Havana has always been thirsty. The city sits at the mouth of one of the finest natural harbours in the Caribbean, and for four centuries everything that moved between Europe and the Americas passed through it — silver from Mexico, sugar from the islands, rum from Havana's own distilleries, and beer from wherever ships happened to be coming from. In 1884, thirty cases of Heineken arrived. The entry in Gerard Adriaan Heineken's export journal is brief: Havana, 1884, thirty cases. Cuba was still a Spanish colony. The recipient was almost certainly a hotel, a merchant house, or a colonial administrator with a taste for Dutch lager and the money to pay for it. It was a single shipment, not a market entry. But it was there.
Then came a revolution, an embargo, and several decades of complicated history that made Cuba one of the most unusual beer markets on earth. After 1959, the state nationalised the brewing industry. Hatuey — the historic brand owned by the Bacardi family — was confiscated. Cristal and Bucanero became the beers of the revolution, brewed at state-owned facilities and sold through state retail channels. Foreign beer existed but was expensive, scarce, and ideologically awkward.
Heineken found its way back regardless. The green bottle is not bound by the US embargo — Heineken is a Dutch company, and the EU maintains its own trading relationship with Cuba. By the 2010s, Heineken had become one of the most visible imported beers in Havana, available at the Carlos III shopping mall and in hotels and tourist bars across the capital. At certain moments of domestic supply disruption — Cuba's beer logistics are famously unreliable — Heineken became the dominant beer on Havana's shelves entirely by default. A Havana Times writer noted wryly in 2014 that Heineken had achieved a "brief reign" in the city simply by being there when local brands weren't.
No brewery. No joint venture. No named distributor — Cuba's import channels run through state trading companies, and the paperwork is not public. Just the green bottle, arriving by container, selling to tourists and Cubans alike in a market that has spent sixty years being simultaneously closed to the world and desperately dependent on it.
Thirty cases in 1884. A top-selling import in 2014. The gap between those two moments contains most of the twentieth century.
