Tag Archive for: big business

2 Cuban Exiles Who Were Central to the ‘Cola Wars’

/in , , , /by

Few brands in the history of global commerce have generated such a fierce rivalry as that of PepsiCo and Coca-Cola. This rivalry has permeated popular culture and even inspired Hollywood stars like Steven Spielberg, who will produce Sony’s film “Cola Wars,” currently in development.

And perhaps the lesser-known story is that, behind the scenes, Cuban-American businessmen were making key decisions that elevated these two brands to the status of epitomes of good marketing, aggressiveness, and market savvy. The two men we will analyze here helped shape the American imagination and popular culture in recent decades.

Néstor T. Carbonell was born in 1936 in Cuba. His paternal grandfather had already lived in the United States as an exile during the island’s war of independence; upon his return to Cuba, he served as ambassador of the new Republic to Mexico and president of its National Academy of Arts and Letters.

He never imagined that his descendants, because of another revolution, even more radical and violent, would have to spend most of their lives in the country that welcomed him with open arms in the 19th century.

Carbonell recounts that it was on his maternal grandfather’s hacienda (confiscated by Fidel Castro’s socialist regime) where, on October 15, 1962, a U.S. U-2 reconnaissance plane photographed the first Soviet offensive missile base, triggering the crisis that brought the world to the brink of World War III.

But, as has happened so often with Cubans fleeing communism with almost nothing, he carved out a place for himself in the new American society. After participating in various initiatives to reclaim the island (from joining Brigade 2506 to diplomatic efforts to isolate the Castro regime) and following the Kennedy administration’s agreement with the Soviet Union that prohibited attacks on Cuba, he began his 40-year professional career at PepsiCo in New York in 1967.

Carbonell spent approximately 40 years there. He rose from being a lawyer to holding positions related to international relations within the corporation. Along with his wife and family, he traveled and lived in Mexico, Venezuela, the United Kingdom, the Bahamas, and the United States. “I was fortunate to meet and establish personal relationships with many prominent figures, including the three pillars of the free world during the Cold War: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II,” he recounted in an interview.

As part of the PepsiCo team, Carbonell saw its net sales increase from $665,345,000 in 1967 to $43.25 billion in 2008.

That year, the Cuban-American ended his tenure at the mega-corporation as vice president in charge of international public and government relations, a position he had held since 1995.

But during his time at PepsiCo, Carbonell had a formidable rival: Coca-Cola. And within Coca-Cola, another Cuban-American was driving the company forward. I’m referring to Roberto Goizueta.

Goizueta was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1931, “with a natural curiosity and a great love of learning,” according to the website of the foundation that bears his name. He studied at prestigious institutions in Cuba and the United States, such as the Jesuit Belén School, Cheshire Academy, and Yale University, where he majored in chemical engineering. In 1953, he married Olga Casteleiro, his high school sweetheart.

On July 4, 1954, Goizueta began working as a chemist at The Coca-Cola Company’s Havana branch after responding to a job offer; however, he didn’t stay there long. A year after Castro took power, he nationalized Coca-Cola’s Cuban operations. In 1961, Goizueta fled with his wife and three children to the United States.

They arrived with little more than $40 and 100 shares of Coca-Cola stock. At the company’s headquarters in Atlanta, his leadership potential was recognized by others, including Robert W. Woodruff, former president and CEO and later a member of The Coca-Cola Company’s board of directors.

“Two years after moving to Atlanta, at the age of 35, Mr. Goizueta was elected vice president, at the time the youngest vice president in the history of The Coca-Cola Company,” according to the Goizueta Foundation. In 1981, he was appointed president and CEO, inheriting a successful company with great potential. The company experienced tremendous growth during his tenure, and Coca-Cola became the most recognized brand in the world.

The Cuban-American was known for his focus on shareholder profitability. To achieve this, he sold unrelated and unprofitable parts of the business, developed new products, and launched global advertising and distribution campaigns that, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, left PepsiCo, Coca-Cola’s main competitor, far behind.

Goizueta also left his mark on the company’s marketing strategy, creating the slogan “Coca-Cola is the best!” and he was credited with the successful introduction of Diet Coke in 1982. As with everything, there were also ups and downs. The marketing failure of introducing New Coke in 1985 and the simultaneous withdrawal of original Coke was a major setback. The disaster was only mitigated by reselling the original formula as Coca-Cola Classic.

The Emory University business school has borne his name since 1994. The admiration he commands within the business world is well-deserved. During his 16 years as president and CEO, according to The New York Times, he increased Coca-Cola’s market value from $4 billion in 1981 to more than $152 billion at the time of his death.

Carbonell and Goizueta, each influencing or leading the operations of PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, respectively, transformed the free market into a breeding ground for healthy competition.

Perhaps without intending to, their success in the Cola Wars was their way of demonstrating the flaws in Castro’s centralized planning. Fleeing a regime like Cuba’s, which condemned the free market, they became legends when they made it their space for freedom and success.

AUTHOR

Yoe Suarez

Yoe Suárez is a writer, producer, and journalist, exiled from Cuba due to his investigative reporting about themes like torture, political prisoners, government black lists, cybersurveillance, and freedom of expression and conscience. He is the author of the books “Leviathan: Political Police and Socialist Terror” and “El Soplo del Demonio: Violence and Gangsterism in Havana.”

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

CLICHES OF PROGRESSIVISM #19 – “Big Government Is a Check on Big Business”

/in , , , , , , /by

A myth runs through most of America today, and it goes like this: Big business hates government and yearns for an unregulated market. But the reality is the opposite: Big government can be highly profitable for big business.

Many regulations restrict competition that would otherwise challenge existing firms. At the same time, government institutions—many created during the New Deal—funnel money to the largest corporations.

When government regulates X industry, it imposes high costs that hurt smaller firms and reduce competition. Imagine that the Department of Energy imposes a new rule that dishwashers must be more energy efficient. Coming up with designs, retrofitting factories to produce these energy-efficient models, and navigating the forms and licenses around this rule might cost a dishwasher-producing firm thousands of dollars. An industry giant, with more revenue and sizeable profit margins, can absorb this cost. A small dishwasher factory that’s only a year or two old, with little revenue and less profit, cannot. The latter would have to shut down. That means less competition for the industry giant, enabling it to grow even bigger and seize even more market share.

Barriers to entry, such as expensive licenses, also cripple start-ups and reduce competition. The Progressive New Republic speaks favorably of how Dwolla, an Iowa-based start-up that processes payments and competes with credit card agencies, had to pay $200,000 for a license to operate. Rather than hire employees or build a better product to compete with its entrenched competition, Dwolla was forced to spend its first $200,000 on a permission slip. Dwolla could afford it; but how many less-well-funded competitors were forced from the market? How many were deterred from even starting a payment-processing business by this six-figure barrier to entry?

For big businesses, which often sacrifice agility for size, smaller competitors are a major threat. By limiting smaller competition, government helps the industry giants at the expense of everyone else. Barriers to entry can kill the next innovative firm before it can become a threat to its giant competition. When this happens, we don’t even know it: The killed-before-it-can-live company is a classic example of the “unseen” costs of regulation.

While regulations minimize competition, government entities subsidize big business. The Export-Import Bank, established in 1934 as part of the New Deal, exists to subsidize exports by U.S.-based firms. The primary beneficiaries? Large corporations. From 2009 to 2014, for instance, the Ex-Im Bank financed over one-quarter of Boeing’s planes. Farm bills, a key element of the New Deal that still exists today, subsidize huge farms at the expense of smaller ones. The program uses a variety of methods, from crop insurance to direct payments, to subsidize farmers. The program is ostensibly designed to protect small farmers. But 75 percent of total subsidies—$126 billion from 2004 to 2013—go to the biggest 10 percent of farming companies. The program taxes consumers to funnel money to large farms.

Nor are these programs unique. National Journalism Center graduate Tim Carney argues, “The history of big business is one of cooperation with big government.” In the time of Teddy Roosevelt, big meat packers lobbied for federal meat inspection, knowing that the costs around compliance would crush their smaller competitors. New Deal legislation was only passed with help from the national Chamber of Commerce and the American Bankers Association. The Marshall Plan, which subsidized the sale of billions of dollars of goods to Europe, was implemented by a committee of businessmen. President Johnson created the Transportation Department in 1966, overcoming resistance from shipping interests by agreeing to exempt them from the new rules. Costly regulations for thee, but not for me.

If Progressives want to see what free enterprise looks like, they need only look at the Internet. For the past 20 years, it’s been largely unregulated. The result? Start-ups erupt and die every year. New competitors like Facebook bring down existing giants like MySpace and are in turn challenged by a wealth of social media competitors. Yahoo was the Internet search king until two college kids founded Google. Google has been recently accused of monopoly status, but competitors like DuckDuckGo spring up every day.

Let’s imagine if the Internet—a playground of creative destruction—had been as subject to big government as brick and mortar businesses have been. Yahoo would have been subsidized. Facebook would have had to pay six figures to get a licensing fee, crushing college-kid Zuckerberg before he got started and preserving MySpace’s market dominance. Businesses that learned to play the lobbying game would have been allowed to write regulations to crush their competitors.

For those who doubt, the proof of business’s collusion with big government is in the pudding. In 2014, a surprising number of libertarian-leaning men and women are in Congress. How has big business responded? K Street has spent millions of dollars working to replace laissez-faire advocates with those who are establishment-friendly. Sadly, cronyist businesses are fighting to keep free market advocates out of power.

A final note: I have criticized Progressives here, but the institution of big government, which enables businesses to hire lobbyists to write regulations or give themselves a subsidy, is the primary problem. The bigger government grows, the more powerful a tool it becomes for businesses prone to use it for private advantage. That’s not capitalism; it’s what one economist properly labeled “crapitalism.”

Julian Adorney
Economic Historian, Entrepreneur, Fiction Writer

Summary

  • Big Government and Big Business often play well together, at the expense of start-ups, little guys, and consumers.
  • Artificial, politically instigated barriers to entry make markets less competitive and dynamic, and make established firms more monopolistic.
  • A free market (true capitalism, not its adulterated “crapitalism” version) maximizes competition and, therefore, service to the consumer.

For further information, see:

“Of Meat and Myth” by Lawrence W. Reed
“Atlas Shrugged and the Corporate State” by Sheldon Richman
“Ending Corporate Welfare As We Know It” by Lawrence W. Reed
“The Rise of Big Business and the Growth of Government” by Robert Higgs
“Theodore Roosevelt: Big Government Man” by Jim Powell

ABOUT JULIAN ADORNEY

Julian Adorney is an economic historian, entrepreneur, and fiction writer. He writes for the Ludwig von Mises Institute and other websites. You can find his collected work at adorney.liberty.me.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of FEE and Shutterstock.