by Wayne Curtis
What makes the daiquiri an enduring classic is its perfect simplicity. It doesn’t require an off-putting list of unfamiliar ingredients, and the techniques for making one can be easily learned. Yet it requires a nuanced pouring hand to get just the right proportions—not too sweet nor too sour, not too icy nor too warm. A proper daiquiri may be either shaken or stirred. Recipes typically call for shaking the lime juice, sugar, and rum until the shaker frosts over, then straining and serving. In 1909, a naval medical officer named Lucius W. Johnson met the engineer Jennings Cox, who served him one of his famous daiquiris. “He mixed in each glass a jigger of rum, the juice of half a lime, and a teaspoon of sugar,” Johnson wrote. “He then filled the glass with finely shaved ice and stirred it well. In that hot, humid weather the ice melted rapidly and the glass quickly became frosted.”
Johnson brought his daiquiri recipe to the United States, where he introduced it to the Army and Navy Club on Farragut Square in downtown Washington, D.C. The drink caught on, and the club soon opened the Daiquiri Lounge. (Officers still order up daiquiris here.) This was the first step to making the daiquiri a proper cocktail in the eyes of Americans.
It took Ernest Hemingway to give the daiquiri a more literary glow.
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Constantino Ribalaigua Vert was the chief bartender and owner of El Floridita, a popular establishment just a few minutes’ walk from Hemingway’s hotel. With its long bar, dim interior, and grocery stocked with basic cooking supplies, it had the congeniality of a bodega combined with the sophistication of a hotel bar. Constantino had first learned about daiquiris from Emilio Gonzalez, a bartender at the nearby Plaza Hotel. But Constantino wasn’t content to leave the concoction alone, and he tinkered endlessly, mixing daiquiris with the chipped ice from the Flak Mark chipper he had imported from the United States. He created at least four different versions of the daiquiri, all excellent. One popular variant included five drops of Marasquin, a cherry-flavored liqueur. He dubbed it the “Daiquiri Floridita.”
Constantino’s technique involved equal parts precision and flamboyance. He would fill stemmed cocktail glasses with ice to chill them, pour the ingredients (often for several drinks) into a cocktail shaker, and then shake vigorously, reportedly then sending the contents in a great arc from one half of the shaker to the other. He’d empty out the ice from the now-chilled glasses, line these up in a row on the bar, and fill them with a fluid sweep of his arm. Awed visitors said that every glass was filled to the brim, and not a drop was left in the shaker. To watch Constantino was to watch a master craftsman at work.
As he presided over his bar one day according to one popular story, a scruffy, bearish man entered and asked to use the toilet. When the man emerged from the bathroom and saw the daiquiris lined up on the bar, his curiosity was piqued. He asked for a sip. “That’s good, but I prefer it without sugar and double rum,” the man said. Constantino mixed one up to those specifications, and the man declared it very good. He was, of course, Ernest Hemingway. This modified version of the daiquiri became known ever after as the “Papa Doble.” (A later variation also enjoyed by Hemingway included a splash of grapefruit juice and a dash of maraschino liqueur: the “Hemingway Special.” Neither drink, it saddens me to report, is of much merit.)
It was Hemingway’s first but by no means last visit to El Floridita. About a third of his life was spent in Cuba, a measurable portion at El Floridita. One of the waiters later recalled that Hemingway would often slide into his usual seat in a shadowy corner of the bar, far to the left, where he would read or write, and remain so still as to attract no more attention than a painting. “If you didn’t see him you didn’t know he was there,” the waiter said. Hemingway made no effort to stand out; one of the things he liked best about Havana was that he could let his beard go long, wear ratty blue swimming trunks and a dirty guayabera shirt, and sit barefoot at El Floridita while downing Constantino’s double daiquiris.
And down them he did. Hemingway drank long and deeply, sometimes breaking up a drinking session with a trip to the jai alai fronton, only to end up back at El Floridita, where he’d have four or five more drinks before calling it a night. He maintained his drinking habits even after his third wife, journalist Martha Gellhorn, persuaded him to leave his downtown hotel room and purchase a small farm, which they called Finca Vigía, a few miles southeast of Havana. Hemingway said the marathon sessions with the bottle were essential to combat the fatigue that plagued him after writing. Biographer Carlos Baker notes that his binges were the only aspect of Hemingway’s Cuban life that really annoyed Gellhorn. And as their fights over his drinking increased, Baker wrote, he spent more time “at the Floridita while the tall daiquiris came and went in seemingly inexhaustible supply.”
During his fourth marriage, to Mary Welsh, Hemingway still sought out El Floridita while awaiting her return from her frequent travels, keeping at bay what he called the “black lonelies” by staying out until two in the morning. A consummate competitor, Hemingway managed to set a house record, consuming sixteen daiquiris in one sitting. Yet he had a heroic capacity for drink. He rarely became a nasty or sloppy drunk, but rather tended to grow sullen and remote. He chief problem, he said, was the “mastodon hangovers” that made it all but impossible to work the next day.
The daiquiri became nearly as large a part of the Hemingway legend as bullfights in Spain and the woods of northern Michigan. He worked the daiquiri into his fiction, most notably in his posthumously published Islands in the Stream. “The Floridita was now open,” Hemingway wrote, and his protagonist Thomas Hudson entered and ordered “a double frozen daiquiri with no sugar from Pedrico, who smiled his smile which was almost like the rictus on a dead man who had died from a suddenly broken back, and yet was a true and legitimate smile.” Hemingway later turned uncharacteristically rhapsodic about his favored drink: “This frozen daiquiri, so well beaten as it is, looks like the sea where the wave falls away from the bow of a ship when she is doing thirty knots.” (Hemingway can’t claim credit for introducing the daiquiri to the literate American public. That honor goes to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who produced the first known published reference to it in 1920, when the daiquiri made a fleeting cameo in This Side of Paradise.)
The daiquiri was by no means Hemingway’s only drink—he was not especially picky when it came to alcohol. He often knocked back three Scotches when he finished writing. He liked absinthe and red wine and white wine and champagne and vodka and whiskey. On the Pilar, his thirty-eight-foot fishing boat, Hemingway had a customized bar built high on the flying bridge to keep drink at hand when piloting the boat; he called tequila his “steering liquor.” Hemingway steadfastly refused to admit that he had a drinking problem. (“Have spent my life straightening out rummies and all my life drinking,” Hemingway wrote to A. E. Hotchner in 1949, “but since writing is my true love I never get the two things mixed up.”) But his drinking began to poach on his skills, and his output lessened and grew less compelling after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea in 1952. Even FBI director J. Edgar Hoover noted, apropos of Hemingway’s fruitless hunts for German submarines off the Cuban coast during World War II, that “Hemingway’s judgment is not of the best, and if his sobriety is the same as it was some years ago, that is certainly questionable.”
Hemingway managed to curb his thirst after being hectored by his friends, but like Captain Morgan four centuries earlier, his present love of drink began to overshadow the exploits of his youth. He was often in pain as a result of injuries suffered during his last African safari, and drink proved a balm for the body as well as the mind. Workers at Finca Vigía remember the afternoon he learned he had won the 1954 Nobel Prize for literature. He brought out tray after tray of drinks and served them up to the nearly dozen employees who maintained the house and grounds. “By the time we were done drinking, I could barely find the door,” one recalled. By the late 1950s, the writer George Plimpton sai
d he could see Hemingway’s distended liver through his shirt, standing out “from his body like a long fat leech.” The writer’s mental state deteriorated, and he submitted to electroshock treatments in 1960 and 1961. Then one day in Ketchum, Idaho, two days after being released from treatment, he took out a shotgun he used for hunting partridge, loaded it, put it to his head, and pulled the trigger. It was July 2, 1961, and Ernest Hemingway was sixty-one years old.
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The bells of Repeal rang out on December 5, 1933, the day that Utah became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. With noteworthy brevity, the amendment stated, “The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.” The Eighteenth Amendment, which banned liquor sales, remains the only constitutional amendment ever to be rolled back. The reasons for the reversal were many. The Drys had largely expended themselves in the long and hard-fought battle to ban liquor, and thereafter lost much of their drive, focus, and ardor. It turned out that they were better crusaders than administrators. What’s more, in the early 1930s, the nation was slouching through the Great Depression, and any effort to revive manufacturing was welcome. Firing up the shuttered distilleries would light a spark in the more depressed regions of the country, and beleaguered farmers would find new corn markets for bourbon and grain markets for beer, thereby shoring up flagging commodity prices. (“Beer for Prosperity” neckties were fashionable among advocates for repeal.)
And, in the end, Prohibition didn’t achieve its goal of eliminating liquor consumption—not by a long shot. Drinking did decline: By most accounts, Americans drank about a third less at the end of Prohibition than the beginning, not so much because they couldn’t obtain booze but because drinking cost more. Yet the tax bill for reducing America’s alcohol consumption by one beer out of three was staggering. Not only was enforcement expensive—by some estimates, the government spent more than $10 billion (in current dollars)—but the government also lost huge amounts of tax revenues to bootleggers and the black market.
More significantly, Prohibition undermined respect for the law. Crime became endemic in the cities as turf battles erupted in the shadowy demimonde of bootleggers and organized crime bosses. (Some 550 died in liquor-related clashes in Prohibition Chicago alone.) More insidiously, common citizens who otherwise considered themselves law-abiding thought nothing of filling a hip flask with illegal hooch or spending an evening at a speakeasy. When the nation’s most esteemed citizens openly flouted the guiding charter, other cracks in the foundation were inevitable. Even John D. Rockefeller Jr., a firm Prohibition advocate who put his money into lobbying for the liquor ban, reconsidered his stand. “Many of our best citizens, piqued by what they regarded as an infringement of the private rights, have openly and unabashedly disregarded the Eighteenth Amendment,” he wrote. “As an inevitable result respect for all law has been greatly lessened.”
Faced with growing crime, a floundering economy, a mixed track record, and the impossibility of eradicating liquor consumption, the tide began to turn. The amendment to repeal the ban was introduced, passed, and ratified, and less than a year into his first term, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Presidential Proclamation 2065. Roosevelt reportedly then mixed the nation’s first legal martini in nearly fourteen years.
With drinks once again on the table, customers rushed to the bars, and bartenders hustled to stock the shelves. Although Prohibition had rendered the saloon extinct, its role was quickly filled by nightclubs and other entertainment venues, which proved to be a breed apart from the beery watering holes of the past.
The new places were, however, a distant cry from the grand hotel bars of the cocktail’s golden era: The knowledge of how and what to drink had been lost to a generation. For drinkers, Prohibition was akin to the burning of the library at Alexandria.
Serious imbibers who recalled the stylish cocktails served up prior to Prohibition were disheartened by unschooled hordes that filled the new bars to overflowing. These were young people who saw drink as a mere intoxicant rather than a centerpiece to a social ritual. “Those who had mastered the art [of drinking] somewhat before Prohibition, have been slow to reappear, whereas the new crop would put to shame the uncouth ecstasies of South Sea Islander or the Indians of New Mexico,” wrote H. G. Moody in American Mercury in 1936. “Let the modern American who wishes to drink be made to know that he is starting from scratch, that he has to acquire a form of culture to do the trick even half well.” A drinker old enough to remember better days told a reporter that she hoped only that her grandchildren would one day “know the difference between drinking like gentlemen and lapping it up like puppies.”
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No spirit benefited from the long national drought as much as rum. With ample supplies in the islands and a newly developed taste for the stuff among everyday Americans, this three-hundred-year-old spirit emerged from its century-long slumber into a bright new day. Approximately 2.5 million gallons of rum were readied at the shipping docks of the West Indies on the eve of Repeal. The island of Trinidad sent off America’s first legal consignment—one hundred cases—and gave away thousands of free drinks to American visitors in the hope that they would carry their newfound tastes back home.
“While a great deal of inferior ‘fire water’ rum is likely to be sold in the United States for several years,” reported Literary Digest in early 1934, “the better quality rum made from genuine sugar cane should be obtainable in increasing measure…and the industry is confident of restoring the taste for a liquor that was once inextricably woven with the romantic history of early America.”
Rum was back in fashion. “Perhaps the fanatical dry will object to the latest discovery the drinking public of America is making—the discovery of rum,” reported New Outlook magazine in 1934. “The American public has been a little delayed in discovering this beverage, but according to reports from the West Indies and other Caribbean isles, a rum boom is under way, after many years of sad decline….Perhaps because it was impossible to imitate, the years of Prohibition had made us forget just how efficient and tasty a beverage it is. But now the public taste is turning back to the memory of its ancestors, and rum is arriving, or about to arrive, on our shores in staggering quantity.”
The rum that made its way to these shores, of course, landed in a very different America than the rustic colonies it had left behind. Advances in the chemistry, sanitation, engineering, fermentation, and distillation had brought major changes to the liquor industry. Production was no longer undertaken by a motley assortment of small-scale producers—like the approximately two thousand whiskey distilleries that flourished in the hills and hollows of Kentucky just prior to Prohibition. It was increasingly dominated by fewer, larger firms with enough capital to take advantage of new technological efficiencies. Among the largest and best known of the companies was National Distillers, dubbed “the United States Steel of liquor,” which had seven plants running night and day to meet booming post-Repeal demand. To compete effectively, rum manufacturing began the process of consolidation. Larger, better-funded companies like Cuba’s Bacardi, Jamaica’s Wray & Nephew, and Barbados’s Mount Gay would come to dominate international rum markets.
An even more sweeping change came in marketing and branding. Early rum producers could ship a passable product in plain barrels to an undemanding market. That world had passed. To attract attention on crowded shelves and anticipate (or manufacture) consumer needs, rum manufacturers had to learn the craft of advertising and marketing.
Many rum distillers quickly realized that what the consumer wanted was “Cuban rum”—an almost generic term referring to any light, crisp rum. Like Bacardi, which started it all, Cuban rum went down easily and mixed well with everything. Cuban competitors had long ago sought to copy Bacardi’s production methods, filtering and blending to produce a less cloyin
g product. The Matusalem family produced a similar rum as early as 1872, and Havana Club rolled out its improved rum in 1878.
During and after Prohibition, other West Indian distillers also retooled to meet the clamor. Puerto Rico made the transition best, its rum becoming synonymous with Cuba’s in the public mind. The government pushed hard to improve quality, banning island distillers from blending their rum with neutral spirits, then decreeing that all Puerto Rican rum be aged at least one year. Puerto Rican rum was further aided by Puerto Rico’s status as a United States territory, meaning that most exports, including rum, were exempt from import duties. In 1936, Cuba’s Bacardi family, rightly concerned about its financial disadvantage, became licensed to distill in Puerto Rico, and then invested more than a half-million dollars to buy an empty building near the seawall in San Juan’s old city. This was a seed from which the world’s largest rum distillery would one day grow.
For the smaller island distillers, Bacardi wasn’t the most worrisome competitor. It was an unexpected heavyweight: the U.S. government. In 1934, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt moved to improve the living conditions in another U.S. territory, the Virgin Islands, which the United States had acquired from Denmark twenty years earlier. President Herbert Hoover visited in 1931 and described it as an “effective poorhouse,” an island devastated by the back-to-back economic hurricanes of Prohibition and the Depression. To make the islands self-sufficient, the U.S. government invested a million dollars to set up the Virgin Islands Company, which was chaired by the U.S. interior secretary. The money was used to buy sugarcane lands, sugar factories, and shuttered rum distilleries. The old stills were fired up. The goal of the government—in a striking departure from its recent role as liquor cop—was to produce “as fine a rum as distilling science knows how to produce.” Not all greeted this project with enthusiasm. U.S. distillers didn’t relish the idea of competing directly with the U.S. government in home markets. And feral Drys took affront that the government was getting into the rum trade. Roosevelt ignored the bawling and put this on his list of pet projects. He suggested that the new rum be called “Colonial” and even sketched out a possible label. In the end, Roosevelt didn’t get his way. The rum was sold as “Government House,” and its label featured a palm tree, a harbor, and a sailing ship.
