Typing from mobile so I can’t ramble as much as I would like, but rum got a big boost from Prohibition! Americans began traveling to the Caribbean in record numbers to take advantage of the nearby legal alcohol, both by ship and by plane (Blacktail in NYC is named after the nickname of the seaplanes that left that harbor for Cuba).

Rum flowed practically like water for visitors. Rowboats would come alongside passenger ships to try and sell bottles of cheap rum to the passengers and crew aboard. Bars were mobbed by Americans. Ernest Hemingway helped popularize the Daiquiri through his near-daily visits to El Floridita in Havana to spend hours drinking his preferred cocktail (though he requested his with no sugar and double the rum). Bacardi became a household name on the back of Americans. Rum was smuggled in massive amounts from the Caribbean to the Gulf states, to the point where it was basement cheap by the 1940s.

It would take a long time for rum to recover completely from the cheap white rum Bacardi popularized, but it was a huge boon to the industry.