As Ernest Hemingway’s birthday rolls around each July, Florida bars from Key West to Miami Beach shake mojitos in tribute to the Nobel Prize-winning author. But Hemingway scholars say one of the writer’s most enduring cocktail legends is probably just that — a legend.
“I think his connection to the mojito is probably more myth than reality,” said Mark Ott, a Hemingway scholar who has edited the Teaching Hemingway book series and served as a consulting editor on Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s “Hemingway” documentary. “There’s not much of a record of him drinking mojitos.”
The myth is often traced to Havana, Cuba’s famed La Bodeguita del Medio, where a handwritten inscription attributed to Hemingway proclaims, “My mojito in La Bodeguita, my daiquiri in El Floridita.”
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But historians have long questioned both the authenticity of the signature and whether the restaurant even operated in its current form during much of Hemingway’s time in Cuba, where he wrote “The Old Man and the Sea,” which earned him a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953.
Nevertheless, the inscription has become a staple of tourism and cocktail culture.
By contrast, Hemingway’s affection for daiquiris is well-documented. Ott said the author was a regular at El Floridita in Havana, where bartenders developed what became known as the papa doble, a variation of the daiquiri made with extra rum and no added sugar.
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“The daiquiri is Hemingway,” agreed Frank Gonzalez, the corporate beverage director for Havana 1957, a South Florida restaurant group known for its Cuban cocktails.
Gonzalez said Hemingway likely enjoyed both mojitos and daiquiris during his years in Cuba but that his drinking habits changed over time.
“He became diabetic, so he had to avoid drinking drinks or cocktails with sugar,” Gonzalez told Fox News Digital.
Reporting over the years has similarly revealed that while Hemingway almost certainly visited La Bodeguita del Medio, the evidence linking him to mojitos is thin. Contemporary accounts, letters and biographies much more frequently place a daiquiri, beer, wine or scotch in his hand than Cuba’s mint-and-lime cocktail.
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For Ott, the historical record speaks for itself.
“There’s literally thousands of photographs of Hemingway,” he told Fox News Digital. “I have never seen one where he actually has a mojito in his hand. … You’ll see lots of photos with him and beer bottles in his hands, for example, or mixing up martinis and things like that, but never with minty leaves floating on the top of a glass.”
One drink Hemingway did favor, Ott said, was scotch.
“He certainly liked his scotch,” Ott said. “There’s no question about that.”
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That doesn’t mean mojitos deserve any less appreciation, Gonzalez said.
He calls the classic combination of white rum, fresh lime juice, mint, sugar and soda water one of Cuba’s most enduring cocktails — as long as it’s made with fresh ingredients and a gentle muddle.
Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899. He died on July 2, 1961, at the age of 61.
