When: July 11
National Mojito Day on July 11th celebrates Cuba's most famous cocktail — mint, lime, sugar, rum, and soda — a drink whose simplicity conceals serious technique and whose history runs through Havana's bar culture, sugar cane agriculture, and centuries of Caribbean rum production.
The mojito is credited with saving Ernest Hemingway's liver — he supposedly switched to mojitos from stronger spirits during his years in Havana, and La Bodeguita del Medio has his handwritten declaration "My mojito in La Bodeguita" on the wall.
The mojito's oldest ancestor was a medical preparation. In 1586, Sir Francis Drake's fleet raided Havana, and among the provisions his crew consumed was a drink called El Draque — named after Drake himself — made from aguardiente (rough sugarcane spirit), lime, sugar, and hierba buena, a mint-like herb used to treat scurvy and dysentery. The drink was medicine that happened to taste reasonably good. As Cuban rum production improved through the 18th and 19th centuries, aguardiente gave way to refined white rum, the medicine became a pleasure, and the mojito took its modern form. Havana's golden age — the 1920s through 1950s — produced the cocktail culture that defined the mojito. American Prohibition drove drinkers south to a country with no such restrictions, and Havana became one of the world's great cocktail capitals: warm nights, cheap rum, ice from the mountains, lime trees in every courtyard. La Bodeguita del Medio, a small bar near the Cathedral de La Habana, became famous for...