Mojito (History)

Origin

How a modern Mojito is typically prepared.

The Mojito is a Cuban cocktail, which consists of five main ingredients: white rum, sugar (traditionally sugar cane juice), limejuice, sparkling water and mint. The exact origin of the Mojito is open for debate, tracing back to mainly two different stories. The first origin story dates to English sea captain Francis Drake, who carried out the second circumnavigation of the world from 1577 to 1580. In 1586 after his successful raid at Cartagena de Indias, Drake and his crew set sail for Havana but they was an outbreak of dysentery and scurvy on board. Since it was commonly known that the local South American Indians had remedies for various illnesses, Drake sent a small boarding party to Cuba’s shore to receive ingredients for medicine to aid his diseased men. The remedy was deemed effective and helped to heal many of the men. The men returned to the ship with 4 ingredients; aguardiente de cana (a crude form of rum, which translates as fire water), lime, sugarcane juice and mint. This drink was not initially called a Mojito, but it was the original combination of the ingredients associated with this popular drink.

Relation to Slavery

Other historians argue that African slaves who worked in the Cuban sugar cane fields during the 19th century were responsible for the origin of the cocktail. Guarapo, a sugar cane juice often used in Mojitos, was a popular drink among slaves. Slaves brought over from Africa via the Atlantic Slave Trade maintained sugar plantations.

A photograph of slaves from Africa.

Thus, the Mojito is linked to a time of extreme inequality between Africans and Europeans. Colonial classifications of people were based on racial terms and in the social context of the slave trade, Africans came to be associated with slavery and servitude while Europeans were associated with cultural adaptability, political competency and modernity. Therefore, these sugar plantations symbolize the history of racial inequality and slavery that Africans suffered through. Moreover, the plantations linked Cuba with the global economic market. The process of harvesting sugar in Cuba and then transporting it around the world to Europe and Asia via colonial trade routes is an early example of globalization in which goods and people in one location were linked with other places and people through economic routes. The Mojito - with its links to colonial sugar plantations - is a symbol of colonial racism and globalization.

Changing European Perception

The debate over the two origin stories can be linked to the changing European perception of foreign lands and people. In the time of Francis Drake, colonial exploration of the globe had just been initiated and this was accompanied by the perception that Europeans “discovered” the wider world whereas indigenous populations of other lands were blind to their surroundings. The mentality during this time was that the ideas of any non-Europeans were irrelevant, and only those ideas presented by European aristocrats were deemed acceptable by society. Therefore, any discoveries made in exploration travels were associated with European travelers rather than the people it originated from.The second origin story refers to the 19th century when slavery was on the decline around the world. Africans were viewed less as incapable, unintelligent beings and thus, the thought that a slave might have invented something was becoming more socially acceptable.

Social Impact and Effects

The evolution of the Mojito over the centuries has culminated in its current role as a popular tourist drink and a representation of Cuban identity. Several blogs and tourist travel brochures cite the Mojito as the “must-try” drink for tourists. Since it calls for the use of cane sugar, the Mojito alludes to the sugar plantations run by slaves during colonial times. Thus, the prominence of the Cuban Mojito serves as an implicit reference to a past of slavery and when tourists identify the Mojito as being uniquely “Cuban,” they unconsciously associate slavery with “being Cuban.”

Cuban Identity

Due to its identification as a Cuban drink, the Mojito is marketed as a product of Cuban “culture” in order to attract tourists in search of experiencing cultures that are different from their own. This process of marketing the Mojito as giving tourists an insight into the Cuban way of life reflects a wider process of the commoditization of culture that is a resounding phenomenon in the Caribbean today. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, Cuba lost one to two billion dollars in trade per year and it was forced to participate in the global capitalist market for survival. Cuba’s primary economic activity today is tourism, which is also largely dependent on globalization because it involves the selling of Cuban resources - its people, culture and natural beauty - to foreign markets. Since the Mojito derived its origins from the sugar plantations and is today used as a marketing device to attract tourists to Cuba, it symbolizes the continuation of Cuba’s participation in the global market.

Tourism has been a large driver of Cuba's economy.

One form of tourism in Cuba is ethnic tourism, which is the “marketing of tourist attractions based on an indigenous population’s way of life.” As anthropologist L. Kaifa Roland describes, tourist interest in experiencing “authentic” Cuban culture led to the increasing promotion of historically oppressed Afro-Cuban music and dance by cabarets and taverns that paid Afro-Cubans to perform traditional dances like the Rumba. This revitalization of Afro-Cuban culture was directly linked to its increased importance as a source of economic revenue. Had it not been for the financial value of these cultural performances, they would have been continued to be kept in the shadows in the racialized Cuban society. Thus, a culture is valued according to its monetary value and this turns culture into a commodity that is sold in the global market. Since the Mojito is marketed by the tourist industry as an aspect of Cuban culture, it is a physical symbol for the commoditization and exploitation of culture for financial gain.

Economic Factors

As a tool in the tourist sector, the Mojito is used - much like other products of tourism such as hotels and expensive medicines - to segregate tourists and locals on economic and radicalized lines. Roland’s description of her first visit to Cuba as the only black female in an entourage of American students highlights the veiled racism that is prominent in contemporary Cuban society despite Cuban assertions that “race is a nonissue.” When served a Mojito along with her white friends in a Cuban bar, Roland found that her drink was watered down and tasted merely like seltzer water with a little mint in it compared to her friends’ drinks. Even after sending her drink back twice, there was no change to the flavor and realizing that this was a racial situation,

An ethnically black Cuban female.

she angrily confronted the two jineteros (street hustlers) who were accompanying her group. Both were embarrassed when they realized that she was an American since due to her skin color and hairstyle, they had assumed she was a Cuban prostitute and this was the reason behind her bland drink. This example underlines the association of “blackness” with poverty and lower social class since because she was black; Roland was thought to engage in the crude job of prostitution. While a majority of Cuba’s sex workers are actually white or mestiza, the popular belief that sex workers are all of African descent reflects the strong association of black identity with the degrading job of prostitution. By restricting Roland from drinking the actual Mojito, the barman used the drink as a tool to discriminate against those of African descent and thus, the Mojito was used to re-emphasize colonial practices of racial discrimination against Africans.

Discrimination and Status

More importantly, Roland was discriminated against not just because she was black but because she was thought to be a black Cuban. Whenever she proved her American identity by showing her passport to security guards, she was given the same privileges as other tourists. However, because she was assumed to be Cuban due to her dress and hairstyle, she was prohibited from entering these areas if she could not prove her American identity. This points to the government policy of preventing Cubans from entering hotels and other tourist sites. Although the official explanation is the prevention of prostitution, this practice serves to highlight the economic and class differences between the foreign tourist and the local Cuban. As a young Cuban pointed out, “ [A] random Cuban can’t pay for a room at $60-$70…. And if they do have the money – there’s something dark about that money because it is not possible if you are a Cuban, living in Cuba, working like a Cuban that you can make that kind of money.” His statement alludes to the fact that while the tourist often has enough money to enjoy the luxuries Cuba has to offer, the common Cuban struggles to acquire dollar items like television sets with a meager peso income. Thus, the majority of the Cuban population has a lower socioeconomic standing than Cuba’s foreign (mostly white) tourists. Because the Mojito is associated with tourism, it symbolizes the unequal class relations between foreigners and Cubans, which is reflective of colonial times when a colored slave population was placed lower in the power hierarchy than their white masters.

References

Marcus, Anthony. “Racism as a Transnational Process.” In Anthropology for a Small Planet, 2nd ed., edited by Anthony Marcus and Charles Menzies, 37-56. Vancouver: New Proposals Publishing, 2013.

Kirtsoglou, Elizabeth, and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos. “They are Taking Our Culture Away.” Critique of Anthropology 24, no. 2 (2004). http://www.academia.edu/1201606/They_are_taking_our_culture_away.

Roland, L. Kaifa. Cuban Colour in Tourism and La Lucha. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Kothari, Uma. “An Agenda for Thinking about Race in Development.” Progress in Developmental Studies 6, no. 1 (2006): 9-23. http://web.ebscohost.com.