USPTO records now show Cubaexport's registration cancelled, and a filing-history mirror dates the cancellation and expiration to August 7, weeks after Cubaexport prevailed over Bacardi at the Fourth Circuit.
The federal trademark registration for HAVANA CLUB, which Cubaexport has held since 1976, has been canceled.
The USPTO's Trademark Trial and Appeal Board record for Registration No. 1,031,651, retrieved on August 18, lists the application status as CANCELLED - SECTION 8. Trademarkia, a commercial database that mirrors USPTO filing history, dates the change to August 7, 2026, and records the event as CANCELLED SEC. 8 (10-YR)/EXPIRED SECTION 9.
As of this writing, the development appears to be unreported. Bartending News found no coverage in the trade or legal press, and a separate third-party trademark database still showed the registration's previous status as of August 18.
Two provisions of the Lanham Act keep a registration alive past its term. Section 8 requires a periodic declaration that the mark is still in use, or that non-use is excusable. Section 9 governs renewal. They run on the same ten-year cycle and are filed together as a combined submission, which is why a single closed window produces both consequences at once: cancellation under Section 8 and expiration under Section 9. That is what the August 7 entry records. Not two separate rulings, but the administrative end of a registration after its maintenance window shut.
The registration issued on January 27, 1976, which placed its next ten-year maintenance deadline on January 27, 2026. A six-month statutory grace period followed.
That is the entirety of what the public record establishes. It does not establish why.
The distinction matters, and it is the part most likely to get flattened in secondhand coverage.
An administrative cancellation means a registration was not maintained. It is not a finding that the owner's rights were invalid, nor is it a judgment in anyone's favor.
Bacardi's petition to cancel the registration, filed in July 1995, remains listed by the Board as pending court appeal, with a status date of April 2004. The registration was canceled and expired while the proceeding remained open.
The wider litigation ran the other way. On June 16, 2026, the Fourth Circuit affirmed against Bacardi, upholding the USPTO's acceptance of Cubaexport's 2016 renewal. Bacardi lost that appeal. Seven weeks later, the registration was gone anyway.
Sitting behind all of this is the No Stolen Trademarks Honored in America Act, approved December 1, 2024. It does not create a new prohibition. It amends Section 211 of a 1998 appropriations act, extending an existing bar from US courts to entities of the executive branch, and applying it to marks used in connection with a confiscated business or assets unless the original owner or a bona fide successor in interest has expressly consented. The prohibition applies only to parties who knew, or had reason to know, at the time they acquired the rights they are asserting, that the mark was the same as, or substantially similar to, one tied to confiscated assets.
Bacardi has argued publicly that the statute forbids the USPTO from granting another renewal. Whether that law drove the August 7 entry is not something the record we reviewed answers, and we are not going to assert it.
Two things follow from this, and both are the opposite of what a headline might suggest.
The first is that Cubaexport losing this registration does not make Cuban Havana Club legal to import. Cuban-made Havana Club, distributed internationally through the Pernod Ricard joint venture, still cannot enter the United States. The embargo is what keeps it out, not the trademark, and nothing about a maintenance deadline touches the sanctions regime.
The second is that the cancellation does not grant Bacardi a federal registration. Its own pleaded application for HAVANA CLUB, Serial No. 74572667, remains in suspension on the same USPTO record. A canceled registration removes an obstacle. It does not grant a right.
Bacardi continues to sell Puerto Rican-made Havana Club in the United States, as it did on August 6.
Costs, compliance, and the rules that change what you pour. Bartending News covers the operational side of this business for bartenders, bar owners, and event operators. Free, straight to your inbox. Subscribe →
The Cuban government seized the assets of José Arechabala S.A., the family firm that had made Havana Club rum since the 1930s, in 1960. The family left. Cubaexport, a Cuban state entity, registered HAVANA CLUB in the United States in 1976, a mark it could not use in commerce here because of the embargo. In the 1990s, the Arechabala family sold what rights it retained to Bacardi, which began selling its own Havana Club and petitioned to cancel the Cuban registration.
The fight since then has run through the USPTO, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, two rounds at the Fourth Circuit, and an act of Congress. We covered the underlying dispute about why there are two Havana Clubs.
We have not obtained the USPTO document underlying the August 7 entry, and the agency's case-specific document viewer did not return it. So several things remain open.
Whether CubaExport filed and was refused, or did not file at all. Whether it will challenge the entry or seek any available post-registration relief. Whether Bacardi will act on the change. Neither company has issued a statement that we could find.
Readers should treat this as a report of what the Federal Register currently shows on the date shown, and not as a legal conclusion about who owns anything.
For anyone behind a bar, the practical answer is that the two Havana Clubs remain exactly where they were on August 6. The Havana Club you can legally buy here is Puerto Rican. Cuban-made Havana Club remains barred from import. That has been true for years, and it is still true.
What changed is the paperwork underneath a fifty-year argument. A registration that grew out of the Cuban government's seizure of the Arechabala business, and that then persisted through decades of embargo restrictions, a decade-long fee dispute, repeated federal litigation, a cancellation proceeding pending since the Clinton administration, and legislation written with this controversy in view, was marked canceled and expired on August 7, after its maintenance window closed.
Bartending News will update this story if the USPTO record changes or if either company comments.
