by Wayne Curtis
The stuff sold in speakeasies often wasn’t much better than the stuff wrung out of rags. Enterprising owners would smuggle in perfectly good liquor from Canada or the Bahamas, and then cut one bottle of good liquor to make five bottles of bad. The good stuff would be diluted with whatever cheap industrial-grade alcohol could be bought or stolen. If that wasn’t available, antifreeze, hair tonic, and aftershave could be employed. The product could then be colored with caramel and flavored (sometimes with creosote) to hide the raw taste.
The powerful urge to find a drink that wouldn’t mercilessly assail the palate led to one other unintended impact of Prohibition. It promoted travel and tourism. In particular, it promoted travel to nations where liquor was still available. This left an impressively large choice—in fact, every country except Finland, which had imposed its own prohibition in 1919. (Canada flirted with prohibition in some provinces early on, but came to its senses when it realized the vast size of the American market for contraband liquor.)
Of the many overseas choices, Cuba stood out. The largest of the Caribbean islands, Cuba was just a short hop from Florida and was redolent of romance, adventure, and fermenting molasses. The New York Times noted that not only was the sunshine and the Old World charm of Havana alluring, but that “nowhere…does the Eighteenth Amendment run or the Volstead Act have jurisdiction.” The paper added that “ ‘swizzles,’ ‘Daiquiris,’ ‘planters’ punches’ and other drinks may be consumed without subterfuge or fear of poisoning.” Ships soon disgorged thousands of parched American passengers on Cuban shores. At least twenty made weekly runs to Havana, and far more ferries shuttled Americans from Miami and Key West.
Drinking began early in a journey south. When foreign-registered steamships crossed into international waters while still within sight of the American shoreline, armies of stewards invaded the staterooms bearing trays of cocktails. And even before passengers disembarked to fill the nightclubs of Havana, a flotilla of small “bumboats” would besiege arriving ships, with locals offering up bottles of cheap rum for sale. Ship captains hoping to keep their crews sober (and passengers buying onboard cocktails) turned the fire hoses on the floating vendors. The hapless boats filled and capsized, leaving the liquor salesmen to swim to shore with their bobbing bottles. The flotilla developed techniques to counteract these attacks, including sending out more bumboats than the ship had fire hoses. The craftiest entrepreneurs would dodge under the overhanging stern, from which the conspiring crew would lower a basket and exchange a few dollars for liquor.
New transportation networks arose to meet demand for travel to Cuba. In November 1920, just ten months after Prohibition went into effect, Aeromarine Airways took its first passengers to Cuba in eleven-seat “flying boats”—the first international airline service ever offered from the United States. In 1927, Pan American Airways (better known later as Pan Am) first took off: its seaplanes lifted off from the blue-green waters at Coconut Grove, then banked over the Keys and landed in Cuba an hour later, well in time for afternoon cocktails. Business boomed; Pan Am flew Amelia Earhart to Havana for the gala opening of the airline’s new terminal, and in Miami, airline salesmen swarmed the sidewalks, handing out flyers promising passersby they could “bathe in Bacardi tonight.” “Havana,” Fortune magazine noted, “became the unofficial United States saloon.”
The city was touted in travel magazines as a sort of licentious Paris with palm trees, a city of smoky nightclubs overflowing with sultry music, liquor, and more than a hint of romance. (Havana’s reputation was not new; as early as 1911, the Cleveland Press reported that “Havana is World’s Wickedest City, Press Man Finds,” noting that naked women actually performed on stage.) Havana had everything you couldn’t get at home, including syphilis cures that were advertised in tourist magazines. Even the Shriners and the Elks were drawn here for conventions in the 1920s; the Cubans got along famously with the Shriners, but were puzzled by the more taciturn Elks.
Most of all, Havana attracted the affluent and socially prominent. Basil Woon, writing in When It’s Cocktail Time in Cuba (1928), insisted that the city’s fashionable watering holes were on par with the best of Europe. “ ‘Have one in Havana’ seems to have become the winter slogan of the wealthy,” he wrote, adding that the city attracted society visitors along the lines of Charles Lindbergh, Anita Loos, Cyrus Curtis, and William K. Vanderbilt. Havana’s season ran from the opening of the horse track in early December to the closing of the casino in March. “Havana is not, like Palm Beach, a parrot-cage of ostentation,” Woon wrote. “It is rather, like Paris, a city of definite attraction where smart people go to be amused.”
American hoteliers scrambled to cater to the new breed of seasonal immigrant, and in 1928 a travel writer reported that “Havana is studded with very new and painfully expensive English-spoken hotels, which are jammed to the billiard tables from January to April.” Among them was the Biltmore chain, which already had hotels catering to the well-off in New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Coral Gables. The chain bought the Hotel Sevilla in downtown Havana just before Prohibition took effect, adding a ten-story tower and a roof garden, and rechristening it the Sevilla-Biltmore. They added new services to lure visiting Americans—like long-distance phone calling and two orchestras to play the ballroom—and they ensured that the extensive bar was amply stocked.
Just across from the Sevilla-Biltmore was the Telégrafo Hotel. Inside was Donovan’s bar, operated by an Irishman from Newark, New Jersey. When Prohibition was enacted, other bartenders in Newark either padlocked their doors or switched to soft drinks. Donovan had a grander plan. He wrenched out his entire bar—stools and signs and mirrors and chairs—and shipped everything to Havana. He installed it in the Telégrafo and reopened to his new clientele, business as usual.
Among the more popular haunts of visiting Americans was a bar on Zulueta Street called Sloppy Joe’s, whose slogan was “Where the Wet Begins.” It was originally called La Victoria, but according to local lore, a newspaper reporter, irked at the owner’s refusal to advance him a $50 loan, penned an editorial attacking the bar and called for local officials to look into its unsanitary conditions. The article snidely suggested that it be called “Sloppy Joe’s.” The infamy brought more business, especially with Americans. So the bar’s owner officially changed the name of the place and catered increasingly to the tourist trade, even selling belts crafted with holsters to hide small bottles of smuggled rum beneath jackets. The bar became famous among gawking tourists, and infamous among those who sought to avoid them. “It is not a very pretty picture to see a half a dozen gray-haired American ladies clinging to the bar rail in Sloppy Joe’s,” reported one traveler in the New Republic, “shouting maudlin ditties to the tropic night and their bored and slick-haired gigolos.”
The visitors to Cuba discovered something else that pleased them greatly: a light, crisp rum that tasted nothing at all like the medicinal, rough, dark New England rum of decades past. As Basil Woon put it, “Rum, by the grace of a family named Bacardi and of American prohibition, had become, in fact, a gentleman’s drink.”
Rum had been reinvented. Again.
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The new rum traced its history to 1836, the year that a fifteen-year-old Catalonian immigrant named Facundo Bacardi y Maso arrived with his family at the elegant colonial city of Santiago de Cuba on the island’s southeast coast. Facundo set himself up as an importer of wines and seller of spirits and, in 1862, purchased with one of his brothers the modest Santiago distillery of an Englishman named John Nunes. Depending on which company legend one subscribes to, a colony of bats either lived in the rafters of the distillery or occupied a tree in the backyard. They fluttered around the distillery in the evenings, and locals started calling Bacardi’s rum “the bat drink.” Bacardi smelled opportunity. Rural Cubans were largely illiterate, and a graphic logo allowed the drink to stand out among so many incomprehensible words of othe
r brands. So Bacardi introduced the bat trademark, plastering it on his labels. The logo caught on, and never left. One magazine ranked it as among the ten most valuable logos in the world, in league with those of Kodak, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola. (There’s another explanation for the bat: Bacardi may have lifted the idea from the civic heraldry of his native city of Valencia, which features a bat with wings spread atop a crown. Legend has it that in 1238, moments before King Jaume stormed Valencia to reclaim it from the Moors, a bat hovered overhead and landed atop his standard, and forever after the bat was seen as a harbinger of luck.)
Bacardi’s success as a distiller left little to luck and much to technological innovation. He set about looking for a way to make the harsh, often disagreeable spirit lighter, smoother, and more palatable to a broader array of drinkers. His breakthrough was a filtering system, which removed the heavier, oilier impurities that often made rum such a rank bit of business. (The filter, which remains a family secret, probably involved a combination of charcoal and sand.) Bacardi toyed with different woods for his casks and tinkered with the blending process, mixing rums from different batches to create a consistently smooth product. Bacardi entered his rum in international competitions; at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876, Bacardi’s light rum won a gold medal.
In 1892, Bacardi was rewarded with another welcome piece of publicity. Spain’s ailing six-year-old King Alfonso XIII was faring poorly—feverish and with dim prospects for survival. Not knowing what else to do, the king’s keepers administered a dollop of Bacardi’s rum, which knocked him into a deep slumber. When Alfonso awoke, his fever had broken and he was on the mend. Spain’s royal secretary wrote the distiller to thank Bacardi “for making a product that has saved the life of His Majesty.” Bacardi did not keep this letter a secret.
Bacardi’s rise was blessed by another accident of history—the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898. The war is remembered mostly for the historic shift in American foreign policy, from isolationism to a more bellicose interventionism. Less well known is the effect the war had in introducing Americans to a new rum. When Teddy Roosevelt charged up Cuba’s San Juan Hill with his Rough Riders, he established a beachhead for a wave of American immigrants, initially in the mining and the sugar industry, and later in tourism. The new arrivals quickly embraced Bacardi’s rum. In 1899, a reporter for a New England newspaper concluded that the Santiago region’s charms were not overly impressive. (“The country houses around Santiago are infested with mice and lizards.”) But he did commend a restaurant where he was served “a native rum, called bacardi [sic], which is made from molasses, and which, well mixed with water and cooled with ice, makes a very smooth sort of beverage and a somewhat insidious one. A quart bottle of this rum costs only fifty cents, and as a good deal of it is usually drunk at the midday meal it is not to be wondered at that a nap immediately follows it.”
Bacardi’s light rum, in fact, mixed well with about everything—carbonated water, lime juice, pineapple juice, orange juice—and new cocktails were born, sometimes by design and sometimes not. In 1899, Santiago was swept by a craze for a new drink called the “mismo.” It arose when a group of Cubans and Americans got together at the Cosmopolitan Club, and one of the Cubans ordered a Bacardi and seltzer. The next Cuban said, “Lo mismo,” which is to say, “The same.” The Americans, eager to try something novel, also ordered los mismos, and found them much to their liking. When they returned to the bar the next day, they ordered another round of mismos. The same waiter was fortunately on duty and served them their mismos without missing a beat. “It spread with remarkable rapidity,” reported the New York Tribune, “until now every barkeeper in Santiago knows what you are after if you ask for a ‘mismo.’ In fact, you rarely ever hear Bacardi rum and seltzer spoken of in any other way now.”
Bacardi saw a welcome increase in orders to the United States during World War I, when supplies of European spirits were disrupted. But Prohibition gave Bacardi its greatest windfall: an estimated $50 million in sales to dry Americans. Not only did Bacardi sell vast quantities to Americans visiting Cuba, but its shipments to the smuggling ports of Saint-Pierre—a French island off Newfoundland—and the Bahamas tripled. In 1924, flush with profits, the Bacardi family commissioned the noted American illustrator Maxfield Parrish to design an office building in Havana, a fanciful construct of modern lines and old world whimsy. The eight-story tower, just a block from the Parque Central and a short walk to the presidential palace, had an oversized ground floor clad in a chocolaty marble, with the upper floors in a pale yellow brick capped by fanciful friezes and colorful cornices and crenellations.
Edificio Bacardi became one of the city’s chief attractions for Prohibition pilgrims. Few were interested in the architecture, however. To promote its rum, Bacardi gave away free drinks weekdays to any tourist who wandered up to the second floor bar, where bartenders crafted perfect cocktails. “We took rum, an unsophisticated drink, and made it a sophisticated drink,” company patriarch Jose Argamasilla-Bacardi recalled to the Wall Street Journal. “All the people who liked rum but were ashamed to ask for it aren’t ashamed anymore.”
Travelers touring the West Indies during Prohibition quickly learned that the world could be wonderfully exotic when viewed through the bottom of a cocktail glass. Adolph Schmitt, a bartender on the Hamburg-American liner Reliance, groused about the extra work: “No passenger wanted the same drink twice,” he said. “Instead of ordering Scotch or rye they insisted on clover clubs, orange blossoms, gin fizzes, gin rickeys, mint juleps, and old-fashioned cocktails. Then they learned about Daiquiri cocktails at Havana, rum swizzles at Trinidad, and punch at Kingston. On the way home they wanted all of these. I worked twelve hours a day trying to keep pace with the demand and at night I used to dream that new drinks had been invented.”
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Among the new drinks, the daiquiri cocktail was a standout. A perfect blend of lime, sugar, rum, and ice, the daiquiri cuts through the humidity, heat, and haze of the tropics with an uncanny precision. It has an invitingly translucent appearance when made well, as cool and lustrous as alabaster.
How was it invented? Two origin myths have surfaced, both involving Americans. The most common involves an American engineer, Jennings Cox, who managed mines near the town of Daiquirí, not far from Santiago. In one telling, Cox and another foreign engineer spent a dusty afternoon touring abandoned mines near Cobre in 1896. The day’s work over, they retired to Cox’s home for a drink, where the host was mortified to discover that he lacked imported gin or whiskey to serve his guest. With only local rum that he wouldn’t serve straight, he improvised: He put lime juice and sugar into a cocktail shaker and gave it a lively shaking. The result was surprisingly delicious. “What is this cocktail?” asked the marveling visitor. Cox admitted that it hadn’t been properly christened, but allowed that it was probably a rum sour or something of the sort. The guest found this name insufficiently laudatory. “This name isn’t worthy of such a fine and delicious cocktail,” he exclaimed. “We’ll call it a daiquiri!”
Other variants of this story surface now and again. Cox’s granddaughter claims that when he served the proto-daiquiri he was entertaining not another engineer, but a group of American dignitaries. In another account, Facundo Bacardi was present and reported that Cox exclaimed, “I’ll tell you what, lads—we all work at Daiquirí and we all drank this drink first there. Let’s call it a daiquiri!”
The second myth involves an American military officer named William Shafter, who came ashore during the Spanish-American War in 1898 near Santiago. He was not shy of girth and in poor health, and he liked food and drink more than the tedious chore of battle. When he sampled the drink of the Cuban patriot—rum, lime juice, and sugar muddled together—he found it to his liking and declared, “Only one ingredient is missing—ice.” He set about remedying that omission, and, lo, the daiquiri was born.
Which tale is correct? Who knows? Cocktail archives are lamentably scarce. Connoisseurs of spurious tales will appreciate both stories for the precise, often stilted quotes rendered verbatim (the “lads” is a nice touch). But it’s a bit odd that anyone would claim credit for a cocktail whose ingredients had been mixed well and often since at least 1740, when Admiral Edward Vernon issued his order to distribute limes and sugar with grog rations. Limes had mingled with rum for centuries aboard ships, and it wasn’t much of a secret that the puckery tartness of limes and the underlying sweetness of rum were born to marry. The pair were the Astaire and Rogers of the cocktail world, every bit as perfect as gin and vermouth.
At heart, the daiquiri is simply a variation of the ageless punch recipe: one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak. The chief difference between a daiquiri and punch—and the real stroke of brilliance, to which the General Shafter origin myth gives a nod—was the use of ice as the “weak.”
The cocktail culture that blossomed in the tropics in the 1920s was abetted by the wide availability of ice. In the steamier counties, ice had long been a luxury—captured most vividly in the opening chapter of Gabriel García Márquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude, in which gypsies bring a block of glimmering ice to a small village in South America, a jewel in a sawdust-filled chest, and the protagonist, Colonel Aureliano Buendía proclaims it to be “the great invention of our time.” The inconvenience and expense of cutting ice in winter near northern ports and shipping it south ended around 1870, when the invention of artificial refrigeration meant that even the most sultry cities could produce their own frosty diamonds. By the early twentieth century, ice was an everyday commodity.
