On a chilly fall night at Marina’s Bistro and Rum Bar in Uptown, a menu of cocktails featuring the Chicago Cane Cooperative’s locally-distilled rum put patrons into a tropical mood.

The warm reception to the cooperative’s launch party was an especially sweet moment for co-founder Daniel Regueira as he witnessed patrons enjoying his creation. It was a moment that came so close to not happening at all.

In August, Regueira was in a devastating collision while riding his motorcycle that left him paralyzed from the waist down.

“I was on the way home from the gym, and the woman just blew a stop sign on Ridge. And I had literally a second to react, which is not enough,” he recalled. “So, yeah, we collided. My spinal cord was severed at L1. I had the surgery done to put my back in place, put a couple of rods in place to hold it there.”

WTTW News originally met with Regueira and co-founder Sean Ellis Hussey at their distillery back in late May, when their company was just a few months old. Regueira, Hussey and a third partner had set the company up under a cooperative ownership model.

“We’ve been friends since 2015 and the two things that really hit off our friendship were obviously booze and drinking really fun liquor and experimenting with cocktails, and also talking about politics,” Hussey said. “We were really interested in each other’s politics and our political activism and wanted to infuse that passion into whatever we do.”

That activism is also a reaction to the industry in which they now work.

“The rum and sugar production history, there’s a really bad history of not just bad labor practices but slavery, right? In the Americas and the new world in general. This is our attempt at doing something to address that really terrible, awful history,” Regueira said. “Chicago is historically a labor town. You have in the DNA of our city, you have Haymarket which was the birth of the modern labor movement, right? So Chicago plays a really important role in that … So we wanted to pay homage to Chicago and acknowledge the terrible history of sugar production and rum, but also try to do something about it.”

While Hussey manages the marketing side of the business, Regueira’s role was and remains tastemaker-in-chief, creating rums starting with molasses from the cooperatively-run Guatemalan sugar mill Madre Tierra.

“The way that we got into rum specifically is that, you know, nerdiness that we shared, but also my Latinidad is a really big part of my identity. Anywhere in the Caribbean … they have a really lovely, robust almost like thickness to them that you do not get in American rum for the most part,” Regueira said. “The texture is fantastic. Stylistically, that’s kind of what we’re aiming for is, we’re cornering our own style here with blending of some Latin American styles, some Caribbean style, and then maybe a little bit of Scotch style as well all into like one thing.”

Hussey said while they’re having a great experience making their rum at a suburban distillery both before, but especially after Regueira’s injury, their eventual hope is to open a tasting room and distillery in Chicago.

“We are not shying away from the aspiration of the whole thing, founding a worker co-op making rum in Chicago. And the reason is not only to have our own production and manufacturing space, it’s to open a community space for people to gather, for people to enjoy cocktails, but also to not necessarily be a place people have to use money to inhabit, especially because of our founding as a cooperative,” Hussey said. “We want to help other people in the hospitality industry throughout the city have a place where they can gather if they need, if they’re looking to like meet outside of their workplace to organize, to have resources to help them be able to get what they are needing from their workplace.”

By summer 2023, Chicago Cane Cooperative had two styles of rum in production. Today, as they’re expanding distribution and preparing to launch new products, Regueira said he’s staying in the mix.

“I'm still right now involved in the creation of the rum. I can’t be as physically involved as I’d like to be, but it has definitely lit a fire under my ass, like, let’s go, let’s do this thing,” Regueira said.

Now four months into his rehabilitation at the Shirley Ryan Ability Lab, Regueira said the support he’s received makes him more motivated than ever to see the Chicago Cane Cooperative’s aspirations become reality.

“There were moments where I thought that I should have died, not to mention all the pain I was in. But I remember expressing this to my wife and she looked at me and she was like, shut the f--- up,” Regueira said. “We'll get through this. I’m just glad you're here.”

“Our friends and family that have been here, our circle of people that have been supporting us — there’s moments that are only sometimes public where I cry and reminisce on how awful this is,” Regueira continued. “But the other side of the coin is how grateful I am to have the ability to be able to still live a life that I would love to live. So, yeah, grateful is a good way to put it.”