ABRIL DE 2017
NOTA CENTRAL
Vamos a echar mentiras al café Coca-Cola. Foto: Edwin Wide. live as if he has a lot, even if he’ s missing everything,” said Eduardo Zamacois.
Before that name, Café Coca Cola there met the literary and artistic bohemia of the country and also the one of passage.
“ Literature,” recalls Ramón Gómez de la Serna,“ is not a way to eat, but you have to eat while writing literature.”
What happens is that the writer cannot be thinking of small things, and that leads him to hunger. There are many interested in that the writer does not eat, because his hunger is contrast of other fills.
Hence Honoré de Balzac drew a distinction between men according to their customs: the one who works, the one who thinks and the one who does nothing; the man who thinks he lives in the exceptional life of the artist, and many artists came to Coca-Cola to satisfy their hunger with the solidarity of His talkative.
How many problems were solved around a coffee and a toast? How many political and not-so-holy conspiracies took place in that emblematic site of our city?
How many poems, verses, stories, novels, essays, speeches were not created around their tables?
Serve a dark one Some experts say that coffee is introduced in Europe by Venetian merchants
in the early seventeenth century, but the first coffe-house in London or aristocratic parlor in Paris dates from 1650 to 1660, Antoni Martí Monterde informs me. Moreover, he argues:“ Cafés are bourgeois, open to a new emerging citizenship that knows itself at the cradle of power, which does not yet see itself as a counter power, but which already exercises the critique of power and begins to think seriously To hold it, which accentuates the subversive character of the coffee... Finally, our santanero coffee was transformed in 1906 into Café Coca-Cola.
This was due to two Americans from the Panama Canal Construction team, AC King and WE Black, who turned to entrepreneur Asa G. Candler, who already sold soda fountains in the 1890s in Cuba, Mexico and Panama, and even more since the start of the construction of the Canal in 1904, migrating to our shores thousands of US civilians and military. That convinced the businessman to grant them permission to import, distribute and sell Coca Cola to these two employees of the PCC.
From 1906, they distributed in wooden barrels, subject to hand-operated wagons, that circulated like dog through his house in the different areas of canal construction, among white, black, Chinese, olive, Arab, Venezuelan, European, Colombians and Panamanians, that is, the whole world.
Later, Candler granted another equal permit for Cuba, being the first two Latin American countries official drinkers of the black waters of Yankee imperialism.
Finally, by 1912, say cokealized historians; the formal concession was given to bottling the isthmus. The matter took on more form and the popular santanero coffee entered bourgeois modernity or, perhaps, redundancy, to its death.
Then the bars were invented, more canteens proliferated, with the passage of gray hair, clubs, pubs, and there is no longer anyone who stops drinking and talks loudly, like barking.
Many politicians invaded this historic space, almost no one remembers where our Demetrio Korsi, or Nicolás Guillén, or even Pablo Neruda sat there, to mention only the tolerated ones in an environment where, just by entering, you are already the center of all.
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Vamos a echar mentiras al café Coca-Cola. Foto: Edwin Wide.
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