Dive Bars and Dialectical Materialism
Dive Bars and Dialectical Materialism
Communist Rum in Havana
Bar Guayabal is a hole-in-the-wall in the most literal sense. There is a wall, made of concrete, that runs along a small side street not far from the tourist hotels that surround Havana’s Parque Centra. Then, there is a hole in said wall, and that hole is Bar Guayabal. It doesn’t even have a door, just an iron gate over the hole that opens everyday at the good drinking hour of 7 am and locks up every night at 10 pm. But between those hours, there is no drinking experience in Cuba, or anywhere else, quite like it.
The bar menu is spartan: a shot of rum or a bottle of rum. There are theoretically a couple rum options, with bottles of Havana Club available for purchase for about $3 or $6 USD (depending on the edition), but these are presumably kept around only as decoration or in case of the rare emergency in which a stray European tourist gets lost on the way to La Floridita and stumbles in here. The only true option at Bar Guayabal is, for the equivalent of about 10 cents, a shot of rum––or a rum-like substance––from a large and mysterious plastic bottle with a plastic twist-off cap.
That plastic bottle does have a label, and that label does have a name on it, but the brand name is not important. This is good, proud, communist rum. Clear, strong, and devoid of any of the joys that come with the material luxuries of capitalism, this is a liquid that could just as easily, and nobly, polish a hammer and sickle or power a tractor. It doesn’t have much discernible flavor, except for a solid burn on the way down. But it is a rather pleasant burn––the rewarding pain of labor, just as Lenin would’ve wanted. This is the rum of the proletariat, and its representatives can be found occupying nearly every stool at the bar.
In Cuba, especially in Havana, and especially in the tourism heavy area of Habana Vieja, the majority of bars and restaurants are either empty or filled with foreigners. In a country where most people scrape and hustle to live on about $20-$30 per month, a $2-$3 cocktail is simply prohibitive. To drink with local Cubans typically involves picking up a can of beer or planchao––the ubiquitous juice-box sized carton of rum, which is an equally wonderful communist beverage––and posting up in a square or lively street, or on Havana’s Malecon.
So when a friend and I first happened across a lively Bar Guayabal one night, there was no question that we had to stop in and get a drink. One drink quickly became three, or four, or more, as the old bartender––dressed sharply in a white shirt, bowtie, and vest––would only break up the heavy pours from his plastic bottle by occasionally sliding us a bowl of popcorn with a flick of the hand that, though wordless, seemed simultaneously friendly and dismissive, while the conversation slid from politics to baseball, Barack Obama to Omar Linares. For ten cents, it was good rum.