In the Mojito, History is Muddled
By Israel Melendez Ayala
The process of making a mojito begins with pouring simple syrup into a highball glass, muddling the mint so it releases its pungent but sweet scent, and then muddling it with the sugar to make it all come together as the base. Then I add rum, lime, ice, and club soda, and finish it off with a stir. You never shake a mojito—that would kill the mint and dampen its aroma.
On the corner of Calle San Sebastián and Calle San José in Old San Juan, there is a bar called La Factoría. I worked there, at the wine bar called Vino. The block is known as the place to go for a party. There is a line of venues, from dives to this cocktail bar, stretching down the cobblestone block in this 16th century town built by the Spanish colonizers.
Some Saturday nights, before the pandemic quieted the city down, people would pack into the street, blocking cars, with cups or cans of the local beer, Medalla, in their hands. Those seeking a quieter time would often sit down at my bar, whether for a bottle of wine or a cocktail. But on weekends, the clock would strike 10 p.m., and it would feel as though the whole street had poured into our tiny space. That’s when the mojito orders would start flowing—three, five or 10 at a time.
The mojito is what bartenders refer to as a “built” cocktail, made to order in the glass. On those nights, I would do this over and over again, even though there’s a bar around the corner where they make gigantic jugs of the Cuban cocktail and sell them for just $5. Their big plastic cups can be found around town any weekend morning, littering the street with the lime and mint dried up inside them.
All across the Puerto Rican archipelago, at bars ranging from fancy cocktail spots like Factoría to the dive around the corner where you can also order a $3 beer, visitors order mojitos. Despite being well-known as the home of the piña colada, created by a bartender named Mochito at the Caribe Hilton Hotel, tourists come thirsty for mint. Most of these travelers are from the U.S.; as a finding from the tourism agency Discover Puerto Rico notes, 61.9% are Americans, enticed by the fact that no passport nor change of currency is required when traveling to the colony.
The mojito is understood as just another tropical cocktail, divorced from its true origin in Cuba. It joins the piña colada and the daiquiri—rum-based beverages using fruits and herbs that grow well in the tropics. Mojitos, in particular, though, with their refreshing mix of rum, lime, sugar, mint and club soda, are one of the most requested drinks worldwide. In London, where one out of every five bars serves it, the mojito is so often requested that they can come “premixed” in draft form. This pre-batched version by Diageo is available in over 500 British bars. In May 2020, there were over 5 million mentions of the cocktail on Instagram from Spain.
It’s a classic drink that’s found everywhere, but it symbolizes the tropics, and that comes with a lot of colonial baggage. Indeed, the mojito’s origins have been obscured by historical storytelling that favors a European gaze and writing in English.
That Anglophone narrative has been traced to 16th century Cuba, when Francis Drake—in the Caribbean by order of the British crown to plunder Spanish cities—sent an expedition looking for a remedy or cure to the dysentery that he and his crew were suffering. They brought him a drink with aguardiente, an early version of rum, mint, lime and cane juice that some called “El Draque” (the dragon), a nickname given to Drake locally, inspired by his ruthlessness.
The narratives that still prevail also tell the story that this Brit was the drink’s creator. Difford’s Guide says all the ingredients were carried aboard the ship to serve medicinal purposes. Owner of the famous Death & Co. and other bars, Ravi DeRossi, who was also a co-author of the book Cuban Cocktails, tells this tale as well. Drink Magazine admits this story is likely apocryphal, but no one suggests that perhaps the mojito has its real origins in Cuba itself, where all the ingredients were available.
This is an Anglo-Saxon story of imperialism that mirrors the narratives and myths surrounding rum as a whole. The enslaved peoples or subjects of the colonizing empire who created it are not credited. The distillation of sugar dates back to 800 BCE in ancient India, but in Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of British West Indies, Richard Sheridan says the British first wrote down the word “rum” in 1647 in Barbados, leading to it being considered the birthplace of the spirit.
“The chief fuddling they make in the Island is Rumbullion, aka Kill-Devil, and this is made of sugar cane distilled, a hot, hellish and terrible liquor,” a British visitor to Barbados wrote then in 1651. Here, the British construct a "history" where Westernism stands as the arbiter of world history and appropriates what it "discovers."
The Spanish were the first colonizers in the Americas that brought and imposed sugar plantations and other related exploits, including distillation, but it was not at an industrialized level in the beginning. The Saccharum officinarum, or sugar, originated from New Guinea, reached the north of Africa approximately 800 BCE, and arrived in Spain during the 8th century by the Arab kingdom of Al-Andalus, Juan Llanes-Santos wrote in Desde el Barrio al Alambique y la Gallera: Tres Ensayos. The distillation of sugar was exercised by the Arabs for medications and perfumes but not for beverages, because “al-kohl” (the origin word for alcohol in Arab) was forbidden, according to Peter James and Nick Thorpe in Ancient Inventions.
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The Mentha spicata, known as spearmint or “Hierbabuena,” “comes from the botanical family of the Lamiaceae, originated in the Mediterranean,” says the anthropologist Licia Garcia Vergara from Puerto Rico, the director of Mi PLANTITA, an organization that studies and preserves pre-Columbian plants and herbs in the Caribbean.
“This plant is used in cooking, perfumes and even medicines for its properties,” she says. “It has useful, antispasmodic properties. It is carminative, antiseptic, analgesic, anti-inflammatory, and stimulating.”
The most common way to use spicata is by infusing its leaves. In this way, it’s thought that it helps to treat indigestion problems, intestinal gas and liver inflammations. It’s also believed to act on the gallbladder, which activates the production of bile, and relieves dizziness and pain. Thus, it is not surprising that Drake took that infusion to treat his dysentery.
Spearmint is mentioned first in the 1st century AD, with references from naturalist Pliny and in the Bible. Mathew 23:23 reads, “How terrible it will be for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your mint, dill, and cumin, but have neglected the more important matters of the Law…”
Further records show descriptions of mint in ancient mythology. Findings of early versions of toothpaste using mint in the 14th century suggest widespread domestication by this point. It was introduced into England by the Romans at least in the 5th century. Therefore, maybe the spicata was on Drake's ship, but it's quite unlikely that that’s where he got all the ingredients (aguardiente, lime and sugar) to make the mojito.
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Sugarcane was fermented into alcoholic beverages starting in the 16th century. Photo by Eva Elijas from Pexels.
The “aguardiente” is a sugar distillate and the precursor of rum. Sugarcane arrived on Columbus’s second voyage in 1493 to Hispaniola—the Dominican Republic and Haiti—and this distillate was not produced until the early 16th century, when the native inhabitants started using sugarcane juice and the byproducts of sugar to produce fermented alcoholic drinks.
“Once they [enslaved people] were sent to the mills, they die like flies from the hard labor they were made to endure and the beverages they drink made from the sugarcane,” wrote Spanish Dominican Friar Bartolome de Las Casas of the conditions faced by people enslaved by Spanish plantation owners in his 1511 to 1520 accounts of his visit to the region, later published in Historias de las Indias.
The British did not have their first colony until 1607, which was Jamestown, Virginia. In the Caribbean, they took Barbados in 1627; therefore, it is highly unlikely that Drake had sugar liquor on his boat in 1595 or 1596, since the British had no sugar production or trade at that time. Obtaining any sugar distillate was probably due to theft in the unsuccessful attack on Las Palmas, Canary Islands, to stock up on food and drinking water, according to Victorias por Mar de los Españoles by Rodríguez González and Agustín Ramón. There, Ana Viña Brito and Manuela Ronquillo Rubio write in El azúcar y el Mundo Atlántico. Economía y Hacienda. Patrimonio Cultural y geobotánico. XVI Coloquio de Historia Canario-Americano, sugar had already been worked since 1508.
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When Drake arrived in the Caribbean in November of 1595, he suffered a great defeat in Puerto Rico, resulting in many casualties and high supply losses, so he started to stock up and deal with the dysentery, stopping in Cuba for a cure or remedy. This was how he came to be credited with the creation and popularization of a beverage that was made by Cubans.
“Unfortunately, what our ancestors did was documented by others, the Spanish settlers or other settlers and for their benefit,” says Rafael Reyes, Caribbean Diageo ambassador and a bartender originally from Cuba. “In addition, they documented how they understood, and therefore content was lost, and a myth was created.”
The mojito is a variation of "mojo," a sour citrus sauce in Cuba made by enslaved people from Africa; the drink could also take its name from “mojado,” the Spanish word for “wet.” Even the name that it is now called comes from a misunderstanding by the European colonizers.
The concoction was originally drunk among farmers from the plantations to deal with their illnesses, mainly produced by the hard labor they endured. It was during the Prohibition era, when alcohol was illegal in the U.S., that it came to be served as a highball with club soda. Havana, Cuba, had become the American hotspot for a cocktail experience, attracting people from the United States who weren’t going to let the government affect their party lifestyle. It was during that time that the classic Cuban drink began to gain a lot of popularity among Americans.
More fame for the drink then came from Ernest Hemingway’s writings, as he lived in Cuba for many years, and his fellow Americans wanted to imitate his notorious habits. At the famous Havana cocktail lounge La Bodeguita del Medio, there is a quote on the wall from Hemingway: “Mi mojito en La Bodeguita, mi daiquiri en El Floridita."
As the Martinician poet Aimé Césaire wrote in his book Discourse on Colonialism, “...colonisation works to decivilize...to degrade'' the practices and culture of the colonized. Rum never was seen as a valuable spirit because the technology to make it was created by enslaved people on sugar plantations, therefore the history of this drink and all other tropical cocktails have been overshadowed by myths that bestow grandeur upon the colonizers. May the continued popularity of the mojito also lead to new interest in who actually created it. To continue to do otherwise is an act of neo-colonialism.
