Cuba: Rum diaries.

In Cuba, early planters distilled sugarcane juice into a brandy. The molasses that remained in the kettle after the sugar crystals were boiled was used to feed slaves. Once again, the intrepid British led the way by boiling this thick, brownish sludge a second time and allowing it to ferment. The resulting extract was a harsh, dark liquor called “kill-devil,” drunk only by those too poor to afford anything else.
By 1667, it was called rum and proved popular as well as profitable. Barbados was soon producing 200,000 gallons a year.
If wine was drunk aboard Spanish galleons, rum will forever be associated with the Royal Navy. Apparently, sailors were wary of diluted rum, for they tested it by dripping some on a few grains of gun-powder. If the alcohol content was sufficiently high, the water evaporate and the gunpowder flashed when lit. This was the “proof”, a measure that has remained on liquor bottles to this day.
The British sailors who stormed Havana in 1762 brought their tots with them. In the decades that followed, the increased trade with North America and the expansion of the sugar industry created a booming market for Cuban molasses.
This started a peculiar variant of the Triangle Trade: Yankee slavers traded rum directly for slaves. In 1767, the going rate was 130 gallons of rum per man and 110 gallons per woman. From Africa, the slave ships proceeded to Havana, where they unloaded the slaves and took on hogsheads of molasses.
The docks of of Havana was thus awash in rum long before the slave revolt in Saint Domingue, but the French refugees who fled the violence brought their distillation techniques with them.
They found an eager student in Don Facundo Bacardi Masso, who emigrated to Cuba in 1829. He married the daughter of a French sugar baron and a bought a tin-roofed distillery where he developed a charcoal filtering technique that created a smoother, mellower rum. A colony of fruit bats lived in the rafters, and the bat thus became the symbol of Bacardi Compania, founded in 1862.
Today, Bacardi, selling more than 200 million bottles of rum a year, it is still controlled by six hundred of Don Facundo’s descendents. The company flourished during Prohibition, when American tourists flocked to Havana to drink in bars like Sloppy Joe’s on Zuleta Street.
Bacardi became synonymous with rum itself and an indispensable ingredient in Cuba libres. If Bacardi was to be believed, this cocktail was born during the Spanish American War when one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders added Bacardi to his Coca-Cola and drank to a free Cuba.
Another famous libation was developed at around the same time in the village of Daiquiri, not far from the Bacardi distillery. Rum sage, Charles Coulombe maintains that the American engineer at the local iron mine ran out of gin one day and served rum to visiting friends. To hide the taste, he mixed it with lime juice and sugar, creating a variant of grog. In 1932, a bartender at the Floridita on Obispo Street mixed one for a thirsty Ernest Hemingway and rest is literary history. The daiquiri has probably been featured in more novels than any other drink and was a favourite of John. F. Kennedy who enjoyed it with his H. Upmanns.
The holy trinity of Cuban cocktails is completed with mojito, a fizzy version of the daiquiri with fresh mint.
In recent years, Bacardi has become well-known for litigation as for rum, waging an expensive, politically savvy fued against Castro over trademarks. The Cuban government entered into a partnership with French Liquor giant Pernod Ricard to market Havana Club. Havana Club has been owned by the Arechabala family who fled Cuba after the Revolution. When the trademark expired, Cuba re-registered it in the U.S Patent and Trademark office. Despite this, Florida lawmakers managed to get a bill passed that exempted nationalized trademarks such as Havana Club from the usual protections of International Law.
Recently Bacardi announced plans to sell Havana Club in the United States, perhaps inviting another contentious lawsuits.
Rum and politics are still familiar bedfellows.