A Tale of Old Cuba (and Alcohol)

Over the dinner table, tonight, talk turned to cocktails, especially the mint-flavored mojito and the famous daiquiri, the ur-drink of pre-Castro Cuba. My grandmother was not only familiar with them (she's familiar with everything, having met everyone from Churchill to Calvin Coolige), but also had a story to go with that familiarity.

My late grandfather was José Morell Romero, a farmer's boy from Camagüey who went to Habana to study law at the University and instead walked into a student revolution. After several exiles, fortune's wheel finally brought him up into the high life of the capital as the Minister of Labor and finally Justice of the Court of Constitutional Guarantees. He was the husband of Rosy de Varona, a high-spirited, humorous blue-blood who could trace her lineage back to the Marqués de San Felipe, the oldest and highest-ranking of Cuba's old (and now long-vanished) peninsulare nobility. She had met him while he was a student and part-time fugitive, and for six months had only known him by one of many aliases. I like to think that I can still trace a ghost of the beauty of so many photographs in the finely-wrinkled lineaments of the face of the grandmother I now know.

They were out on their yacht in Habana Bay, chugging towards Mariel with a handful of guests, and Rosy insisted on taking the steering wheel. My grandmother knows absolutely nothing of matters nautical, ni un poco, though that, naturally, didn't deter her. In short order, they struck a rock and limped home to the dock, taking their rattled guests back home on the bus.

However, my grandfather, always the genteel host, impulsively stopped the bus at the corner and stepped out, spying La Floridita, the famous Habana bar that gave birth to the daiquiri. The real thing, not the ghastly frozen monstrosity, like a wino slurpee, that is such a favorite of college students trying to get drunk. In fact, he and Rosy knew the bartender who'd invented it, or so my grandmother remembers. (The chronological fact that the daiquiri was invented in 1890 means that La Floridita must have had an army of geriatric bartenders in the 1940s, but se non è vero, è ben trovato.) So, still got up in their yacht clothes, they brazenly waded, wholly under-dressed, into the sea of black tie and white shirt fronts to crown the disastrous adventure with a drink, thus saving both guests and hosts from the horror of a ruined evening.

My grandfather the judge, I have to admit, knew how to party in between starting revolutions and guaranteeing the Constitution. If, in the unlikely event La Floridita still stands, I shall have to drink a daiquiri to his memory on the soil of a free and alcoholic Cuba.