Cuba seized the Arechabala family's Havana Club rum company in 1959, and the family's lapsed US trademark has been in court ever since

The Arechabala family founded José Arechabala S.A. in Cárdenas in 1878. It made Havana Club rum and registered the mark in the United States in 1935. In 2010 Ramón Arechabala told the US House Judiciary Committee that Calixto López broke into the company offices on 31 December 1959, pointed a machine gun at him and said he was now the boss. Cuba expropriated the business in 1960, taking the family's personal assets too. Ramón said he was jailed, then left Cuba with his wife and infant son, keeping only his knowledge of his father's rum formula. With no distillery outside Cuba, the family let the US registration expire in 1973, on what a law review note calls faulty legal advice. That year the state exporter Cubaexport applied for the mark, and it was registered in 1976. In 1993 Cuba and Pernod Ricard formed Havana Club Holding. The Arechabalas sold any rights they had to Bacardi, whose own Cuban business had also been seized, and Bacardi sold Havana Club rum in the United States. In 1998 Congress passed Section 211, which bars US courts from enforcing rights in marks tied to confiscated property; Bacardi won in New York, affirmed by the Second Circuit in 2000. In 2002 the WTO Appellate Body ruled parts of Section 211 discriminatory. The dispute produced 16 federal cases. In January 2016 the US renewed Cubaexport's registration, and in January 2025 a Virginia federal court dismissed Bacardi's challenge^†.