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The Fabled Pour

Prohibition and the American exile

When the United States went dry in 1920, its bartenders did not stop working. They moved. Paris, London and above all Havana took them in, and the cocktail came home thirteen years later speaking rum and French.

By The Fabled Pour editorial team · 6 min read · Oct 11, 2026

On 17 January 1920 the Eighteenth Amendment took effect and the American bar, as a legal institution, ceased to exist. The usual story is that the cocktail went underground and got worse, cut with bathtub gin and sweetened to hide it. That is true as far as it goes. The other half of the story is that the people who made cocktails for a living packed their shakers and left, and that for thirteen years the American cocktail was perfected somewhere other than America.

A dozen a day from Chicago

The departures began at once. A February 1920 report counted a dozen bartenders a day leaving Chicago alone for Cuba, and Difford's Guide's account of the decade describes Americans taking over nearly every bar in Havana, a city with something like seven thousand of them. Behind the bartenders came the distillers. A Virginia whiskey maker moved his plant to the island. A Chicago brewery was bought by a Cuban company and expanded. Louisville investors pledged money for a resort with sixty thousand barrels laid down, until Cuban businesses led by the Bacardi family blocked the plan.

The customers followed too. American visitors to Cuba had numbered about 33,000 in 1914. By 1928 the figure was 90,000, and it kept rising for two decades. Havana was a ninety-mile boat ride from a country where a drink was a crime, and its bars advertised themselves accordingly.

Sloppy Joe's

The most famous of them was run by a Spaniard. Jose Abeal y Otero, born in 1886, had worked in Havana, New Orleans and Miami before opening his own place in Havana in 1917. By the bar's own telling, in its 1936 cocktail manual, it began as a small grocery store, and the name came from a visiting American friend who looked at the state of the place and said so. The manual dates the purchase to 1918, the Oxford Companion to 1917. The Oxford Companion records that it drew American film stars and tourists throughout the dry years and after. Abeal sold up in 1937 and went home to Spain, where he died in 1942. The bar closed in 1959 and reopened on the same corner in 2013.

The cantineros

The Americans did not have Havana to themselves for long. Cuban bartenders organized. Their association required members to speak English, graded them from apprentice to journeyman to cantinero on the number of drinks they could make from memory, and ran national competitions. In 1936 it became a government-recognized trade union, and from then on only cantineros it had trained and accredited could work a Cuban bar. Repeal in 1933 had not sent the Americans home overnight; the union finished the job.

What the cantineros had, and what visiting Americans took back with them, was rum and lime. The Daiquiri was already a generation old by 1920. The standard account credits Jennings Cox, an American mining engineer working near the village of Daiquiri in 1898, who mixed his Bacardi ration with lime and sugar; Admiral Lucius Johnson carried it to the Army and Navy Club in Washington in 1909, and Jacques Straub printed the first recipe in 1914. The Mojito, mint and lime and rum lengthened with soda, belonged to the same family. Prohibition is what made these Cuban drinks American habits.

Rue Daunou

Paris had a different kind of exile. The New York Bar had opened at 5 Rue Daunou in 1911, and a young Scot from Dundee named Harry MacElhone was behind it from the first day. He went on to work in Connecticut and at the Plaza in New York, served in the war, and then ran the bar at Ciro's Club in London, where he published Harry of Ciro's ABC of Mixing Cocktails in 1921. On 8 February 1923 he bought the Paris bar he had started in and put his own name over the door. Harry's New York Bar is still there, and his son and grandson ran it after him.

The bar's clientele was the American colony of the 1920s. MacElhone's second book, Barflies and Cocktails of 1927, gave the regulars a chapter of their own, written by Arthur Moss, the Around the Town columnist of the Paris edition of the New York Herald, and recording the drinks made for them. That is where the Boulevardier first appears: equal parts Campari, Italian vermouth and bourbon, credited to Erskine Gwynne, a Vanderbilt nephew who with Moss and Jed Kiley founded a Paris magazine called Boulevardier, which is where the drink's name comes from. It is a Negroni with the gin swapped for American whiskey, which is exactly what you would expect from an American in Paris. The Sidecar belongs to the same scene, though not to the same man; its parentage is disputed and MacElhone's biographers do not give it to him.

London

The Savoy's share of the exile was Harry Craddock, who had worked New York's great hotel bars until the law closed them and who came back to England in 1920. By 1926 he was head bartender of the American Bar, and in 1930 he compiled The Savoy Cocktail Book, which is in large part the pre-Prohibition American repertoire preserved in London at the moment it would otherwise have been lost. His claim to have shaken the last legal cocktail in New York is his own. The book is the evidence that matters.

Coming home

Repeal came on 5 December 1933. The bartenders who returned, and the drinkers who had holidayed in Havana and Paris, brought back a repertoire that had been changed by rum, by lime, by Campari and by the French liqueur cabinet. The American cocktail of the 1930s was broader than the one that had gone into exile, and it owed that breadth to a decade spent abroad.

Folklore and fact

Fact: the dates of MacElhone's purchase and books, the Boulevardier's 1927 text, Sloppy Joe's 1917 opening and 1937 sale, the Cuban tourism numbers and the cantineros' 1936 union are documented. Folklore: the long list of drinks credited to MacElhone (Difford's biography names only the Monkey Gland), Craddock's last legal cocktail, and the several competing claims about who first mixed a Daiquiri. The exile was real. The inventions attached to it need checking one at a time.

Sources

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Sources

  1. Harry MacElhone, Difford's Guide · secondary source, retrieved 2026-10-11
  2. The American bartender invasion of 1920s Cuba, Difford's Guide · secondary source, retrieved 2026-10-11
  3. Abeal y Otero, Jose (The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails), Oxford University Press, via Spirits and Distilling (2021) · secondary source, retrieved 2026-10-11
  4. Boulevardier Cocktail, Difford's Guide · secondary source, retrieved 2026-10-11
  5. Harry Craddock, Difford's Guide · secondary source, retrieved 2026-10-11
  6. Daiquiri history and story of its creation, Difford's Guide · secondary source, retrieved 2026-10-11
  7. Sloppy Joe's Bar (1931, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1936, 1939), EUVS Digital Collection · primary source, retrieved 2026-10-11

Fact check: verified