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| Jennings Cox |
In 1898, after the victory of Roosevelt at
the Battle of San Juan, the Americans began to exploit the iron mines and this
engineer led one of the first explorations. Cox and his team worked in the
Sierra Maestra hills to the outside of Santiago de Cuba where the small town of
Daiquiri is located and was the one who invented the famous drink during their
stay there. The engineers received
substantial salaries and generous rations of tobacco as an incentive after
leaving their jobs in the United States to go to Cuba and
face the threat of yellow fever that was there at that time. Jennings also
asked that his workers receive a monthly ration of local rum, Bacardi Carta
Blanca, that local workers used to mix with coffee every night after the
workday. This is how he began to experiment until he created what we now
know as Daiquiri.
The gossips tell that the history of this
drink can be attributed to another engineer, Pagliuchi ,
who was a mine observer and who met more than once with Cox. During their
meetings, they talked about creating a drink with the ingredients that Cox had
at hand: rum, lime and sugar. Cox's granddaughter tells a slightly
different story; she said that his grandfather was running out of gin when
he had to entertain the Americans. When that happened, I changed it for
rum that never served directly but mixed it with lime and sugar to mask its
flavor. Whichever way Cox managed to create the drink, the result was
sublime.
In Havana, a bar just off of the square in
Old Town Havana was El Floridita. This
is a bar that was owned by Constantiono Ribalaigua Vert. He has been credited with the invention of
the “frozen Daiquiri” To this day it is
the best please in the world to go have one of these very refreshing
cocktails. A pleasure that I have
enjoyed many times.
He did his best writing in the morning,
standing in front of his typewriter, plucking the keys as fast as the words
might come to him. This was fortunate, because by 11 a.m., the Havana heat
began to creep into his rented room at the Hotel Ambros Mundos. He couldn't think in the swelter, much less
write. If the trade winds were good,
Hemingway might make his way to Havana Harbor, where his boat, Pilar, was
docked in the 1930s. But on other days, he would take the ornate caged elevator
down from Room 511 to the lobby and make his way out to the sun-speckled
street. It was just a 10-minute stroll through Old Havana from Hotel Ambos
Mundos to El Floridita, his favorite bar.
Between the heat and the morning spent cooped in his small room,
Hemingway was always parched by the time he arrived at El Floridita.
According to Hilary Hemingway, Ernest’s
niece, Ernest Hemingway's niece, explains: "In the early 1930s, Hemingway
went into the Floridita to use the restroom one day. People in the bar were
bragging about the daiquiris that were being served there. So he ordered one
and took a sip. Ernest asked for another one, this time with 'no sugar and more
rum.' And that's how the Papa Doble, or the
Hemingway Daiquiri, was born." Ribalaigua
coined the drink after Hemingway and the rest is literary-meets-libation
history. The Papa was for Hemingway, known
for his graying beard and fatherly self-assurance. The doble — well, that meant two. Two times more
liquor to pack the most punch. Hemingway
proudly boasted to have downed 17 of Constante's daiquiris over the course of
one afternoon in 1942.
