Cuba came next, and I went back to Havana with a much narrower question in mind than the one I'd carried the first two times I'd passed through this city. I wasn't chasing an unfinished night this time. I was chasing the exact moment Caribbean rum split into two entirely different personalities, and Havana turned out to be as good a place as any to watch that split actually happen.
Bacardí is the name that matters most here, even though the company hasn't distilled a drop on this island in more than sixty years. Facundo Bacardí Massó started distilling in Santiago de Cuba back in 1862, and what made his rum different from nearly everything Barbados or Jamaica had been producing up to that point wasn't the sugarcane, it was the technique. Bacardí pioneered a lighter style, filtering the spirit through charcoal and refining the distillation until the heavy, funky character that defined most Caribbean rum up to then had been polished almost entirely away, producing something clean and mixable in a way the older, rougher styles had never bothered to be. It's the reason a mojito and a daiquirí exist in the form we know them at all, a rum built specifically to get out of a cocktail's way rather than dominate it. I found both drinks at their actual birthplace, a mojito at La Bodeguita del Medio, walls covered in decades of visitor graffiti, and a daiquirí at El Floridita a few blocks over, where a bartender named Yosvani poured mine with the same theatrical, unhurried care the bar's been known for since Constantino Ribalaigua Vert first perfected the drink there in the 1930s. Hemingway used to split his own drinking loyalties right down that same line, famously claiming his mojito belonged at one bar and his daiquirí at the other, and Yosvani told the story like he'd told it a thousand times and still meant every word of it.
What Yosvani wanted to talk about more than the cocktails, though, was 1960, the year the Cuban Revolution nationalized every distillery on the island, Bacardí's included, forcing the family into exile and scattering its production to Puerto Rico and beyond rather than letting the company simply disappear. A separate Cuban rum, Havana Club, had been distilling on the island since the 1930s under the Arechabala family before the same nationalization swept it up too, and the Cuban government eventually partnered with a French spirits company to keep exporting that same name internationally, which is the reason there are now two entirely different rums called Havana Club fighting over the same trademark in different courtrooms depending which country you happen to be standing in, one made in Cuba and blocked from most American shelves, one made under license elsewhere and sold freely here. Yosvani found the whole legal tangle darkly funny, a spirit born on this island still can't legally sell itself under its own name in half the world because of a revolution that happened before either of us were born. I drank a Havana Club that night that had never once technically been to Havana in its current form, poured for me in the actual city it was named after, and found the whole contradiction about as fitting a summary of this island's last sixty years as anything I could have written myself.
Jamaica pulled me in the opposite direction entirely once I got there, less interested in refining rum into something polite and considerably more interested in keeping every bit of the funk that Cuba had spent a century filtering out. I went straight for Appleton Estate, tucked into the Nassau Valley in the parish of St. Elizabeth, an operation that's been distilling on this same land since 1749 and claims, with a fairly strong case, to be the oldest rum-producing estate still working in Jamaica. A guide there walked me through the whole property, cane fields running up into green hills on every side, and I learned that the estate's master blender, a woman named Joy Spence, holds the distinction of being the first woman ever named master blender anywhere in the global spirits industry, not just for rum, for any spirit, a title she's held since the 1990s in an industry that had managed, up to that point, to convince itself blending required something only men had. I tasted a flight of Appleton's aged blends afterward, some carrying rich notes of banana and baking spice that came, the guide explained, from pot-still rums aged specifically to preserve the heavier esters that give Jamaican rum its signature funk, a hogo the whole island seems to actively cultivate rather than apologize for.
Wray and Nephew's overproof, sold in a plain white bottle strong enough to strip paint, gave me the rougher, more honest end of that same tradition, a rum still used across the island in everything from cooking to actual religious ceremony, poured on the ground in libation before a drop of it gets drunk by anyone standing above it. A man at a rum bar in Kingston told me overproof isn't really meant to be sipped the way I'd been sipping Appleton's aged stock an hour earlier, it's meant to be present, in a wedding, a funeral, a Nine Night ceremony for the recently dead, rum treated as a genuine participant in a ritual rather than just a drink alongside one.
I couldn't leave the island's rum history without a stop in Port Royal, once the wickedest city on earth by its own contemporary reputation, a pirate haven so thoroughly built on plunder and rum that a 1692 earthquake sinking two-thirds of it into the harbor struck plenty of people at the time as a fairly direct message from above about the place's morals. Henry Morgan himself operated out of this exact harbor before the town went under, and standing on what's left of it now, a quiet fishing village with barely a hint of its old reputation, I thought about how directly this island's rum fed the British Navy that eventually replaced the pirates it couldn't beat. Sailors received an actual daily rum ration for centuries, a tot straight from the cask, and legend still holds that Admiral Nelson's body was shipped home preserved in a barrel of the stuff after Trafalgar, giving British sailors the grim nickname Nelson's Blood for their own ration long after anyone could confirm whether the story was even true.
Standing between those two islands in my own memory, one that spent a century polishing rum into something you could pour into anything without noticing, and one that's spent the same century refusing to file down a single rough edge, I understood something about this whole spirit that I hadn't fully appreciated back in Barbados. Rum was never one thing pretending to be two. It split, deliberately, into an entire family of arguments about what a good drink is even supposed to taste like, and both answers turned out to be right.
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