Rum Historian by Marco Pierini
HISTORY OF CUBAN RUM
14. RUM CONSUMPTION IN XIX CENTURY’S CUBA
After a few months’ break, we take up again the story of Cuban rum, this time focusing on rum consumption in XIX century’s Cuba. For this article, I based myself mostly on the essay “Bebidas y ambiente social en la Cuba del siglo XIX” (Drinks and social environment in XIX century’s Cuba) 2002 by Ismael Sarmiento Ramírez, the beautiful book of Samuel Hazard “Cuba with pen and pencil” 1870, the classic book by Fernando Campoamor “El hijo alegre de la caña” (The happy son of the cane) 1981, and, last but not least, the fundamental volume by Frederick H. Smith “Caribbean Rum” 2005.
For the sake of simplicity, I will always use the word rum. But remember that in XIX century Cuba, they usually called ordinary, cheap, rum with the word aguardiente de caña (sugar cane burning water) or simply aguardiente, while they used the word ron (rum) only for the better quality, expensive, product.
Let’s start with the black population, remembering that in Cuba, alongside the majority of slaves, there was also a substantial minority of free blacks and mulattoes. In the Cuban plantations rum was distributed to slaves as a preventive and healing medicine because it was believed that it could preserve them from many diseases and help cure them if they got sick. Also, in Cuba as elsewhere in the Caribbean, to make regular distributions of rum to the slaves was a normal practice in nearly all the plantations. They were limited distributions, not enough to make them drunk, but enough to be enjoyed greatly. These distributions helped to maintain order and respect for hierarchies. Moreover, when the work was particularly hard or difficult, they were given an extra ration as a reward. Distributions of rum occurred also for some religious festivities, for Catholic chapels and priests were often present in Cu-ban plantations. The Planters lived in a perpetual contradiction. On the one hand, rum made the slaves happier and more docile, it made them work harder and better accept their bondage. On the other, too much rum made them drunk, therefore una-ble to work and at times even rebellious and dangerous.
Usually, the slaves drank rum in the morning, pure, without diluting it with water. There were two basic types, the so-called cordón cerrado (closed lacing?) which seems to have been more or less between 28 and 30 degrees abv, and the lighter medio cordón (half lacing?) The ease with which slaves acquired the habit and pleasure of drinking rum probably had its roots also in their familiarity with alcoholic fermented beverages, such as palm wine, widely consumed in their native Africa.
Rum was (and is) also widely used in the rites of Afro-Cuban religions. In Cuba, more than elsewhere in the Caribbean, slaves remained tied to their ethnic and cultural origins, thanks also to their cabildos (more or less, councils), a kind of community organizations on ethnic bases that were tolerated by the masters and the church. In this context, various new religions were born that united divinities and rites of African ancestral religions with strong influences of Catholicism. Santería is perhaps the best-known and most widespread, even outside Cuba. “In Cuba, followers of santería also pour rum libations and make offerings to orisha or spirits in public and private ceremonies. … all orishas require ‘nourishment’, including rum, which they received from followers during regular ceremonies. Like Ogun in Haitian voodoo, Ogou, the aggressive warrior spirit in santería, typically prefers to drink rum. Spiritual possession also demands the extensive use of alcohol …” (Smith)
Blacks, both slaves and free, loved rum and tried to get it in every way, even stealing it or steeling goods to exchange it for. Let’s read again one of the classics of Cuban literature of the XIX century, and indeed of all time, “Cecilia Valdès” by Cirilo Villaverde, written in a large part in 1839. In the novel, which tells the tragic story of a young, beautiful, mulatto girl, rum is often mentioned as the slaves’ drink. “While he was waiting for the Master, or was sleeping, or had in his skull more rum than necessary.” And later “Did you go to the innkeeper of the village to swap with rum the raspadura (a sort of raw sugar) which you steal from the plantation?”
After the abolition of slavery in 1886, the close relation between rum and the blacks continued, “Ex-slaves in Cuba hired themselves to plantations or joined work gangs called cuadrillas. These roving workers received rations of aguardiente just as slaves had under slavery. In 1892, the company store at Santa Lucia sugar factory in Gibara, Cuba, possessed a distillery and nine saloons. Workers were paid with company tokens, which they spent on rum at the company stores and saloons.” (Smith). This explains why, according to Sarmiento Ramírez, “For a long time and still today to say rum is to establish an almost direct relationship with blacks and with the underworld.”
A distorted view with a racist base in his first assertion does not deny that blacks were the most devoted to the consumption of this drink. Regarding the second, rum was the least expensive of all alcoholic drinks, cheaper than grape brandy, and therefore was within reach of the poorest. Only later, in the second half of the century, did the consumption of Cuban rum spread among the upper classes.
Even for the white population, rather than a pleasure drink rum was considered for centuries a preventive and curative medicine for a multiplicity of ills, “remedio universal” (universal panacea) according to the friars who assisted patients in hospitals. Watery, it was a medicine to heal wounds and with towels soaked in rum, they rubbed limbs against pains and tiredness. One of the most ingrained customs in Cuba, that of drinking water mixed with rum, was, according to the beliefs of the time, because the spirit gave good qualities to the water and prevented yellow fever from entering the organism; during the first war of independence, the Ten Years’ War (1868-78), this practice became common among both Cuban and Spanish soldiers.
On the confidence in the healthy virtues of rum and spirits in general, it is interesting to read today a contemporary testimony, Doctor Ramón Hernández Poggio’s. Medical officer of the Spanish army, Hernández Poggio participated in the Ten Years’s War and the following year published in “La Gaceta de la Sanidad Militar” a long essay: “Remembranzas médicas de la guerra separatista de Cuba” (Medical remembrances of the separatist war in Cuba) “Alcohol taken in moderate quantity causes a certain degree of stimulation in the mucous membrane of the stomach to activate its secretions and acts to function, which when absorbed circulates in the blood, speeding up the movements of the heart and vessels, and increasing both the heat of the periphery and of the interior of the body; as it is known that a part of the alcohol circulating with the blood is burned, from whose combustion the increase of natural calories of the organism proceeds; in addition, the carbonic acid that accumulates in said liquid, produces a general excitation, giving greater activity to the functions, and for this cause as well as for the incombustible part that circulates in a natural state with the blood, gives a certain degree of energy to the nervous system, which is revealed by the vigor that the man acquires under that stimulating action.”
From the early 1800s, the growth of rum production had led to the decline of grape brandy imports from the Canaries and Spain, especially from Catalonia. While the wealthiest were drinking Jamaican rum, only wine remained to compete with Cuban rum in the consumption of most consumers. Various types of wine were imported from Spain and France, for all tastes and for (almost) all budgets, but the most common was Catalan wine. And in the choice between drinking wine or rum there was a difference in taste that also had deep cultural and identity roots. The criollo, that is the native Cuban, drank rum, while the peninsular, that is the Spanish born, did not renounce his wine.
Among the many ways of drinking rum there was a kind of hot cocktail that was consumed on the plantations, partly as cordial, in part for pure pleasure. Here’s how Hazard describes it: “As a preliminary to retiring, it was our custom, being invalids (for all of whom it is prescribed), to drink a hot guarapo punch, which is said to be for diseases of the chest and lungs, and which I found very palatable indeed. This punch is made by taking an egg, and beating it up with a ‘sufficient quantity’ of rum, whiskey, or brandy; the boiling cane-juice, fresh from the boilers, and known as guarapo, is then poured into it, and this mixture, after being poured backwards and forwards until there is a fine frothy bead on it, is drunk; and I can assure my reader, from frequent experience of it, it is muy bueno, indeed.”
To us, today, this may seem strange, but in Cuba rum was commonly used also for washing. There is no foreign traveler who did not note with some amazement the ordinary way of using it for personal grooming, supplying water and soap. Cuban women, writes my beloved Hazard, apparently washed very little: “Of course, in matters of this kind, touching the habits of the fair sex, my authority must be second-hand; but I have been frequently informed by lady foreigners, long time resident in Cuba, that the only performance of this kind gone through by the Cuban women, in the country and small places, is the dampening of the corner of the towel with aguardiente, a species of rum, and rubbing with it the face and neck.”
According to José García de Arboleya in his “Manual de la Isla de Cuba” published in Havana in 1852, the annual consumption per capita was of 12 bottles or 8,7 liters. In the second half of the century, rum consumption grew a lot (along with that of beer), but I have not found precise figures, while the consumption of wine declined, almost disappearing in today’s Cuba. These are the same decades in which the new Ron Ligero (Light Rum) was born and spread (see THE QUEST FOR QUALITY in the April 2023 issue) and many famous brands appeared: Albuerne, Álvarez Camps, Bocoy, Campeón, Castillo, Jiquí, Lavín, Matusalén, Obispo, San Carlos, San Lino, La Vizcaya y, sobre todo, Bacardí.
Finally, many foreign travelers claim that Cubans drink moderately and that it was difficult, someone writes impossible, to see someone really drunk. For example, writes Hazard: “One thing I must confess is, that during my entire stay on the island, I never saw in town or country, a person whom we should call drunk.”
And that’s a little hard to believe. Maybe it was just a matter of perception and comparison with their Country. Many of the travelers who left us these testimonies, in fact, came from the USA where Temperance Movements grew from year to year and where drunkenness was considered a real social scourge; the very concept of alcoholism indeed was born in these years. Well, certainly compared to that reality, the situation in Cuba was much better. But I can’t believe that there weren’t drunk-ards at all. In the second half of the century, with the spread of rum (and beer) con-sumption, many new words were born to describe drunkenness and drunks. Too many words, if the thing they described did not exist.
Among many imaginative and funny nicknames attributed to drunks, I want to mention here at least one of the best known: mascavidrios, that is, more or less, glass eater. And here is the explanation of the origin of the word: “there are those who say that a certain furious drunken, after engulfing regular doses of the burning liquor, not being satisfied yet, continued biting the glass, to the point that one who observed him, shouted to him from the door of the tavern: Mascavidrio!” (Francis-co de Paula Gelabert)
In conclusion, during the XIX century, rum consumption grew and spread in Cuba, penetrating all ethnic groups and all social classes. Yet, despite this growth, until the end of the century rum is still not THE Cuban national drink, an icon of Cubanism. For this, we must wait for the new century with Independence and the growing international success of Cuban rum. As we will see in the next articles.
Marco Pierini
