Javier dreams of a 50-year rum, an aged spirit that perhaps he’ll never see. “I would need 20 more, but it satisfies me to think that one day it will be done and when someone tastes it he will say: ‘this cellar was prepared by Javier.’” Sitting behind an enormous desk full of papers, among shelves with bottles of vodka, silver dry, refined, white, golden, carta oro and aged rums, he tries to remember why he liked to mix the substances. “I started in chemistry when I was 15 and for 14 courses I was the subject’s professor, but what’s nice about this subject is to put it into practice and not just writing symbols on the blackboard,” he says. And that was it? “Well, yes, I had the desire to work in a factory with chemistry as its base and I got to the rum industry.” Francisco Javier Sabat created almost all the rums consumed today in Pinar del Río and has been working for 30 years in El Valle factory. He is one of the oldest specialists from his province and wants to become a Rum Maestro. “There are only eight in Cuba. If I achieve it,...