Boozehound - Jason Wilson [75]
The poet Derek Walcott once wrote about this facet of Hemingway’s legacy: “The seaside bars from the Bahamas to Tobago are full of boiled executives downing drinks and looking out with unshaven machismo to the lather-line of the reefs, their scuba gear conspicuously heaped like infantry weapons. They grunt about groupers and fire coral, as if Hemingway weren’t dead and all the sharks and stingrays that never attack the locals hadn’t gone with him.”
I am not immune to this type of rum-soaked romanticism. I’ll admit it: When I was in my twenties, I fancied myself a vaguely Hemingwayesque character—so much so that some writer friends had teasingly referred to me as “young Hemingway.” It was not a compliment in grad school. Afterward, I spent a good deal of time in Latin American nations that were tottering shakily toward stability—Nicaragua, in particular.
It was during this period that I took up serious rum drinking. Bottles of Flor de Caña rum were three dollars for the white and only six dollars for the seven-year-old Grand Reserve. I remember stocking up during a visit in 1996, during the heated election between former Sandinista president Daniel Ortega and right-wing candidate Arnoldo Alemán. All the bars in the country were shuttered for three days while they tallied the votes. Rum was our only dinner one night when my friend Brian and I got caught up in a demonstration in Matagalpa, a Sandinista town in the highlands (we were escorted back to our hotel by police in riot gear, who told me, “Matagalpa is closed tonight, jefe”). In Granada, the day the bars opened our driver, Julio, met us at our hotel, so drunk on rum at 8:00 a.m. that we had to pile him into the backseat and drive him back to Managua. There, we drank rum and tonics with wealthy young men who were celebrating the Alemán win at a private casino in what seemed like someone’s house. Years later, Alemán would be convicted of pilfering over $100 million from the nation’s coffers.
We must thank Ortega and the Sandinistas, however indirectly, for the outstanding quality of Flor de Caña. When the Sandinistas seized power in 1979 after overthrowing the Somoza dictatorship, the junta set extremely strict price controls—particularly on rum. Rather than sell its best rum under this system, Flor de Caña decided to store it away, letting it age in casks. When the Sandinista government fell in 1990, they owned a huge stock of some of the finest aged rums in the region. Some of those Sandinista-era rums are now on the market as twenty-plus-year-old bottlings.
During the 1990s, Nicaragua struggled to become a tourist destination, “the next Costa Rica,” as travel writers like me called it. Often it seemed so close but so far away. One night I was at Charly’s Bar in Granada, packed with tourists, surveying the vibrant scene. (Charly’s, oddly, had a wall dedicated to the 1980s heavy metal band the Scorpions; the German owner was a dead ringer for one of the band.) Anyway, I suddenly felt a hand smoothing a flyaway hair over my left ear. I swung around, and to my surprise, it was the friendly young Nicaraguan woman tending bar. “Sorry,” she said. “Your hair was out of place and I was just brushing it back for you.” She laughed really awkwardly, letting me know she meant nothing wanton by the gesture.
I assured her it was no problem and ordered another round. “There are a lot more foreigners in town these days, aren’t there?” I said. “A lot more gringos.”
“Oh yes,” she said, pouring a drink. “And why not? We’re all friends now, after all.”
Then, another night, I found myself in the bar of Managua’s Hotel InterContinental, drinking a twelve-year-old Flor de Caña. All around me, businessmen—some in bad suits, some in flower-print shirts trying to look tropical-casual—talked in hushed tones. They had been warned by their waiters not to walk the streets, to take only specific taxis, to visit only the fashionable bars guarded by men with shotguns