La Bodeguita Del Medio

This guide to La Bodeguita del Medio in Havana opens with the framed verse by the door crediting Ernest Hemingway with drinking his mojitos right here, and the forgery a biographer later found in the signature's loops. It traces the bar back to 1942, when Angel Martinez opened a modest mid-block grocery on Empedrado Street that Habaneros nicknamed la bodeguita del medio, and follows how writers, painters and musicians began covering its walls with their names, Pablo Neruda and Nat King Cole among them.