Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause

By Tom Gjelten

Viking

480 pages, $27.95

Over the years, I’ve had my share of Cuba Libres, the cocktail Americans know as rum-and-Coke and many Cuban exiles know as “mentirita,” or little lie because Cuba isn’t free and hasn’t been for a long time. Yet I never knew where it came from. Who mixed it first? And, more relevant perhaps, who was the optimist who named it?

After reading Tom Gjelten’s gem of a book, Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba, I still don’t know the answers to those questions. And neither does the author, a correspondent for National Public Radio. But the origin of the Cuba Libre may be the only detail of the Bacardi family, its prized rum production, and the last 148 years of Cuban history that Gjelten doesn’t know. Everything else—from the price of molasses in the 1850s to the intricacies of U.S. laws regarding commerce with Castro’s Cuba—he has investigated, digested, and delivered in a highly readable and impeccably researched book.

In Gjelten’s recounting, the legend of the first Cuba Libre goes like this: one day, an inspired Havana bartender mixed some Bacardi rum with Coke and offered it to his American customers, a group of soldiers, with a toast: “¡Por Cuba Libre!” (“To a Free Cuba!”) The soldiers repeated the phrase, and the name stuck.

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