Gastronomy

"Mi mojito en la Bodeguita, mi daiquirì en el Floridita".

La Bodeguita del Medio and El Floridita have been transformed into restaurants. The first serves a good Cuban traditional cuisine, with menu of pork, avocados, rice, black beans and chicharrones (fried pork skin). El Floridita, on the other hand, restructured a couple of years ago, has been converted to the likes of tourists with a specialty of fish, shellfish and seafood. Inside the bar, in front of the counter, Hemingway's stool is preserved. He wrote about El Floridita " it was like a lover, one day without it was unthinkable ". In those years, in which the Americans arrived in Cuba to search for exoticism, adventures and easy love, when Havana was an assembly of gangster and brothels, La Bodeguita and El Floridita were the meeting places for artists and intellectuals.

CREOLE COUSINE

Cuban cuisine is a fusion of Spanish, African and Caribbean cuisines. Cuban recipes share spices and techniques with Spanish and African cooking, with some Caribbean influence in spice and flavor. A small, but noteworthy, Chinese influence can also be accounted for, mainly in the Havana area.

Due to historical reasons, the Cuban population was not equally distributed along the island. African slaves were a majority in the sugar cane plantations, but in most of the cities they constituted a minority. Tobacco plantations were inhabited mainly by poor Spanish peasants, mostly from the Canary Islands. The eastern part of the island also received massive quantities of French, Haitian and Caribbean immigrants, mainly during the Haitian Revolution, as well as seasonal workers for the sugar cane harvest, while the western part did not, receiving instead European, mostly Spanish, immigration well into the 1950s. Thus Cuban cuisines developed locally, from the influences and demographics specific to each area.

Cuban cuisine has almost nothing in common with Mexican cuisine, which is a surprise for many visitors from the United States or Europe. It also differs from other Latin American cuisines and food traditions of the United States.

RUM

Rum is produced through the fermentation and the distillation of syrup juice and molasses drawn from the sugar cane. The procedure requires three separate phases: the fermentation, during which water and yeast are added to the molasses; the distillation to get brandy; and the aging for a varying period between three and twenty years according to the type of liquor and the required bouquet. Immediately after distillation the rum is colorless, it acquires the aroma and the well-known amber color ageing in oak casks. To Cuba the fundamental distinction is however between three types: white rum, pale and seasoned only for three years, dry and ideal to prepare cocktails; gold rum, aged for five years until assuming a shade of amber similar to the color of the oakwood ; and añejo, similar to the former, but kept in barrels for at least seven years. In the Caribbean some qualities of very dark rum are also found: they are obtained by adding caramel. The Cubans usually drink their rum neat, cocktails are an American invention: they were spread in the '20, the age of prohibition. Even the Cuba Libre, one of the most famous drinks with a rum base, was invented by Yankee soldiers at the end of 18th.C.when they replaced the Spanish colonialists: they made their Coke more pleasant , chilled cola with a sip of rum; today the famous recipe includes some lime juice.