Cuba Libre!

It’s cocktail hour, and today calls for a Cuba Libre.  President Barack Obama and President Raoul Castro announced the (re-)opening of embassies, and the rapprochement between the United States and Cuba has taken another big step toward neighborly normalization.

Most people in this country applaud this long-delayed, sensible move. The exceptions are the old-guard Cuban exiles, particularly those centered in South Florida. Their political abuela, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL 27th district), has been all over the media today, decrying this sensible swerve from Cold War politics that obviously have not worked, at all, during the last fifty-plus years.  Her arguments, which she’s put forth for decades, have grown increasingly thin if not to say silly.  Reparations to plantocrats?  Old history and anyway, that’s the way the coquitos crumble during a revolution.  Dealing with dictators who violate human rights?  Can we say Saudi Arabia and China at present, or our shamefully pragmatic history of enabling pet strongmen (Pinochet, Mobutu, Zia-al-Huq, Duvalier)?  

Predictably, Republican Presidential candidates are tripping all over each other to express the most outraged outrageous outrage.  For some it’s knee-jerk pandering to an important part of their traditional electoral base (the Floridians Rubio and Bush, the New Jerseyite Christie, whose state is home to a significant number of Cuban Americans) and/or their ethnic affiliations (add Cruz).  But the rest, it seems, just cannot resist joining another if-Obama-is-for-it-I’m-against-it circle jerk. This stance seems paradoxical, if not downright contradictory: doesn’t normalization open opportunities for things the GOP champions, like new markets, free trade, spreading ‘American’ (Cuba is part of the Americas, but no importa . . . ) values?

The other reason for the GOP’s posturing may be compensatory.  Not a single Republican Presidential candidate has chastised Donald Trump for his insanely offensive comments about Mexicans; maybe they think that posturing against the sitting president’s Cuba initiative shows that they really truly have Hispanic Americans’ interests at heart.

With that face-palm-worthy thought, it’s time to return to Cuba Libre — the cocktail that’s been in existence twice as long as the United States’ embargo of Cuba and that has an intriguing actual and symbolic history.

The recipe is simple:  Rum (preferably Cuban, preferably Bacardi), Coca-Cola, and a twist of lime, over ice.  Leave off the lime and you have a plain old Rum-and-Coke.  Add club soda and you have a Cuba Campechana (half-and-half).  Substitute Vanilla Coke and you have the Gringo.  

But let’s take the classic cocktail.  Rum is made from sugarcane, for centuries Cuba’s most profitable export.  Indeed, sugarcane cultivation fueled the slave trade throughout the Caribbean; after abolition reached British and French islands, Cuba remained a slave-based economy in which (almost all white) plantation owners relied on Black slave labor to cultivate, harvest, and process sugarcane.  Slavery was finally abolished in 1886.  (In the 19th century, limes and other citrus were grown in Cuba, but not for export.)  In the very same year, Coca-Cola was concocted by an Atlanta pharmacist. By 1899, Coca-Cola was being bottled and sold, via aggressive advertising campaigns, throughout the United States and beyond.

By the time of the United States occupation of Cuba (1898 — 1902) after the Spanish-American war, both rum and Coca-Cola were widely and inexpensively available throughout the Americas.  The origin myth of the Cuba Libre cocktail: in 1900 a Havana-based United States Signal Corps captain ordered a Bacardi rum and Coke with a slice of lime; he then toasted “Por Cuba Libre,” a declaration of U.S. success in ‘freeing’ Cuba from Spanish rule.  

This emancipation inaugurated a new imperialism. U.S. and Cuban political and business interests colluded to make the island a laissez-faire fantasyland (for North Americans) and to make Bacardi, Coca Cola, United Fruit, and the Mafia tons of money.  Castro’s Revolution upset these cozy relationships (Bacardi moved to Puerto Rico, Coca-Cola moved to take over the rest of the world, United Fruit redoubled its efforts elsewhere in the Caribbean, and the Mob moved back to the States), and the subsequent embargo (no more Coca Cola in Regla or Cienfuegos?) sundered them permanently.

Except that the Cuba Libre has endured as a sort of bibulous aide memoire. The cocktail’s history suggests that it’s exactly what Republicans should be drinking tonight — to toast the restoration (or possibility of such) of a mutually profitable relationship between Cuba and the United States.

I’d like to visit Cuba for different reasons, academic and aesthetic, but I’d really enjoy having a Cuba Libre in Havana.  So let me invite the normalization naysayers to stop their worn-out carping and have another drink.  Salud!  Todos ganan! Cuba Libre!