The Fira d'Indians de Begur celebrates its coming of age this weekend: 18 years celebrating the heroic deed of thousands of Catalans who made the race for the Americas, many of them in Cuba, "the island of dreams". In the second half of the 19th century, phylloxera caused the emigration of more than 500 Begurenses who, a few years later, returned to their homeland. The Baix Empordà was a machine for manufacturing Indianos and it is known about almost all of them when, where, how and why they left.
The great exception is a son of La Bisbal d'Empordà. His name does not appear on any travel list; nor in the four volumes of Catalans in America published by the Generalitat: his name was José Bosch Vicens (1853-1930) and no one remembers him, although he became one of the richest men in Cuba. He died in Santiago and is buried next to the tombs of the poet José Martí, the founders of Bacardí who came from Sitges, Tomás Estrada Palma (Cuba's first Republican president, who spoke Catalan and was exiled in the castle of Figueres) or Fidel Castro.
The mystery of Bosch Vicens is now beginning to be revealed ninety years after his death. The regional archives of La Bisbal and Figueres (superbly managed) reveal surprising information about an Indian who was not an Indian because he never returned to La Bisbal.
We have discovered the baptismal certificate of José Bosch Vicens in the church of Santa Maria de La Bisbal in December 1853. He was the son of Jaime Bosch, a modest tanner from Llers, and Margarita Vicens, a descendant of an old saga of potters from La Bisbal. We know from the first general census of La Bisbal in 1836 that the home of the Bosch Vicens was made up of that couple and they had three children, who lived at number 9 Calle Hospital, and that their neighbors were, at number 10 of the same street, the family of Tomás Quintana (weaver) and in that of number 11 that of José Torroella (lawyer).
From then on, only minimal and confusing details of the family oral tradition are known, according to which, at the age of 14, he breaks his piggy bank and runs away from home to, alone and without anyone's help, embark on a sailboat in Barcelona. that led him to Santiago de Cuba. There he works as a waiter in “un catalán”, a generic name for grocery stores and basic necessities, stores that never close and where the adolescent Bosch Vicens sleeps under the counter.
Despite these humble and precarious beginnings (he arrived after the outbreak of the first war of independence, the long war (1868-1878), the man from Bisbal earned the trust of his owners and in a very few years progressed from counter clerk or shop assistant to manager, factor, manager and finally partner and owner of different commercial and industrial companies.
In 1887, he married Josefa Lamarque, a descendant of a family of French coffee growers, and his greatest milestones will be to bring electricity and trams to Santiago (one of the partners took advantage of that experience to establish new tram lines in Barcelona), and to promote and urbanize the first garden city of Cuba: the Vista Alegre neighborhood, where the richest families of Santiago will live. There he builds his house, which is still known today as the Bosch Palace, a gigantic three-story building designed by the famous architect Carlos Segrera, who studied in Barcelona and Havana.
Discreet, little given to publicity, he conducts his business without showing off: he buys sugar mills, consigns ships, manages insurance, makes hats as well as ice bars, owns bakeries and pastry shops, invests his fortune inside and outside Cuba, and ends up being one of the first merchants, industrialists and bankers in the country.
A friend of President Estrada Palma, he helps him financially during his electoral campaign and is elected president of the Santiago Chamber of Commerce, where he promotes the Center and Hospital of the Spanish Colony in Santiago.
And as if all this were not enough, his only son, Pepín Bosch Lamarque, married one of the heiresses of the Bacardí family, Enriqueta Schueg Bacardí. Pepín quarrels with his father and does not want to continue running the family business; then Bosch Vicens transfers them to his son-in-law Venancio Mercadé Papiol, another Catalan emigrant from Torredembarra, married to María Bosch Lamarque.
Pepín is hired by a New York bank in Havana and ends up working as manager and vice president of Bacardí. The liberal government of President Carlos Prío Socarrás appoints him Minister of Finance. He accepts with two conditions: stay as little as possible (less than two years) and not earn a single peso. He ceased in 1950 to assume the presidency of Bacardí and left the only fiscal surplus in the history of Cuba. Time magazine will dedicate a very laudatory article to him entitled "An honest man."
Pepín Bosch, like many other businessmen fed up with the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship, went into exile and Bacardí financially helped the 1959 revolution. Fidel Castro included him in the entourage on his trip to Washington DC in 1959, but Bosch confirmed the radical shift of the revolution and orders that all Bacardi brands be registered outside of Cuba.
When in 1960 hundreds of private companies were expropriated, Bacardí was saved thanks to the sense of anticipation of a Pepín who had already gone into exile again and will never return to Cuba again. He died in Nassau in 1994 after turning Bacardi into a multinational with factories all over the world, the first of which was built in Barcelona in 1910.
This story of emigration and exile, which is now looking for a publisher, will serve to vindicate this saga of the Bosch, whose patriarch has lived almost a century ignored by his native Catalonia. A book that will be an act of justice and recognition for the adolescent who left at the age of 14 never to return and with the son who never returned to Cuba.
