earning the big bucks…and get married.

I met my wife-to-be in December 1967, when I was twenty-two years old and still a student at Memphis State University. During a visit to my grandparents’ in Miami, I went to a party at a friend’s house with one girl and ended up flirting with another the entire night. From the moment I was introduced to Gloria Nielsen Ariosa, an heiress to the Bacardi fortune, she didn’t draw breath until the party was over but she was so pretty I didn’t mind having my ear talked off. She was very bright with an ease of conversation very attractive, with short black hair. She was of medium height with a nice body; it was a little on the heavy side, especially her legs, but that made her even more endearing. She seemed to know a lot about me, even though I had barely uttered a word, and it became clear that a little birdie had already filled her in as to whether or not I was marriage material. Since her sister was dating my ex-roommate, Juan Galan, it didn’t take a genius to figure out who that birdie was.

We talked and talked and she flirted shamelessly. It did the trick as I woke up the next morning yearning to see her again. Before long she transformed me into a one-woman man. As she lived in Boston and I was studying in Memphis, we spent a fortune maintaining a long-distance relationship. We spoke for hours on end every day and I flew to Boston more and more frequently, despite her parents hated me for getting involved with their princess.

After graduating, Gloria moved to Miami and attended the University of Miami. I moved from Memphis to attend the University of Florida and commuted back and forth to Miami every weekend to see her. I was loaded with money as I was one of the few students with a car and I charged a small fortune for a ride into the city.

I had convinced my second-oldest brother, Jose, to come and live with me in Gainesville while I attended university. He hadn’t been doing well back home so I offered to take him under my wing while he studied at a junior college called Santa Fe. I love Jose; we shared a room as kids and I got a kick out of his terrorizing our parents. When he was about 7, they tried to get him to drink milk and he would smash the milk bottle on the floor so that the glass and milk exploded everywhere. The same routine happened every day until I suggested that it might be a good idea to buy plastic bottles instead.

One weekend while Jose was staying with me, I left early on a Thursday afternoon to meet Gloria in Miami as I had no classes on Friday. I stopped for gas on the Florida turnpike and, sure enough, after filling the tank up, I couldn’t find my gas credit card. I was sure I had last seen it in my wallet, and I didn’t have any cash on me either. It suddenly occurred to me that my brother Jose must have secretly taken it. The employee at the gas station took absolutely no pity on me and I had to leave the gold watch my father had given me as an heirloom as collateral.

It was a tradition in my family for my father to give one of his watches to each of his kids when they graduated from high school, but by the time Arturo grew up there were no more watches to pass on, so I gave him mine to continue the custom.

When my father died, he was wearing the watch my grandfather, Jorge Luis, had given him. In turn, my mother gave it to me and I cherish it as if it were the Holy Grail, since it was worn by both of them.

After getting sick of commuting back and forth and not having a home to share, Gloria and I decided to get married.

We set our wedding for March 29, 1969, by which time I had graduated and was working with my dad as the project manager of three condominium buildings in Ft. Lauderdale Beach. Once I came back to work for my father, our relationship improved to the point where it was as if I had never left home and nothing had ever happened between us. He couldn’t accept that I wanted to lead a life other than the one he had mapped out for me, so when I did, he deliberately distanced himself. Sometimes I felt as if he believed he owned me. Later on, when I left his business again, he adopted a similar attitude towards me, but this second falling out took even longer to settle.

Three days before I swapped vows with my bride-to-be, I went to see Father Navarrete, the Catholic priest who was going to marry us. He asked me if I wanted to confess and when I said I didn’t, I think he was slightly taken aback. During the lengthy wedding preparations, Father Navarrete became a good friend and I felt at liberty to pour out the childhood traumas that had been haunting me for years. I told him about the priest in the confessional who had broken the camel’s back. Father Navarrete was saddened that one priest could have potentially alienated an entire school of kids from God single-handedly, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I knew for sure mine hadn’t been a singular case. Many of my friends had fallen victim to a similar scenario and hadn’t been as lucky to escape.

I didn’t want to be a hypocrite and repent for sins when I knew it would just be a matter of time before I recommitted them, so I declined but Father Navarrete still gave me the absolution I needed to take communion during my wedding ceremony. Our families were both devout Catholics and it would have been unheard of for me not to take communion during my own wedding.

My father gave us an apartment in one of the company-owned properties, which at the time was worth $19,000. It was in a condominium community in Pompano Beach with two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a little enclosed porch and large living/dining room. It was a walk-up, on the second floor, at the end of a small golf green. The community, Leisureville Pompano, is still there.

We lived there for maybe a year and a half, feeling very awkward around each other. We had not lived together, and moving in as strangers after we had tied ourselves into a marriage was disconcerting.

The apartment was not much of a home for us, and it never became one. Gloria continued college at the University of Miami and commuted from Pompano Beach to Coral Gables almost daily to attend classes. She didn’t get home until late and I went to work every day. When we were home together, we didn’t know what to do with each other. It was a totally new experience to live with a female. Never mind one that I was married to. But we tried hard to make it work and we were madly in love, which helped blind us to everything else.

Gloria eventually graduated with honors. She was first in her class, but I knew I would always be the breadwinner of our family and I had no problem with that. I was confident in my ability to provide for my wife and children to come. After all, I had excellent examples set by my father and grandfather.

My grandfather, Jorge, taught me an invaluable lesson: to always save for a rainy day, no matter how bright your future looks. His modus operandi was to have enough money in the bank to get by for at least a year ahead. By having that safety net, even in desperate times, you can keep a firm hold on your dignity and only take so much shit from anybody before saying enough is enough. Do everything in your power to be in a position of independence and not at the mercy of others.

This advice can be applied to almost anyone, no matter how much you earn or whether it concerns company assets or your personal savings: do everything in your power to have safety reserves.

The Bible’s Book of Genesis depicts a story in which the Pharaoh of Egypt is having bad dreams. In the first one, he is standing by the Nile when seven fat, healthy cows emerge from the river and graze on the marsh grass. Then seven starving cows also emerge from the Nile and devour the seven fat cows. He wakes up panicked and when he falls asleep again the Pharaoh has another dream, in which seven ripe, healthy ears of grain on one stalk are devoured by seven, scorched, shriveled ears of grain.

Joseph, a slave, correctly interprets his dream to mean that there will be seven great years of abundance in all of Egypt, but it will be followed by seven years of famine, during which all of the abundance will be forgotten. Due to his foresight and wisdom, the Pharaoh put Joseph in charge of the whole of Egypt, telling him, “You shall be in charge of my government and food will be distributed to my people by your orders. Only by the throne will I outrank you.”

During the years of surplus, Joseph accumulated so much grain, it was like the sand of the sea but, just as he predicted, after the seven years of abundance passed, there was a great famine. Before long, it spread to the whole of the land and the people begged the Pharaoh for bread. He told them to go to Joseph, who was able to ration the grain he had kept guarded throughout the cities for seven years, saving them all from starvation.

Touted as the richest man in the world, Mexico’s Carlos Slim’s main principle is that his companies’ profits go back into their operation. He looks for ways to reinvest in order to nurture his businesses for the future, rather than strip them of their assets the second there is a return. Using the Bible’s feast/famine analogy, he says, “When there are good times, capitalize strongly and accelerate the growth, and in the bad times, you don’t need to make layoffs, because you’re working with what you need… In the years of the fat cows, business needs to capitalize and accelerate development, so in the years of the starving cows, you don’t lay off people. You’ve already created the wealth and the surplus for these starving cows. You will grow, because you have the grain.”¹

One of my main priorities when I began my career was to heed my grandfather’s advice—never to spend beyond my means and to save enough money to enable me to live comfortably for at least a year, and always be prepared.

But I was not so well prepared when it came to dealing with Gloria’s emotional side. We had fights on things unbeknownst to me. Other times everything was perfect. Just like a box of chocolates—you never knew what you were going to get!

Then one day Gloria came home and said that she was expecting. We were happy and scared, and I proceeded to start looking for a house that our baby could come home to. I was determined not to obtain a mortgage because I didn’t want to be dependent on a bank. Finally I found a house under construction in Ft. Lauderdale that I could afford. I met the builder, made changes and bought the house. It was completed in time for us to move in prior to the birth of Luis on September 10, 1970.

A boy being born in the family was a big deal all round. It was the first boy in Gloria’s family of five girls and for my parents, well, it was another set of balls.

Everyone was happy.

Poor Luis had been born face first and I have to admit that even being a father couldn’t blind me to the fact that he was not an attractive newborn. To our relief, soon enough he grew into a beautiful toddler, skinny with a head full of blond locks, a big smile and huge adorable eyes. Having a child was the greatest experience in our lives. Grandmother Minina always came to the rescue, and when we traveled she would move into our house to look after Luis.

After our son was born Gloria’s showed signs of what I thought to be post-childbirth depression. It was a trying time in our relationship and I became increasingly friendlier with my neighbors. There were plenty of libations next door. Daiquiris with copious splashes of Cointreau provided the perfect escape, so I carried on drinking until we were knocked out. Big headaches ensued, but I made it to my construction job at the break of dawn each day, and fortuitously it just so happened that my neighbor was a banker. Through my drinking companion, I was able to borrow more money for my business than my father-in-law was able to borrow personally against the Bacardi name!

Luis grew up in Ft. Lauderdale with a Central American nanny who only spoke Spanish. We wanted him to be bilingual but one day the school principal called us in to tell us Luis was behind in class because he was struggling with his English. While they were learning the letters of the alphabet, the kids would see a dog and answer “d” while he would say “p” for perro, so we concentrated solely on teaching him English until he could master that language first.

Luis loved water and was not afraid of it even before he learned how to swim. We had a pool in the backyard, which he spontaneously jumped into on more than one occasion—thank God with someone around to pull him out. One time, he cycled straight into the pool on his tricycle and sunk straight to the bottom. I sprinted over fully clothed and dove in to pull him out. He emerged totally unaffected with a huge smile on his face while I almost had a heart attack. The pool got a fence that week.

I used to play all kinds of sports with him but he wasn’t really into it, so we stopped. He did what was expected of him; he joined Little League baseball, tennis clubs and classes, swimming teams—the norm—but it wasn’t really his forte.

In lower school he was falsely diagnosed as having attention deficit disorder. Ridiculously, it was in fashion at the time and an excuse for the education system to make more money and deflect the problem from the poor quality of the teachers to my child, who was being bored to tears during class.

After many psychologists, specialists and other professional consultations, Luis seemed to be miraculously cured.

His grades picked up and he was excited about the courses that he had chosen. We were told the disease had disappeared, which could have been the case—or maybe we had finally found a specialist who was honest enough to tell us that there was nothing wrong.

We had our little girl, Jenny, after we moved to another new house, this time built by yours truly. It was a big house, finally exceeding my parents’ and father-in-law’s homes, on 3609 37th Drive, Ft. Lauderdale, very close to the club where I played tennis. I was on a roll, making plenty of money. My wife had a looming inheritance, so I didn’t bother to follow my grandfather’s advice and save for a rainy day, instead deciding to live very comfortably in the moment.

Our daughter Jenny was a gift from heaven. She was stunning from the get go, always smiling with adorable fat dimples denting her face. My wife use to spend hours on end cradling the baby girl or sleeping with her in her arms. It looked like an image from an ecclesiastical stained-glass window, and I couldn’t help but watch them, mesmerized for hours.

Luis got jealous that he was being robbed of attention and used to bug the hell out of his baby sister, poking her and hitting her. Even though he was the savvier toddler, Jenny knew exactly how to retaliate, making a huge scandal out of nothing so that we would race over and punish Luis for bullying a girl.

Jenny got the hang of things really quickly and the second she saw Luis, she would start screaming and we would obligingly yell at him. He didn’t stand a chance at so much as looking at her without being reprimanded. That is until I caught Jenny in the act and stopped responding every time she cried wolf. She was already a survivor in the early days.

Jenny was a happy-go-lucky kid. The first time we took her to the school bus stop, she didn’t even turn around to say bye; she jumped straight into the bus and went off to school to enjoy the new experience, leaving us heartbroken—at least until she came back that afternoon.

Jenny was very competitive with her brother as he was the apple of his mother’s eye, and she took it upon herself to put up a decent fight. Jenny was different from Luis in that she was very outgoing and befriended everyone. I used to come home late in the afternoons to get changed before going to play tennis. On many occasions she would look out to the front driveway from her room on the top floor of the house and open the window to tell me that it was not a good time to come home.

Miami was less forthcoming than Ft. Lauderdale. We practically had to get down on our hands and knees and beg to get our kids into a decent school. Even though Florida was swarming with Cubans, we were looked down upon by the established Miami community and had to pull every string we had to get the kids into the schools, be allowed to join the clubs and be invited to the “in” events of the town. Being part of the Bacardi clan certainly helped as we were affiliated with wealth and acceptance. I was probably the only Cuban to join The Young Presidents Organization and forced my way into the Riviera Country Club; the kids made it into St. Stephen Episcopal, Ramson Everglades and Gulliver Academy—home runs in all.

I was a workaholic and barely had a second to catch up with the kids. Every night when I could be there, I insisted on having a sit-down family dinner in our main dining room, so that I could be filled in on their goings on.

Even though we endured bad days, Gloria and I had plenty of good times in which we talked endlessly about our dreams for the future; we traveled to the Caribbean, Europe, Hawaii, Japan and Hong Kong and had the time of our lives. We spent a great deal of time moving and redecorating our houses and, as it was the era of antiques, we joined the herd and formed an impressive collection.

With fights being volatile, underneath it all I loved her and she did me, which made the down side of our marriage manageable.

When the partners at the construction company I was employed by at the time (my uncle Jorge and Felix Granado) had a disagreement, the whole business fell apart, but by then I had enough experience under my belt to start a general contractor venture of my own. I had all the contacts and resources to construct a building, but there were a lot of people like me around—with similar skills and often more experience. What would make a potential client choose me over someone else?

I knew I had to find a niche that would make me stand out from others in the same playing field. As a general contractor, I was responsible for hiring subcontractors who specialize in each component of the construction process, such as the framing, masonry, carpentry, plumbing and electrical wiring. Each major subcontractor takes a 15-20% commission, so if I could offer a specialized service in-house, as well as managing the overall project, I could keep the extra commission.

As building the structure is the first step of the construction process, I figured that concrete formwork was the business I should be in. That way I’d be first in, first out, and, unlike the end of the project where budgets have been blown and checks start bouncing, I would almost be guaranteed a payday. Doing the job well also meant having the advantage of speeding up our construction process and providing our service to other general contractors and developers, charging them the commission, and adding at least 30% of the formwork budget to our bottom line.

The only problem was that I had no experience in formwork, but that was easily solvable. I recruited Roland Corneau, a man who had done a good job overseeing the formwork on a prior project of mine. I made him a partner, gave him a big stake of the profits, and sure enough we were in business.