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By Nelson Acosta
SAN JOSE DE LAS LAJAS, Cuba (Reuters) - Havana Club will keep churning out its famously smooth rum even as Cuba's sugar cane harvests plummet to historic lows and tensions ratchet up between Washington and Havana, the company's top executive said this week.
Havana Club International - a joint venture between state-owned Cuba Ron and France's Pernod Ricard - says it exports rum to 125 countries. However, a U.S. Cold War-era trade embargo and related sanctions have long prohibited the import and sale of Cuban rum in the United States.
Those sanctions - hardened in his first term by recently inaugurated U.S. President Donald Trump - also contribute to a crippling economic crisis and falling cane harvests on the Caribbean island.
"I think it is indeed a difficult environment although it is not really new," Christian Barre, CEO of Havana Club International, told Reuters in an interview. "We have (contingencies) in place to operate, whether with this U.S. president or with another."
Revenues from Havana Club - whose top export markets include Germany, France, Spain and Italy - are a key source of foreign currency for the communist-run government.
Havana Club officials have said sugar cane production for its trademark rum is guaranteed despite a string of record-breaking low harvests on the island.
Sugar was long "king" in Cuba as a hundred mills churned out raw sugar for domestic consumption and export. But fuel, fertilizer, machinery and labor shortages that have plagued Cuba's broader farm sector have hit the sugar industry especially hard, with year after year of record-breaking low output.
Barre said the company continues to work closely with the state sugar company, AZCUBA, to assure future supply.
"We are the rum of Cuba," Barre said. "There can be no export strategy, no development without having a (firm) base in Cuba."
From July 2023 to June 2024, the rum maker's sales grew 8%, the chief executive said.
Havana Club, which has its largest rum factory in San Jose de las Lajas outside Havana, has set its sights on increasing sales in China, which Barre described as "the market of the future."
(Reporting by Nelson Acosta in San Jose de las Lajas, additional reporting by Alien Fernandez, editing by Dave Sherwood and Rosalba O'Brien)
