When restoration work began in 2010, laborers discovered that the wood floors, rotten from humidity and years of neglect, had collapsed into the basement. ![]() Ownership later passed to another ‘Joe,’ Jose Garcia.īut last call came in 1965 as Fidel Castro’s communist government was nationalizing nearly all private businesses, and Joe’s has been shuttered for nearly five decades. Swashbuckling actor Errol Flynn, who reportedly got in a fistfight at the bar with an overly admiring fan, was enough of a regular that Joe’s named a cocktail for him. Rafa said his own brushes with celebrity included Boston Red Sox slugger Ted Williams and Cuban crooner Benny More. The list of patrons reads like a Who’s Who from Hollywood’s Golden Age. Many were wealthy, famous and looking for a good time.įrank Sinatra. One illustrated color postcard from the era shows gentlemen in fedoras and pinstripes laughing on barstools alongside white-gloved ladies. ![]() It was a stylish clientele compared with the flip-flop and tank-top tourists who swarm Cuba and other Caribbean islands today. ‘No Havana resident ever went to Sloppy Joe’s,’ novelist Graham Greene wrote in his 1958 spy-farce ‘Our Man in Havana,’ ‘because it was the rendezvous of tourists.’ ‘To restore it to how it was before.’Įmployees made sandwiches to order behind the black mahogany bar, polished to a high shine and purportedly once the longest in Latin America at about 59 feet (18 meters).Īfter dark, the place filled up with Americans on vacation.Ībeal’s affable personality and familiarity with English from his years in the States helped make Joe’s a favorite among tipsy Yanks, along with the nearby El Floridita bar, the reputed birthplace of the daiquiri cocktail, and La Bodeguita del Medio, home of the minty, rum-infused mojito.Īs much as any other place in Havana, Joe’s exemplified the island’s lure as a playground for Americans. ![]() ‘For the people of this city, I think it’s very interesting and very important to rescue a place that has so much history and is so recognized around the world,’ said Ernesto Iznaga, manager of the born-again Joe’s, which will be run by state-owned tourism concern Habaguanex. The effort has helped finance Cuba’s socialist present by drawing tourists fascinated by its pre-socialist past, from colonial palaces of the 18th century to celebrity hangouts of the 1950s. It’s part of an ambitious revitalization project by the Havana City Historian’s Office, which since the 1990s has transformed block after block of crumbling ruins into rehabilitated buildings along vibrant cobblestone streets. Soon, Rafa will be able to relive those boyhood memories as the original Sloppy Joe’s reopens in Havana’s historic quarter, giving residents and tourists from all over the chance to belly up to the same bar that served thirsty celebrities such as Rock Hudson, Babe Ruth and Ernest Hemingway. HAVANA – A half-century later, Jose Rafa Malem remembers the balmy breezes blowing through the bar’s arching porticos, the grain of the tall wood stools, the whiff of Pedro Domecq brandy on his father’s breath.Īnd how could he forget the tangy ground-beef-and-tomato-sauce sandwiches synonymous with what was then one of Havana’s hippest hangouts, playfully dubbed Sloppy Joe’s? ‘I ate so many, I got tired of them,’ said Rafa, a 59-year-old Havana native who grew up to become a bartender.
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