Bacardi - Hemingway Connection

Hemingway Connection

Ernest Hemingway lived in Cuba from 1939 and stayed until shortly after the Cuban revolution. He lived in the small town of San Francisco de Paula, located very close to the Company’s Modelo Brewery for Hatuey beer at el Cotorro.

In 1954, Compañía ‘Ron Bacardi’ S.A. paid him homage when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature of his novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952), in which he honored the Company by mentioning its Hatuey beer. Hemingway also mentioned Bacardí and Hatuey in his novels To Have and Have Not (1937) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).

Guillermo Cabrera Infante wrote an account of the festivities for the periodical Ciclón, titled The Old Man and the Brand (El Viejo y la marca). In his account he described how “on one side there was a wooden stage with two streamers – Hatuey beer and Bacardí rum – on each end and a Cuban flag in the middle. Next to the stage was a bar, at which people crowded, ordering daiquiris and beer, all free.” A sign at the event read: Bacardí rum welcomes the author of The Old Man and the Sea.

In his article The Old Man and the Daiquiri, Wayne Curtis tells us how Hemingway’s “home bar also held a bottle of Bacardí rum.” Hemingway wrote in Islands in the Stream “…this frozen daiquirí, so well beaten as it is, looks like the sea where the wave falls away from the bow of a ship when she is doing thirty knots.”