CubaPLUS Magazine

Once a profession reserved for the so-called “stronger sex”: the bartender, today women have managed, with perseverance and wisdom, to occupy that space and, many have even reached top positions in international competitions, which confirms that the female sex is capable of taking on any job, no matter how difficult it may be.

Barbara Betancourt Bernal is a faithful exponent of what a woman can achieve when she sets her mind to it. A bartender by profession and by conviction, Baby, as everyone knows her, is one of the members of the jury of the Havana Club Cocktail Maestro competition that will take place in the Cuban capital in April-May.

“I graduated,” said Baby in an interview with CubaPLUS, “from the hotel management course in 1996 and from that moment on I began to work at the Ipanema bar at the Copacabana hotel. Although I was not a professional bartender, I began to venture into the profession and I began to like it a lot and I began to associate myself in everything that had to do with the bar. Then I started at the multi-space Macumba Habana, she added, where I stayed for 11 years, not as a bartender, but at times I had to do with the bar.

Already in 2011,d I entered the well-known Café Concert Gato Tuerto. I was there for a long time and there I began what is the competitive theme and currently I work at the Habana Libre Tryp hotel. I have participated, she continued, in many competitions and have achieved several recognitions, but one of the most important for me was in 2018, when I was the winner of the Grand Prix Havana Club, in which I obtained the title of National Champion with a cocktail dedicated to Rita Montaner, called El Manicero, to honor who was one of the most outstanding exponents of Cuban songwriting.”

¨In my profession, she emphasized, I have had very dignified, very beautiful and very grateful moments.” When answering a question about the taboos that Cuban women have managed to break in this profession, she considered that “it can be said that, starting in 1982, when Gloria María Pomares was given the status of bartender -the first Cuban to achieve this- there has been a revolution of women in the bar.” It is, she added, a profession that was always for men. There were waitresses, but over time that changed, and the association has even allowed the incorporation of women in this profession unconditionally.

Finally, she referred to her appointment as a judge in the Havana Club Cocktail Maestro contest and said: “I am very happy to be a judge and to have been chosen to be a judge. I have always worked for the brand and it is a great honor.” “I will always be very grateful to Havana Club because I developed my career through the brand, but above all, to the Cuban Bartenders Association that trained me as a bartender,” she emphasized.