My Rum Diary – Part One.

By Mandy DelVecchio

Our first night in Cuba was a celebration in many respects – I had travelled across the globe from Melbourne, my sister from London and my best mate from Japan, the three of us had not had a drink together in over two years. On top of that we were finally in Havana, Cuba, a dream in itself! So with cause enough for celebration, the accent turned quickly toward what to drink – isn’t it obvious? When in Cuba… drink rum!

We headed to the nearest shop – and I use the word ‘shop’ extremely loosely, remembering we were in a communist country and most ‘shops’ in Cuba consist of so few items they’d more correctly be labeled a ‘storeroom’. Thankfully for us, one of the items that always feature heavily in a Cuban ‘storeroom’ was rum.

For around AUS$5 we bought one bottle of Havana Club, one bottle of unrecognisable cola and a handful of limes. We made our way back to our casa with our wares and prepared for a celebration. We spent that first evening catching up and consuming the only rum cocktail we knew of,  the cuba libre.

Much to our liking, we very quickly learned that drinking rum was less of a celebration and more of a past time in Cuba.

While the cuba libres served their purpose for the first few evenings of our month long journey, after making Cuban friends and spending a lot of time amongst the locals, we soon discovered two things:

1. Rum was going to be offered to us regularly and in varying circumstances – it would prove way too difficult to carry around a bottle of cola everywhere we went; and 
2. Rum was sold on every corner and was cheap, cheaper than cola and beer and more readily available than water.

We were going to have to learn to drink rum the way the Cubans drink rum – all day, every day... and neat.

Determined to fit in with our new Cuban friends, we started to accept the offers of rum. Morning noon and night, bottles were flung in our face along with the words ‘suave, suave’, meaning ‘smooth’.

On a daily basis we were coaxed to take small sips of the rum, and we obliged. However, the motion of swilling rum from the bottle like a pirate, involuntarily brought on a contortion in our faces that we affectionately coined “the rum face”. Although the rum face brought great entertainment to our Cuban friends – they splattered and giggled as they watched us struggle to be suave, suave with our rum ingestion, it started to bring us great shame.

We had to get rid of our rum face.