N°07 · The Havana Breeze
Mojito
/ mo-HEE-toe /
Rum, lime, sugar, mint and soda over crushed ice. Four centuries of Caribbean history disguised as a summer afternoon.
- Spirit
- White rum
- Glass
- Highball
- Method
- Built · lightly muddled
- Est.
- c. 1910s (roots 1586) · Havana, Cuba
Where it comes from — as far as anyone can prove
The mojito’s origin story starts, improbably, with piracy. In 1586, Francis Drake’s fleet anchored off Havana, and legend credits his crew with a medicinal mix of raw cane spirit, lime, sugarcane juice and mint — taken against scurvy and dysentery, and named El Draque after the man the Spanish called the Dragon. It was medicine that outlived its disease.
Centuries of refinement — aguardiente giving way to clean Cuban rum, ice arriving in the tropics, soda water lending lift — produced the mojito Havana knows today, its name possibly borrowed from mojo, the island’s lime-and-garlic sauce, or from an old word for a little spell. By the 1920s and 30s it was the house pour of Havana’s golden age of American refugee drinking.
“My mojito in La Bodeguita, my daiquiri in El Floridita.”
— Attributed to Hemingway — almost certainly marketing, definitely immortal
One bar owns the legend: La Bodeguita del Medio, whose walls carry a framed line in Hemingway’s hand — “My mojito in La Bodeguita, my daiquiri in El Floridita.” Scholars are fairly confident the inscription was a mid-century publicity masterstroke rather than a genuine endorsement; Hemingway’s documented tastes ran to the Floridita. It remains the most successful piece of cocktail marketing ever committed, and the bar it built pours mojitos by the thousand to this day.
Things worth knowing by the second round
- 01
Mint is slapped, not shredded — bruising releases aromatic oils; tearing releases chlorophyll and bitterness. Your mojito should not taste like a lawn.
- 02
El Draque, the 1586 ancestor, predates the word “cocktail” by more than two centuries.
- 03
The Hemingway wall inscription at La Bodeguita is likely apocryphal — and is photographed hundreds of times a day regardless.
- 04
James Bond’s only mojito appears in Die Another Day, on a Havana beach — the franchise’s nod to a Cuba it had never been allowed to film in.
- 05
Cuban bartenders traditionally leave the lime hull and mint in the glass: the drink is meant to evolve as it sits.
Famous company
La Bodeguita del Medio, Havana
Wall-to-wall signatures, a disputed Hemingway blessing, and a permanent mojito production line.
Die Another Day (2002)
Bond hands Halle Berry’s Jinx a mojito in the surf — the drink’s biggest single close-up.
Havana’s golden age
The Prohibition-era pour for Americans who sailed south to drink legally.
Miami
The Cuban diaspora made it the unofficial cocktail of the city, from Little Havana ventanitas to South Beach.