How One Cuban Rum Trademark Refused to Die — and Why Founders Should Care

A trademark registration for HAVANA CLUB (1031651) should have died at least three times. It didn't.

That single registration — owned by a Cuban company called Cubaexport, filed June 12, 1974, issued January 27, 1976 — is the reason two of Bacardi's own U.S. applications for the exact same name have been stuck in limbo for more than a quarter-century. A federal appeals court, the Fourth Circuit, recently sided with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (the USPTO, the federal agency that registers trademarks) and let a required maintenance filing count even though it arrived roughly ten years late, according to IPWatchdog's reporting on the appeal. What the reporting doesn't show is how thoroughly the government's own records document that survival. The paper trail reads like a brand that flat-out refused to be killed.

Why should a founder or CFO who has never filed a trademark care about a rum fight from the Cold War? Because the same rules that kept HAVANA CLUB alive — and the same traps that killed its rivals — are the rules that decide whether your company name is protected or exposed. Reading a trademark file the way this one deserves to be read is a business skill. It protects the thing your marketing budget is building.

Three attempts to cancel it, three survivals

A quick vocabulary note before the timeline. To keep a U.S. registration alive, the owner has to periodically file paperwork proving the brand is still in use — a Section 8 declaration (a sworn statement that you're still using the mark in commerce) — and eventually a Section 9 renewal (the filing that extends the registration for another term). Miss those windows and the registration can lapse.

Cubaexport — the records list the owner as EMPRESA CUBANA EXPORTADORA DE ALIMENTOS Y PRODUCTOS VARIOS, based in Vedado, Havana — cleared its first use-proof deadline on April 12, 1982. Routine so far.

Then the file gets interesting. Someone tried to cancel the registration (a formal request asking the government to erase it) on July 19, 1994. Another cancellation attempt followed in August 1995. Both were denied. A counterclaim (a countersuit filed by the party being challenged) cancellation surfaced in 1997, and the records show two separate entries reading "ABANDONMENT DELETED BY TTAB" on July 30, 1997. The TTAB — the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board — is the USPTO's in-house court for trademark disputes; here it effectively reversed a drift toward abandonment and kept the registration alive during a dispute between two private companies. Yet another cancellation attempt was denied January 29, 2004.

The registration's first renewal came through on June 18, 1996, under the old ten-year term. That renewal turned out to matter enormously, because it landed before the paperwork wall came down.

The filing that arrived a decade late

The combined use-proof and renewal filing landed December 14, 2005 — logged in the records as "REGISTERED - COMBINED SECTION 8 (10-YR) & SEC. 9 FILED." Given that 1996 renewal, the maintenance window had long since closed. The government's own records confirm the heart of the news story: this filing was not on time.

What followed is one of the busiest stretches of post-registration activity you will ever see on a single brand. Between January 2006 and mid-2007, the file logs dozens of incoming faxes and letters — twenty fax and mail entries clustered in the first half of 2006 alone. Cubaexport filed a petition to the Director (a formal appeal asking the head of the USPTO to make an exception) on January 25, 2006. It was denied on July 17, 2006. The office mailed out post-registration actions (official letters flagging problems with the maintenance paperwork) on July 20 and August 3, 2006. A second petition to the Director came in October 5, 2006, and by that December the case was flagged "PENDING PETITION/COURT DECISION."

Correspondence-review entries then stretch across 2009, 2012, and 2013 — a file that simply would not close.

Resolution came in January 2016. On January 13, the records show a petition to the Director granted at last, followed the same day by a second renewal, an acceptance of the ten-year use-proof filing, and a formal notice of acceptance. A month later, on February 16, 2016, the file logs a third renewal plus another use-proof acceptance and notice. Two renewals processed inside 34 days — closing out roughly a decade of limbo in a single administrative push. The registration's status date freezes there: February 16, 2016. It was assigned to an examiner again in October 2018, and its current status reads "CANCELLATION PENDING."

The registration is still live.

Meanwhile, Bacardi has been waiting since the Clinton administration

The other half of this story is what the records don't show happening on the challenger's side: progress.

Bacardi & Company Limited filed its own application for HAVANA CLUB (74572667) covering rum and rum specialty drinks on September 12, 1994. It filed a second application for HAVANA CLUB (75751393) covering clothing on June 25, 1999. Both are still pending. Both are still live. Both show their most recent activity on April 23, 2026 — another suspension letter. Suspension here means the USPTO has hit pause on the application because it's waiting on the outcome of a related dispute. The 1994 application has now spent more than thirty years without ever registering, and it drew a fresh suspension notice in 2026. Ownership traces back through a company called GALLEON S.A. in Nassau to Bacardi in Vaduz, Liechtenstein.

On the other side of the underlying rum war sits HAVANA CLUB HOLDING S.A., the Luxembourg company aligned with liquor giant Pernod-Ricard. It has its own pair of stalled HAVANA CLUB applications (74673898 and 75409541), both limited to "rums produced exclusively in the Province of La Havana, Cuba," and both flagged as still suspended. Every major HAVANA CLUB rum application in the file is frozen behind Cubaexport's registration. That is what a surviving older registration does to everyone who comes after it: it doesn't merely win a fight, it freezes everything downstream that uses the same name.

Havana Club Holding didn't sit still, though. The records show it building an entire neighboring brand portfolio around the fight — HAVANISTA (4008063), PROFUNDO, PACTO NAVIO (5294689), HAVANA CULTURA (4948823), SELECCIÓN DE MAESTROS, and several logo marks for Cuban rum, most registered between 2011 and 2022. When you can't claim the exact name you want, you fortify the territory around it. That's a strategy worth remembering.

The family the records mostly forgot

The saddest thread in the file belongs to the Arechabala family. The reporting recounts Ramón Arechabala fleeing Cuba in 1959 with a rum recipe committed to memory after the government seized the family business. The USPTO records show what happened when the family finally tried to reclaim the name — and it's largely a graveyard.

José Ma. Arechabala Rodrigo filed HAVANA CLUB (74522925) for distilled liquors on May 2, 1994. It was abandoned for failure to respond — meaning the applicant missed a deadline to answer the examiner and the application died automatically. Gloria Marquez-Arechabala did secure a registration for ARECHABALA 75 (2071008) in 1997, but it was later cancelled for a missed use-proof filing. Her ARECHABALA FORMULA application died after a Board decision in a two-party dispute. A related ARECHABALA rum application met the same end. Jose Arechabala International Limited later landed ARECHABALA 1878 (3606104) in 2009 — also cancelled over a missed use-proof filing.

The family kept trying. Two more ARECHABALA 1878 applications (98151434 and 98163537), covering alcoholic beverages, were still live as of the data as intent-to-use filings (applications for a name you plan to use but haven't launched yet), riding on repeated deadline extensions — a fourth extension on one, a third on the other. A JOSÉ ARECHABALA ALDAMA application from 2023 was abandoned for failure to respond. What the family never rebuilt was a HAVANA CLUB registration of its own. The 1974 lapse the appeals court references left no U.S. registration in family hands for anyone to revive.

The business lesson underneath the rum

The takeaway isn't that missing deadlines is fine. It's the opposite, and it cuts two ways.

First, an older brand registration that looks half-dead on the surface can still block you for years. Cubaexport's registration currently reads "CANCELLATION PENDING" with its last real activity in 2016. To a founder glancing at the public status line, that looks like a clear runway. It is not. That "moribund" registration survived three cancellation attempts, a decade-late filing, and two deep-pocketed competitors — and it is still freezing rival applications today. Before you invest in a name, someone on your side should read the full history of any older registration standing in your way, not just the one-line status. That's the difference between a clean legal opinion and an expensive surprise after you've printed the packaging.

Second, patience is not a strategy, and suspension is not resolution. Bacardi's application has been pending for over thirty years and drew yet another suspension letter in 2026. A brand can sit registered-in-name-only, or unregistered-but-waiting, longer than most careers. When the name you want is locked up, the practical move is often the one Havana Club Holding made: build and protect a family of related names you can own, so your marketing has somewhere to go while the core fight grinds on.

For any company, the underlying point is the same. Your brand is an asset with maintenance costs and legal exposure, exactly like a lease or a patent. Knowing how to read who really controls a name — and what it would take to move them — is protection you can build before you spend a dollar on a logo.

GleanMark's monitoring tools exist for precisely this kind of file: an older registration whose sleepy status label badly undersells how much power it still holds over everyone around it. If you're clearing a name against a registration that looks dormant, checking the real history behind it — the deadlines, the petitions, the survivals — is how you avoid betting your brand on a fight you didn't know was still live.

This analysis is based on public USPTO records and is not legal advice.