[1] The drink was supposedly invented by an American mining engineer named Jennings Cox, who was in Cuba (then at the tail-end of the Spanish Captaincy-General government) at the time of the Spanish–American War of 1898.

It is also possible that William A. Chanler, a US congressman who purchased the Santiago iron mines in 1902, introduced the daiquiri to clubs in New York in that year.

The basic recipe for a daiquiri is also similar to the grog British sailors drank aboard ships from the 1780s as a means of preventing scurvy.

Johnson subsequently introduced it to the Army and Navy Club in Washington, D.C., and drinkers of the daiquiri increased over the space of a few decades.

World War II rationing made whiskey and vodka hard to come by, yet rum was easily obtainable owing to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy, which opened up trade and travel relations with Latin America, Cuba, and the Caribbean.