Daiquiri — Three Testimonies About Who Named It, All Contradicting Each Other

The story of who invented it rests on a secondhand account from seventy years after the fact. But the more specific question — who actually gave it the name — left behind three testimonies that contradict one another.

1. The Story Usually Told

The Daiquiri’s invention is usually credited to an American mining engineer, Jennings Cox.

The story goes like this: in the late 1890s, Cox — working in the mining town of Daiquirí near Santiago, Cuba — ran out of gin while entertaining guests. Improvising with the local rum on hand, he added lime juice and sugar, and named the drink after the place.

The cocktail is said to have been later refined at the Havana bar El Floridita, and to have spread around the world through its regulars, including the writer Ernest Hemingway.

2. Checking the Original Sources

Trying to verify the “ran out of gin” story, we couldn’t find where it actually comes from.

We checked multiple sources, and found not a single citation of a contemporary record for this anecdote. Even the earliest testimony we could confirm dates from nearly half a century after the event.

The year Cox is said to have made the drink also varies across sources — some say 1896, others 1898, and still others around 1900.

Among the several later testimonies, the most frequently cited is one from 1970, more than seventy years after the event — an account a step-grandchild of Cox’s gave orally to a cookbook editor. The only contemporary written records we could confirm relate to Cox’s own career (his position at the mining company, and similar details) — not a single contemporary document records the moment of the drink’s invention itself.

3. Who Named It — Three Conflicting Testimonies

There’s a question that should be easier to answer than “who invented it”: who was the first to actually say the name “Daiquiri.” And yet, here too, there’s no agreement.

Testimony one. The engineer Francesco Pagliuchi sent a letter to a Havana newspaper in 1948. The letter was written specifically as a rebuttal to another bartender’s obituary, which had reported that he was the one who invented the Daiquiri. In it, Pagliuchi claims that he was the one who suggested the name to Cox.

Testimony two. According to another source, Cox called the drink simply a “rum sour” for over a decade, and it wasn’t until 1908 that a bartender at a different bar, the San Carlos Club, named it a “Daiquiri-style rum.”

Testimony three. And there’s the obituary Pagliuchi was rebutting in the first place — that same bartender’s own claim to have been the inventor.

Around this single fact — who was first to say the name — three mutually contradicting testimonies remain, side by side. And at least one of them (Pagliuchi’s letter) was written fifty years later, for the express purpose of denying someone else’s claim to credit.

4. The Bar’s Own Records, Surprisingly, Held Up Better

The parts of the story that revolve around named individuals keep shifting. The more modest part — the bar’s own operating records — held up more solidly.

El Floridita’s bartender, Constantino Ribalaigua Vert (“Constante”), joined the bar in 1914 and became its owner in 1918. The recipe booklets he published for the bar survive in editions from 1934, 1935, 1937, and 1939, preserved in a specialist digital archive.

These aren’t oral tradition — they were booklets actually printed and distributed at the time. By 1934, the booklet shows, several variations (No. 1 through No. 4) were already established and in print.

Among them was a version made without sugar, already named after Hemingway, a regular customer. This is one of the earliest printed records of what later became known as the “sugar-free Daiquiri.” What matters more than why this drink came to be is when and where it was printed — and that much, we can say for certain.

5. Placing a Rum Made in Laos on Cuba’s Light-Rum Foundation

A Daiquiri has traditionally been built on the foundation of a light, clear Cuban rum. This time, in that slot, we placed a rum from Laos’s Lao Agro Organic Industries: LAODI White Rhum.

Here’s something worth stating precisely. Neither LAODI’s own site nor BG’s official pages explicitly position this bottle for use in a Daiquiri. The reason we chose it here isn’t an official recommendation — it’s a structural parallel in production method.

LAODI White Rhum is made using what’s often called the “agricole” method — fermenting and distilling only fresh-pressed sugarcane juice, pressed the same day it’s harvested, rather than molasses. This is a different lineage from traditional Cuban rum, but it shares the same underlying design idea: preserving the character of the cane itself. We placed it in this slot as an editorial decision based on that shared idea — and we wanted to state that reasoning up front.

6. Judgment Materials for the Bar

This is as far as we can take it. What comes next belongs to whoever is standing behind the bar.

The following is a framework of considerations for professional bartenders. It is not a recommendation for home preparation.

① Molasses-based rum and agricole-style rum belong to different flavor lineages.

Most of the rums traditionally used in a Daiquiri are molasses-based. Because LAODI White Rhum is made from fresh cane juice, even within the same broad category of “clear rum,” the direction of the aroma that comes forward is different. How to make use of that difference is not something for us to decide.

② The balance of lime juice and sugar is central to the recipe.

Because a Daiquiri is built from so few elements, the balance of acidity, sweetness, and alcohol presence has an outsized effect on the final result. We consider the specific proportions a matter for each establishment to design, and we have not included them here.

③ The type of sweetness added.

Sugar, simple syrup, or none at all — even the traditional approach allows for a range. This choice shifts depending on how strongly the rum’s own aroma comes through.

Where to Begin the First Build

Do you start by confirming how the aroma from LAODI’s fresh-juice character differs from a traditional rum foundation?

Do you start from the usual acid-sweetness balance and adjust from there?

Or do you start close to sugar-free, to let the rum’s own character speak first?

Any of these is a valid starting point. The moment that first choice is made, it already belongs to that bar.

7. What Became Clear Wasn’t an Answer — It Was a Contradiction

We return to the question this article opened with.

The bigger story — who invented it — rested on a secondhand account from seventy years later. And the smaller, more specific question — who named it — left behind three testimonies that contradict one another.

Meanwhile, the more modest part — the bar’s own operating records, the booklets Constante actually printed — turned out to be the more solid record. The bigger the story about a named individual, the more it wavered; the more modest the operating record, the more solid it held. That is as far as we can say for certain about this cocktail.

8. What We Haven’t Answered Yet

This article addressed the question of who invented and who named the Daiquiri, and the editorial reasoning behind our choice of rum.

The balance of lime juice and sugar, and the type of sweetness to add — these we’ve laid out as considerations, not decisions.

Next time, we continue the same sugarcane story from a different angle. The Mojito.

Coming up next.