Launching a new duel over trademark rights, President Fidel Castro said Cuba will begin producing its own Bacardi rum, using the name made famous by a Cuban family in exile.

Bacardi rum "is ours and is better than what they produced,'' Castro said on Saturday in a speech broadcast on state television late Sunday, the Associated Press reported.

The trademarked Bacardi rum company is headquartered on Pitts Bay in Bermuda, but yesterday the company's VP of administration, Jimmy Amos said he could not comment on Mr. Castro's announcement.

Mr. Amos said all statements on the matter were being issued from the company's subsidiary -Bacardi Martini Inc. in Coral Gables, Florida. But officials in Miami could not be reached for comment yesterday.

A trademark duel would not be the first between the Cuban government and Bacardi & Co., the world-famous maker of rum founded in Cuba in the 1860s and resurrected abroad when the Bacardi family fled the island in 1960.

Cuba and Bacardi & Co., now based in Bermuda, have had a long-running dispute over the trademark for another name, the Havana Club.

Cuba began exporting a rum under the name Havana Club in 1994, and since has sold more than 38 million bottles of the rum worldwide.

In 1995, Bacardi & Co. registered the Havana Club name in the United States after buying the rights from the original Cuban owner -- whose trademark Castro's government also confiscated in 1960 -- and began producing its own Havana Club rum made in the Bahamas.

Cuba's Havana Club Holding, accusing Bacardi of violating a federal trademark law and an international treaty, sued to keep Bacardi & Co. from selling Havana Club in the United States.

Last year, the US Supreme Court upheld lower court rulings that said the Cuban company was barred from enforcing any trademark in the United States because of the Cuban trade embargo.

"They've robbed the trademark, for example, of Bacardi, which is Cuban and now they have robbed that of Havana Club, which is Cuban,'' Castro was quoted saying in the Miami Herald.

Rum battle: Cuba's Fidel Castro