2025.25

Maker: Havana Club brand promotional barware; the swizzle-stick manufacturer is not marked. Brand created 1934 by José Arechabala S.A. (Cárdenas, Cuba); state-produced after the 1960 nationalization. Date: Unresolved; cannot be confirmed within 1959–1990 and may fall outside it. The English "HAVANA CLUB RUM" wording points most naturally to the pre-revolution US-tourist trade (1934–1959), which would predate the range; a post-1959 state-era English-market origin is also possible. The finial is a pineapple, not the Giraldilla emblem Havana Club adopted in the early 1970s — weighing mildly toward a pre-1970s design, but not conclusive. (Tentative; boundary/transitional.) Place of Origin: Cuba (brand and use); swizzle-stick manufacture location not marked.

Embossed on each shaft: HAVANA CLUB RUM. No maker's mark, country-of-origin stamp, or date on either.

Plastic

Materials: Molded plastic (polystyrene or similar), translucent green and yellow. Technique: Injection-molded; integral embossed lettering and figural finial.

Good

Havana Club launched in 1934 under José Arechabala S.A.; the English brand name and spelling were deliberately chosen to appeal to the US market amid the post-Prohibition boom in American tourism to Havana, and the company ran a Havana office and private bar from 1935. That pre-revolutionary tourist context is the classic setting for English-language Havana Club barware. Nationalized without compensation in 1960. The Cuban state exported Havana Club under the name from about 1972, chiefly to the USSR and Eastern Europe, and introduced the Giraldilla-statue logo in the early 1970s. Because swizzle sticks rarely carry dates and both a pre-1959 (Arechabala) and post-1959 (state) origin are plausible, this pair sits squarely on the collection's 1959 boundary — routes into the boundary/transitional thread.