Drink - Victoria Moore follows the rum-soaked tracks of Hemingway in Cuba
In a taxi from Havana airport, we come the closest I have ever been to running someone over. Thin limbs flash close to the windscreen. Brakes scream. A boy emerges, miraculously whole, at the other side of the car. Our driver, who has been tearing along at multiples of the speed limit, overtaking wildly from the outside and inside, takes one discernibly culpable breath and then starts to shout out of the window: "What the hell were you doing?"
We need a drink. Everyone who comes to Cuba drinks one of two things: a mojito or a daiquiri. It's Ernest Hemingway's fault, and every tourist taking a sip from one of those lime-hued cocktails probably hopes it will endow them with a few moments of macho contemplation, as if being a drinker were a precursor to being a writer.
In the street, a fecund humidity hangs in the air, scythed through by the sinus-scraping, sweet-sour stench that wafts from the sewers. This carcassy smell sticks to your taste buds like papaya, and changes the flavour of everything you eat and drink.
The bar of the Ambos Mundos Hotel, where Hemingway stayed in the 1930s, is immaculate, austerely styled in slabs of grey. The American ladies sipping daiquiris while their husbands video the coffee tables are not done up as nicely as they could be. Only the pianist saves it from feeling like an airport concourse - although during the day, when the Americans are busy on their organised tours, the place becomes glamorous again.
From the outside, La Bodeguita del Medio (another Hemingway favourite) looks rough enough to be authentic. At first, we mistake it for a bar for locals. In the gloom of the tiny front room (there are more tables, and space, round the back), there is dark wood, graffiti-covered walls and a noisy band. The barman makes a rotten mojito. I've been to bars in London where the managers fly the mint for the mojitos out from Cuba because they say it has more flavour. The mint here tastes of nothing. It's a strong mojito - only a centimetre of soda, and so no fizz. But rum and heat go well together, and after only a few sips I have melded into place at this bar. "My mojito in La Bodeguita, my daiquiri in La Floridita", reads a framed blackboard on the wall. It's signed "Ernest Hemingway". There is also a poster of Diego Maradona signed in block capitals: "PARA MIS AMIGOS DE LA BODEGUITA. CON CARINO, MARADONA". Dr Salvador Allende also adds his blessing. What a company the three would have made, had they come drinking here together. A T-shirt with a mojito recipe written on it can be had for US$11. It's not a bad T-shirt.
I have told you how to make a mojito before, but in case you still don't know: take the juice of one lime, a tablespoon of sugar syrup, two shots of golden rum and a handful of mint leaves picked from the stem and bruised. (Reserva makes an even richer cocktail than golden rum, but is a bit more for special occasions. This should, above all, be a simple drink.) Pour into a tall, ice-filled glass and top with soda.
The mojito you make will be better than any you can buy in Cuba. But when you drink it on your lawn or balcony, or in your front room, you won't have the exuberant noise of son and salsa to accompany it, or the sticky tropical air, or smiling Cubans sidling up and offering you sex and cigars.
Nothing works - not the banks, nor the cars, nor the cooking - and, after a few drops of rum, that makes anything seem possible. If you drink mojitos at home, they will still be refreshing, but they won't make you dream of becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. Still, if you want to try, you ought to know that by the time Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea, his alcohol intake rarely included mojitos. Instead, he fed himself Scotch in the morning, Papa Dobles (white rum, grapefruit juice and a few drops of maraschino) later on, absinthe in the evening, two bottles of wine with dinner, and Scotch and soda into the small hours. If anyone else can drink all that and still write their own name, good luck to them.
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