CHAPTER

3

When I married into the Bacardi family, I had no idea that I was diving headfirst into a tangled network of drama that would make Latin America’s telenovelas seem disappointingly insipid in comparison. The complicated Bacardi history that I was up against dates back as far as 1862 when the company was founded by a Catalan immigrant, Don Facundo Bacardi Massó, in Santiago de Cuba.

By 1919, his company was growing so rapidly that Don Facundo’s sons decided to establish Bacardi as a stock corporation, with Emilio and Facundo Bacardi Moreau taking a third each. However, the company’s rapid expansion took a toll on its finances, so their sister Amalia’s husband, Enrique Schueg, was invited to participate in the business in exchange for investing a third of the stake. It would one day be worth millions.

Ever since its inception Bacardi has remained a family run business—although nearly a century later the distribution of shares is impossibly complicated. Since the company had been divided among Don Facundo’s children, an underlying hostility towards the Schueg branch of the family flourished as there was a consensus that Enrique had married into the family and therefore he and his descendants were not as deserving of the family fortune as the other lineages. Ironically, and even more infuriating to the rest of the family, Enrique Schueg would go on to run the company for nearly half a century before handing the reins over to his son-inlaw, another Schueg, in 1934.

Jose M. (Pepin) Bosch was a young Cuban banker who masterminded the company’s ongoing expansion during his forty-year reign of the company. He almost single-handedly saved them from losing the entire family fortune when communism stripped Cuban business owners of their assets in the wake of the revolution in 1959.

When Fidel Castro was on a mission to win a revolution, there were no lengths to which he would not go. Nobody was sanctified, no matter how close to him they were. Castro strategically charmed his supporters, businessmen and bankers but was not obliged to be loyal to anyone once they had served his needs. He lured investors to donate their own capital to his revolution, which they willingly did, convincing them that it would stimulate the economy and develop business opportunities for their benefit.

The Bacardi family was one of Castro’s many wealthy and effective supporters. Amongst the contributions given to him by the family, Pepin Bosch admitted to donating $38,500 of his own money to aid Castro’s “Crusade to Freedom,” dedicating Bacardi advertising space to promote Castro’s revolution, and using his political allegiances to strengthen Castro’s fragile relations with the U.S.

However, once Castro no longer needed them, he dispossessed his former loyalists of their assets and nationalized their businesses.

If Pepin Bosch hadn’t taken precautionary measures to protect Bacardi from Castro’s predecessor, Batista, Bacardi’s future would most likely have taken a very different path. In 1956, while Bosch and his wife were on a trip to Mexico, Batista had his son, Lindy, arrested and detained in the Moncada Barracks for three days during a worker’s strike in Santiago, an ominous warning that it was only a matter of time before the military dictator came down on him.

Bosch reconstituted the company, Compañia Ron Bacardi, S.A., into a multinational corporation and mailed the trademark certificates, one by one, to the New York based company he had recently founded—just in the nick of time. Once Castro came to power in January 1959, it took him less than a year to nationalize Bacardi and attempt to seize all the family’s assets.

Had Bosch not had the foresight to sneak the company’s intellectual property out of the country and establish separate legal entities, the Bacardi family would have fallen victim to the same bleak destiny as nearly all the other privately owned companies in Cuba. It wasn’t until the ’90s that their closest Cuban rivals, the Arechabalas, were finally able to reclaim the residual rights to their rum company, Havana Club, which they then sold to Bacardi shortly after.

Ironically, the Bacardis’ wealth inflated after the family was compelled to leave the country, so they partially have Castro to thank for forcing them to branch out of Cuba and market their products globally. However, Bosch was the one pulling all the strings and once his reign came to an end, the tight-knit company structure began to fall apart at the seams.

Pepin Bosch’s wife, Enriqueta Schueg, was the linchpin in settling family politics and her husband heavily relied on her to handle that side of the business, which he had little time for or interest in. When Bosch was seventy-seven years old in 1975, Enriqueta died and the time came for him to name the next patriarch, but as their two sons weren’t fit candidates, Bosch decided he needed to hire an outside professional.

When news of his quest for an extraneous successor reached the pureblood Bacardis, there was a backlash. Having kept the company within the family for over a century, the clan unanimously decided that there was no alternative but to keep the crown in the family, even if it was by marriage.

In desperation, another Schueg, Edwin Nielsen, was elected chairman. Ed Nielsen was Enrique Schueg’s daughter’s son, and given the engrained patriarchal mindset of the Hispanic family, he may as well have been an escaped convict. Furthermore, Ed’s position was doomed from the start as it would take years for the Bacardi empire to be controlled with as equal autonomy as Pepin Bosch—or Don Facundo Bacardi Massó and Enrique Schueg before him.

While Bosch reigned over the company, his autonomy was virtually unchallenged because only he and his lawyers could understand the intricate, tangled structure of the five, self-governing Bacardi subsidiaries they had set up across the Americas. However, by the time my father-in-law, Ed Nielsen, inherited the position, the company structure was so dispersed, it was almost impossible to make any unanimous decisions across the board.

At the time Ed was struggling to lead Bacardi, I had become a partner in my father and uncle’s construction business, and even though none of us were seeing eye-to-eye, I felt too guilty to walk away from my father. Tension between all of us was rampant and the company bore the brunt of Uncle Jorge’s uncompromising mindset. He had always viewed himself as the older, more experienced brother and, even though they had both worked in construction with my grandfather back in Cuba, he argued that he had worked for their father longer and was therefore the one in command.

Uncle Jorge was so hung up on Cuban high society that he would always compare situations, saying, “back in Cuba, when I did this, or it’s just like when I did that and…” Nobody could really associate with what he was talking about because Cuba was so removed from our periphery by then.

Uncle Jorge needed to feel that he was in control, so when I brought in lucrative business opportunities, he shut them down for the sake of having the final say. He would much rather stick to the confines of smaller undertakings in order to retain full ownership than invest in a potential cash cow that would require us to partner with others. He was paralyzed with stubbornness and once he made up his mind, the issue was not up for debate. My father was an amicable and business-savvy man, but he didn’t want to be disloyal to his brother, so each of us forged ahead, turning a blind eye to the friction that we were clearly all sensing.

But it was clear that my uncle was impeding the company’s expansion and there was nowhere for us to grow. I was afraid to confront my father, and I suspected it wouldn’t achieve anything anyway, so each of us kept our mouths zipped, waiting for a miracle to somehow pierce through the stagnation.

My chance to escape finally came along in 1979 when my father in law approached me with a business opportunity. Ed had struggled to maintain a stronghold on his position as Chairman of the Board and needed me to manage the situation. He knew he could trust me and if I were running the company operations under his command, he could focus his energy on unifying the company’s fragmented course.

Ed had recently sunk millions of dollars of the company’s money into bad investments, which proved to be a humiliating disaster and poured gasoline on the family’s already scorching scrutiny of his leadership. Ed desperately needed to employ an ally to manage the company while he attended to the family politics, but he had no sons and five daughters, none of whom showed the slightest interest in working professionally for a living. I saw the chance to work at such a prestigious corporation as a clear exit out of my own complicated family politics, as well as an invitation to escape the confines of the construction industry altogether. It was the perfect opportunity to discover a world I feared I might never otherwise be privy to—and avoid hurting my father’s feelings.

The clincher was that my father and uncle were looking for capital for their new ventures and Ed promised that, if I left my family business, he and his clan would provide them with the financial capital they needed to invest in some land they had found that they wanted to buy and develop. It was a no-lose situation from all perspectives and, with hindsight, thank God I took that leap.

We moved to Coral Gables, Florida, where I had been brought up and my wife’s family lived. I built my dream house from scratch, which by the time it was finished resembled a Japanese pagoda. I obtained the first license for a copper roof in the town’s history, and the house was made up of four modules, with each structure joined by a passageway and a huge swimming pool in the middle. It looked like the water entered the house via small canals with the most beautiful view, overlooking the Coral Gables Golf Club and the Biltmore Hotel in the distance. I got a ridiculously petty sense of satisfaction knowing that the entire Bacardi family was envious! With my construction experience, it was a bargain, costing me $800,000, including the lot it was built on, and I sold it about 11 years later for $1.5 million—in a down market. It is still a landmark.

At Bacardi I was willing to accept a fraction of my previous paycheck because I saw the unlimited future prospects that the job would be opening the door to. I was secretly also relying on the future revenues from my family’s construction business that I had kept a stake in, and the fact that one day my wife would have an inheritance for us to fall back on.

But after I left, I watched my Utopian future swirl down the drain. Having wasted the best part of a decade defending his brother to me, as soon as I resigned, Uncle Jorge had the nerve to ask me to sell him my stake in the business and screw my father out of their 50/50 partnership. My father finally discovered he had a voice after all and the construction business disintegrated within a year and a half.

At that point, my relationship with my father was back to the way it was when I went off to college. He distanced himself from me again and in some ways I think he saw my move to Bacardi as disloyal to him and the family. Our relationship only improved when he saw me succeed and provide for him and my mother in his later years when he was not as affluent financially.

The stake I still had in the company—and was relying on—was now worthless, making me wonder why I had bothered to remain loyal to them for so long in the first place. It was apparent that I had been the float buoying the sinking ship, and I probably should have had the courage to put us all out of our misery much sooner. I learned a valuable lesson that life is too transient to constantly tiptoe around others. Base decisions on what is best for you, while curtailing any potential damage to the extent you are able to.

I was oblivious to most of the Bacardi family politics, probably because I was so grateful to have escaped my own. I certainly had no idea that I would be fighting a losing battle against over a century of accrued family hostility or that over time a large portion of it would be directed at me—Ed had monkey-wrenched me into the Bacardis’ company just when the Schuegs’ reign of their precious legacy appeared to be finally coming to a very welcomed end.

On my first day, I was told that I would be the assistant to the president and chief executive officer of Bacardi Imports, William A. Walker—a demotion after running my own company for almost ten years—but it made sense as I needed to learn the ropes from the ground up. However, my new boss, Bill, had no idea what to do with me and did a very bad job of disguising the fact that he wanted to keep me (his boss’s son-in-law) as far removed from his business as possible.

Trying to learn anything from Bill was like sucking blood out of a stone. If I wanted to know about any of his business decisions, or lack thereof, I had to snoop. And so it came as no surprise when he put two and two together, realizing my construction background, and came up with a plan to ship me off to the building management department so that I would have as little opportunity to interfere with his goings on as possible. Being a building manager involved mind-numbingly menial tasks such as administration, accounting and staff reporting.

When Bill proposed to me, “Why don’t you be the building manager,” all the anxieties I had spent the last ten years overcoming rushed through my pores like an allergic reaction. Had I just made a huge mistake leaving the security of my family’s construction business to manage a building? If someone thought that my being married to the chairman’s daughter would shoehorn me into the top echelon of the company, it was a delusion.

To further exacerbate my predicament, with my father and uncle’s construction business disintegrating shortly after I left, I was devoid of the additional revenue I had been relying on, and my wife’s stipend of about $200 a month from her trust was about as comforting as a dental chair. However, regardless of how underutilized and deflated I felt, I tried to make the most of the situation. During that period I spent a great deal of time learning from my father-in-law’s experiences and complaining bitterly about my job. Even though I moaned along the way, I absorbed what was going on around me and pushed my way through almost any door with the slightest opening. My inquisitive nature raised a lot of eyebrows in an insular company set in its old-school ways. I analyzed every operation I had managed to find out about and wanted to know the rationale behind the way things were being done, which was usually as extensive as, “That’s the way it has always been done.”

Since a promotion wasn’t about to be handed to me on a plate, I took my future into my own hands and created a role for myself within the company. I asked to take over the new wine division—an investment most of the people at Bacardi had already written off, which, at the very least, meant I wouldn’t be stepping on anybody else’s toes.

In his vain attempts to branch out of the rum business, Ed had purchased a wine import company called Dennis & Huppert. His strategy behind the acquisition was that it would open a door into the cliquey wine distribution network. However, the deal was yet another huge mistake because a brand name was required in order to be accepted into the wine industry and Dennis & Huppert’s name recognition value was worthless.

The wine company idea in itself was not a bad one and there was definitely a future in the wine business, but the product line and inventory it came with, such as German estate wines and second-tier Bordeaux and Burgundy products, were very difficult to sell and nobody at Bacardi had the foggiest idea what to do with it. After six months of building-management drudgery, I was more than ready for the challenge.

Even though running the wine division wasn’t my ultimate ambition, it was the same concept as running the rum business but on a smaller scale and catered to a more niche market. I had had success in niche-marketing before in the construction business, and was quick to realize it would give me the opportunity to learn the ins and outs of the distribution business and make allegiances with the liquor distributors and sales representatives, whom I would then be able to call upon in the future.

I saw my window to become the knight-in-shining-armor and asked for the responsibility of marketing these new products. Luckily, Bill seized his chance to get me out of his hair. It would have been a serious achievement to do any worse than they already had by buying the albatross of a company in the first place. No one at Bacardi would touch it with a ten-foot barge pole for fear of putting their job on the line. The wine division had been incorporated in 1974 and when I came on it was still running at a loss. As far as Bill was concerned, working in the wine subsidiary would distract me from his business and buy him a few more years procrastinating in his top-level position. With any luck, I would shoot myself in the foot in the process, without even a nudge.

Bill and the other executives at Bacardi took their “market research” duties very seriously. At lunchtime, employees had a drink at the upstairs bar in the office before having lunch at Mike Gordon Seafood Restaurant. They would frequent bars under the pretext of researching what customers were drinking and whether or not they were pouring Bacardi into the rum cocktails as opposed to another brand. Most afternoons were therefore a write-off.

By learning from others’ mistakes, I realized that in order to get ahead I couldn’t drink much at lunchtime. I have drunk consistently all my life in moderation, except for a particulary trying period. I have barely been inebriated since my college days and pretty much only drink at social events. Even when I worked for the liquor company, my drinking would be limited to maybe one weak Bacardi on the rocks and after that I would switch to water with ice and a slice of lemon, giving people the impression that I was still drinking Bacardi—and had a bionic tolerance for liquor.

I didn’t feel like being the only sober one at the party was a sacrifice because I noticed that I was staying focused on moving the company forward and getting results.

I put my spare time to good use, and while some work colleagues were nursing their drinks, I served food to the homeless in Overtown, a poor Miami neighborhood. I took food to the local soup kitchen run by Mother Teresa’s nuns every week for two years, and soon became the most popular man in town—especially on Fridays when everyone at Bacardi was suspiciously keen to promote Bacardi drinks, leaving almost the entire kitchen full of leftovers at my disposal.

It didn’t take much before I was awarded the title President and CEO of Dennis & Huppert, Bacardi Wine Division, which sounded very grand if one didn’t know the reality of its assets.

My first step was to assess the inventory and decide what to do with it. The stock consisted solely of fine wines, and I recognized that they were not a good fit for the mass-market brand we were expert in selling. The fine-wine business is a specialty market that is difficult to crack and Dennis & Huppert did not have the prestige or high-quality product to match the prices it was demanding.

It took some time to put my plan together and getting it approved was like using a fork to push spaghetti up a mountain. The bureaucratic company moved very slowly, and, at that time, they were even more painstakingly cautious than usual, having suffered one disastrous decision after the next in the preceding years.

My main priority was to figure out what to do with the company. I knew less about wine than BP knows about plugging oil spills, so I called for reinforcements. I raised all kinds of hell at Bacardi in order to get any support from them and ultimately they agreed to have the Bacardi sales and marketing teams report directly to me on this undertaking. Then I brought in professionals from outside the company to help oversee them. I also hired wine experts to value the inventory we had and advise me on how best to get rid of it—using any means possible, short of vaporization.

I flew from country to country, visiting suppliers and getting rid of any surplus I could. In Germany, I met with a major supplier who had excess inventory of our wines. There, we conducted tastings with Michael Broadbent, the renowned head of Christie’s Wine Department in London. He tried most of the German boutique wines we had and mercifully agreed to sell them at an auction that year, on our behalf.

Christie’s would not touch the Burgundy so I had to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to sell it. I went through the same process in France with a Burgundy supplier, who also had excess stock of our wine that was impossible to sell. We ended up negotiating with the supplier, asking him to produce a cheaper line of wines for us, which we called Le Papillon de la Reine, and we exchanged that for the inventory he was already holding for us. As we couldn’t give the wine away in the U.S., it was probably the only option for everyone to make the best out of a hopeless situation.

In Germany we bought stock from a household German wine brand called Kupferberg, which specialized in sparkling wine or “sekt,” and distributed it in the U.S. We also tapped into the Italian market, exploiting the increasing popularity of Pinot Grigio in the States. A New York-based distributor saw a great opportunity in selling the Collavini wine from Northern Italy and asked me to research it. I flew to Umbria, Italy, to meet the head of the family-run company, Manlio Collavini, and we struck up a deal to start distributing a Pinot Grigio and two other wines under the Collavini label, that ended up selling like hot cakes.

Now that I had gotten rid of most of the inventory and had developed relationships with the European suppliers, I knew that in order to prove my worth at the company, I had to go one step further. I returned to the U.S. and hit the streets, becoming acquainted with our distributors. The company already had established relationships and by introducing myself as the chairman’s son-in-law, I had their ears from the get-go. It was definitely a foot in the door but I would have to go above and beyond that in order to win them over in the long term. I set off to travel across the country to meet the major distributors, laboriously calling each of the remaining 200, or sending our sales force on a carefully defined mission to charm them.

On my escapades all over the U.S. and Europe, I sucked up as much knowledge and tips as our distributors and suppliers could offer. I knew what was selling, the trends and the demands, and by collaborating with my new allies to assess and break down what made the other companies they worked with thrive, I eventually figured out how I could make the wine company work, by having a much simpler, defined strategy. I developed minimalist, consumer-friendly labels from scratch, reducing the product lines to two handfuls of products. We had wines from Bordeaux, Chile, Italy, Burgundy and Germany but none of them brought any value to the distributors who could go to those countries and buy the fine wines themselves. We were just acting as a superfluous middleman, so I recommended that we disband the company and fold the brands with volume potential into Bacardi imports.

We created a new brand, Papillon, an umbrella for mass-market white, red and rosé lines, and Grandin, which was the name of our sparkling wine. Instead of alienating our target consumers by presenting them with expensive, specialty vintages they were not acquainted with and could not afford, the wine would be inexpensive with a consistent high quality they could rely on year after year, and packaging and marketing they would not be ashamed to buy.

The Papillon (which stemmed from Le Papillon de La Reine) and Grandin labels were Dennis & Huppert’s concept, but we gradually fazed out any association with the D&H brand on the actual products as it was only harming sales. Instead, we commissioned local French suppliers or brokers to buy inexpensive wine on our behalf, which they would blend and package with our label before shipping it to us in the U.S. That way we knew we were getting a good deal and could guarantee our customers the high quality they required in order to remain loyal to our new brands.

I ensured that the sales team was motivated by saying that this was only the beginning of new products coming their way and an opportunity to be more effective with their distributors. And the distributors were so relieved not to be encumbered with selling the boutique wine Bacardi had previously acquired that they began marketing these consumer-friendly wines with heightened ebullience.

Supported by a full-on publicity and marketing campaign, the sales picked up, and I became Mr. Popular within the organization and was known as the turn-around kid. The results were phenomenal. After many battles, we brought in Don Emilio Tequila and O’Darby Irish Cream liquor, which sold 100,000 cases. Papillon table wine sold 350,000 cases in 1985 and was the fifth in sales in all wine brands in the U.S. market, plus we were selling 100,000 cases of the sparkling wine a year. The distributors were happy and the company could not believe what I had achieved.

As well as making the company a profit, succeeding in the wine industry garnered us the reputation of being able to market and sell products besides Bacardi Rum. By initiating a clear diversification strategy that would both prove my value to the company and start shifting Bacardi in line with 20th Century business tactics, I had almost unwittingly fired the first shot of a revolution. A few years later, the Italian multinational alcoholic beverage company, Martini & Rossi, would reach out to us to be the sole distributor of Martini & Rossi’s vermouths and Asti Spumante, which was selling in excess of one million cases per year.

Having shed the company’s albatross, I decided to strike while the iron was hot. Bill Walker had been in the same position for a long time, and I was coming from a position of strength. I took a three-month crash course in advertising and marketing at Stanford to add the icing on the cake and plucked up the courage to ask for a promotion. I wanted to be incorporated into the mainstream division of the business, and as the company was looking for new blood to sustain its marketing and sales efforts, I knew that my demands weren’t too unrealistic.

I didn’t get what I wanted immediately but I was promoted to general manager of the company and then I was made Vice President and COO of Bacardi Imports shortly thereafter. I think Ed was looking for an excuse to push me up the company ranks and when I delivered with the wine company there was nothing preventing him. Two years later, in 1984, Bill retired and I became the President and CEO of Bacardi Imports, taking over the day- to-day operations of the company.

When I look back on my rise through the ranks in Bacardi, there were several philosophies I adopted and utilized while making my way through that uncharted territory of my early career. Some were the products of my natural business sense put into action or were lessons I learned by trial and error, others I gleaned from interactions with successful businessmen around the globe.

First, I learned to absorb everything. I was constantly on the lookout for ways to move up the food chain and create my own empires. You must learn everything in all areas in your work environment and always be on your toes, challenging yourself to know and do more. If you work at a low position in an office and are tired of working underneath your boss, learn everything about the job that you can and think of it as training for your own business. Do your best at even the most trivial chores and make yourself indispensable.

Try to learn what people in the other departments are doing and get a full grasp of what your company’s objective is. If you know how to do someone else’s job as well as your own, you are opening yourself up to more opportunities rather than limiting yourself to the same stagnant job for the rest of your life.

Even if you continue working for someone else, keep looking for ways to gain more autonomy. Prowl for bigger opportunities and take on more responsibility if it is available to you. Be in an environment that constantly enables you to learn, improve and progress, and disdain everything that impinges on your mobility and independence.

As tempting as it is, don’t succumb to the security of a regular paycheck. If you can’t expand within your job, find other ways to learn skills. You could be working anywhere from McDonald’s to Morgan Stanley to pay the rent but use every spare minute, at night or on weekends, to study or take on an apprenticeship. Find a way to work towards something that serves a long-term purpose.

One vital trait I developed in my business learning curve was connecting to my market and being ready to change accordingly. As Michael Leboeuf, respected author of eight successful business books, says, “Every company’s greatest assets are its customers, because without customers there is no company.”

There is no source of competitive advantage stronger than a continuous stream of delighted customers. A true entrepreneur intimately knows his customers—what pain they experience, how they buy, why they buy, what problems they face and why, and what solutions they might need. Don’t try to give your customers lemonade when they want water—or repackage it as juice when all they still want is just plain water.

The often-quoted example is the story about dog food that isn’t selling: At a meeting where members of the headquarters staff are trying to determine why the dog food isn’t selling, various reasons for the lack of business are presented.

One bureaucrat says it’s poor packaging; another names bad advertising. All kinds of imagined weaknesses are suggested. Finally, someone who has been out in the market points out that the real reason why the dog food isn’t selling is simply that dogs don’t like it. The market is the best source of information. Ask your customer what his or her priorities are and then prioritize your actions according to the customers’ needs. Getting feedback from your customers on a regular basis is effective and cost efficient, even if you do have to invest the extra expenses upfront.

Identify who your customers are and use any means possible to connect with them. Listen to what they want instead of giving them what you assume they want. Change before they do and supply them with what they are looking for before they’ve even started looking for it. Deep down, the customer already knows what he or she wants even if they don’t know what exactly it is. It’s our job to give it to them.

If you put in the groundwork and analyze your target market as well as your competition with the precision Napoleon used to study his military ranks—and his enemies’—your customers will believe your product was made especially for them and will keep coming back for more.

These valuable business management and personal development tools not only served me well at Bacardi but also became the standbys of my career survival when fate dealt my future a new hand.

While I was striving to build my career, Gloria and I had settled into the routine of family life and raising children. It was a time of prosperity and plenty and I was proud of the fact that even though Gloria came from one of the wealthiest families in Florida, I paid for everything, saving her money for God-knows-what I thought we might one day use it for.

I was working so many hours, that if my kids called me at work, no matter what I was doing, they were to be transferred through. I regretted having to spend so much time in the office but I made sure I was there to listen.

Jenny loved to call me at work and tell me about her day in school or to just gossip and I lived to witness her vying for my attention. When I went running in the afternoon, the kids would follow me on their bikes and, between our calls, dinners and my daily exercise I tried to offer them as much advice as I could.

When Luis Jr. got a bit older he was into BMX biking and would practice on the golf course behind the house. He would jump the sand dunes, always managing to clear them, so I figured I could too. I’ve always thought of myself as a badass and one evening I demanded to have a go. The kids warned me against it but I wanted to show them what their father was capable of.

I jumped the sand dune and landed straight on my shoulder while the bike flew off in the opposite direction. I was in so much pain that I could barely see straight, with contractions shooting through my shoulder, but I had to try and stumble home to my wife so she could take me to the hospital, but she refused. The kids were crying and I could barely see straight. I had to beg my neighbor, Mr. Martin, to drive me to the hospital where they clicked it back into place and had me in a sling for two months.

Miami in the ’80s was tough and dangerous. The news media was constantly relaying stories of people getting attacked at home or on the road and the ex-FBI adviser to our Bacardi executives advised us to take precautionary measures and arm ourselves if we knew how to manage a gun.

I did, so I bought a .38 revolver and carried it around with me everywhere. After two years of carrying the gun without cleaning it or changing the bullets, I heard noises outside the house and crept down, gun at hand, to find nothing. The next day I went to the firing range with my son to practice shooting my .38 in case I should actually need it one of these days. I aimed for the target and checked to see if I’d hit the bull’s eye. My son was laughing hysterically while I obliviously searched for the non-existent holes I thought I’d made. He had witnessed all six bullets fall out of the gun and land three feet in front of us. We laughed, imagining what would have happened if the noise the previous night had actually come from an intruder.

Luis Jr. was a strange teenager; he loved to dress in black from head to toe and wore an earring. He had very long hair, which looked like it had been spiked with an entire bottle of gel to defy gravity. When he was on the brink of being a teenager, he grew his hair down to his waist. Luis and his best friend Scott were glued at the hip and spent hours dressing up to go out. They often had dinner with me and put me to bed before hitting the streets. They wouldn’t leave the house until after midnight, saying that nothing opened before then. One day, I came out of my bedroom and saw a figure resembling the Crow coming down the stairs, dressed in a long black coat and dead-straight, pitch-black hair. I nearly had a heart attack as I thought it was a burglar. We had plenty of invaders wandering around the house, mainly renegades Luis collected around town.

I used to be terrified of where he was heading but I knew that if I fought him on whom he hung out with and how he dressed, he would run a mile, so I bit my tongue. After all, I’d brought back every reprobate in Cuba when I was growing up. We remained close enough for me to feel comfortable that he was being open with me and it was just a phase he would grow out—with any luck.

Scott practically squatted at our house for Luis’ entire childhood and it was like having an extra son. The two boys reminded me of the odd couple. Luis was strong, tall, good-looking and masculine, while Scott was tender and could almost have passed for a girl. Luis was attached to him and felt responsible for his wellbeing, so we took him in as part of the family.

Luis Jr. decided to go away for the first year of high school, no doubt to escape his parents’ destructive marriage. We thought it would be best for him to attend Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts as Gloria’s father had gone there and it was a reputable school. I thought it was smart of Luis to leave. I would have too if I’d been in his situation. He was mature enough to take care of himself and I’m sure staying at home would have scarred him for life.

It was never the same after he left; the physical distance put a huge barrier in our relationship and I never felt that we were as close as we were when we lived together. I really missed him and a big part of my life had been taken away when he went to Deerfield.

He did well in school and after four years he got into Tufts University to study liberal arts and then premed. He didn’t get into med school the first time around, so he did a masters degree in biology and then reapplied successfully to Tufts Medical School at the New England Medical Center. He did his residency at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami and moved there indefinitely to set up his own practice as a pulmonologist, while working in various local hospitals’ intensive care units.

Luis met Leah, who’s now a doctor too, in medical school and got married shortly after. They have three children: Gabriel is thirteen, Nicolas is nine and Elise is seven.

Even though he insisted that he didn’t want to be a workaholic like me, he has turned out to be a very responsible doctor, with his own prosperous practice, and ironically, he probably works harder than I ever have.

In the past few years I have been spending more quality time with Luis than I did when he was growing up. Visiting him and his wife and children feels like coming home.

After her junior year in high school, Jenny decided that she also wanted to go to Deerfield Academy to compete with her brother and follow in her grandfather Ed Nielsen’s footsteps. It was the first year the school had become coed, so she jumped at the opportunity and thrived there. Jenny was great at softball, tennis and swimming, gloating about it shamelessly.

She was close to my father and it touched both of us to see her thrive at softball, although I was a little riled when she sided with my father, supporting the Red Sox over the Yankees. My fourth brother Carlos’ son, Carlitos, has also continued our family’s baseball legacy, and as a budding pitcher and batter, he reminds me of myself when I was younger as he can also play almost any position on the team. Carlitos goes to public high school in North Palm Beach, playing with all the tough guys, so we have high hopes for him.

Jenny got good enough results to get accepted into Williams, a liberal arts college in Massachusetts, but something happened at Williams. Maybe it was the changes in our lives, but shortly after she finished her degree, Jenny retreated to Stowe, Vermont.

Years prior, we had purchased an old, abandoned house from the 1780s there as a holiday getaway to escape the heat of Miami. There were plenty of antique shops to keep us busy and the children could play around freely. It was so safe that when you popped into the coffee shop you could leave the key in the ignition with the car running. So, Jenny was familiar with the area when she chose to return. She must have had happy memories there.

Later on when my career changed and we found ourselves away from the kids, we wanted them to have secure home bases, so we bought Luis Jr. a pad in Boston, but Jennifer insisted on staying in Vermont. She wanted to distance herself from the turbulent city life her mother and I were leading and, much to our horror, take up full-time residence in small-town America.

We bought Jennifer a house in Vermont in 1988. The woman who sold it to her couldn’t find the front door key because she hadn’t locked it in thirty years. Where Jenny lives now, you can see the stars very clearly as there are no city lights, and she has her own private zoo in the backyard with a moose and turkeys and other wild animals wandering around.

Jennifer loves the intimacy of knowing all the locals, so much so in fact that she married one of them. She eloped for her first wedding, only afterwards telling us she’d done so. They had a daughter, Isabel, but unfortunately the marriage didn’t work out.

For her second marriage, Jennifer decided she wanted a traditional, pull-out-all-the stops wedding. I picked up from where I’d left off decades prior and we learned how to partner dance. For the bride’s first dance, I spun her around to Michael Bublé’s “Save the Last Dance for Me,” but it was a challenge as she kept trying to lead. I think I surprised the entire room by being able to dance. I didn’t let on that back in the day I’d had years of dance classes in an attempt to improve my sex life.

Jenny was brought up by a series of nannies and a mother who needed to drink six cups of coffee a day without knowing how to make one, and as a result she’s made a conscious effort to live an uncomplicated, low-maintenance life. She’s very independent, refusing to accept help from us unless she’s in dire straits and my efforts to persuade her to leave behind her life in the middle of nowhere have been futile. Instead, my ferocious little chick and her adorable daughter, Isabel, stubbornly stayed put. She divorced again and is now a teacher in the local town.

Throughout the kids’childhood we lived more comfortably than I could have ever imagined, in our dream house, with a huge holiday home in Vermont and a weekend apartment on Singer Island, a two-hour car ride from Miami.

Why not? My wife was an heiress, I had a secure income and, as far as I was concerned, I was invincible. Little did I know that the years of abundance would come to an abrupt end in the not-too-distant, but unforeseeable, future.