The offer of laborers and teams was a frequent occurrence, in fact a business accommodation, and meant more than la politesse—it meant just what was expressed. While in such emergencies Lamo had on several occasions suspended work, in order to loan for a day all of Desengaño’s available force to a neighbor, it had always happened that we were able to triumph over misfortune without placing ourselves under similar obligations.
CHAPTER XXIX.
DON RUANO’S COFFEE ESTATE—COFFEE-MILLS AND COFFEE-POTS—WASTE OF FRUITS—DON RUANO AND HIS MOTHER.
We rode to Don Francisco Ruano’s coffee estate, hoping to hire a few hands from him to tide over the unexpected rush of work. The Don, with his octogenarian mother, had lived many years on a small and neatly managed cafetal, whose boundaries touched Desengaño. The Don never ventured farther from home than the depot or nearest village; and the aged señora su madre had not been beyond the limits of her domain for so long that she—like many others of advanced life in that voluptuous land—had lost all desire to move. The avenue to the house was bordered with straggling, rough-barked cocoa-palms, loaded at all seasons with the valuable nuts that grew, ripened, and rotted in great bunches on the trees year after year. A coffee estate is necessarily a fruit-farm also. Coffee is a delicate plant, requiring heat tempered with shade, and, as it grows in long rows of detached shrubs on the cleanly kept ground, tall, broad-spreading avenues of fruit-trees shelter it from the direct rays of the scorching sun.
A well-kept cafetal—and it has to be well kept, else it goes rapidly to ruin—is like a beautiful, symmetrical garden, planted with utmost precision.
The foliage is a light green; the leaves are small, and grow along the straight, slender branches in clusters; while the broad-spreading boughs of the towering trees, of a darker and richer green, cast their refreshing shade over all. Coffee is of slow and delicate growth. The plant is four to six years old before it begins to bear fruit. Once matured, it continues to increase in value and capacity for, perhaps, fifteen or twenty years before it deteriorates, and the necessity of renewal is apparent. In the late spring the shrubs are thickly sprinkled with a shower of white blossoms, somewhat resembling in form and fragrance those of the orange. When the petals of these flowers strew the ground, tiny green buds appear in great profusion the whole length of the slender branches, turning red like holly-berries as they increase rapidly in size, bending the boughs down with their weight. These transformations take place during the rainy season, and through that period a cafetal is wonderfully beautiful and fragrant.
The first clear days in October, the berries, then the size of small hazel-nuts, are carefully harvested in immense flat baskets and spread upon a broad paved court to dry in the sun, protected from chance showers during the day and drenching dews at night by being heaped into piles under sheds or covered with heavy cloths. Any moisture during the drying process rots and ruins the berry. At Don Ruano’s the drying patio was under his mother’s supervision, and the old lady found occupation in watching the coffee, seeing that it was frequently stirred so that each grain received its due proportion of sun and heat, and that it was also protected from dampness.
All through the country coffee is sold in the hull, which contains two grains laid face to face, covered with a brown, dry husk, from which it is easily separated.
The door of every country-house, be it dwelling or bodega, is ornamented by the unattractive but useful coffee-mortar with its clumsy wooden pestle, and a sieve made of pita caruja hangs by its side, in which the contents of the mortar are tossed in the wind and the light husks blown away, leaving the firm, hard berry.
One of the sights that arrests the eye of a stranger in Cuba is the multitude of bags hanging at the door of every little shop and for sale at every step in the country as well as in the towns—bags of coarse red flannel, fitted with a hoop around the top and terminating in a point at the bottom; bags of every size, from those that would contain only a pint to others with the capacity of many gallons. These are the coffee-pots of Cuba, from which come the most delicious draughts of that much-prized and much-disparaged beverage. Half filled with finely pulverized coffee and suspended from a hook on the wall, cold water is gently poured on from time to time till the whole mass is saturated. The first drops which fall into the receiver placed beneath the bag are thick and black. One spoonful in a cup of boiling milk yields a draught of coffee that is deliciousness itself, such as is not to be found in any other land. The red bag hangs day and night, and the process of dripping coffee is ceaseless. All classes and ages offer and drink it freely as we do water. The wealthiest banker in his gilded palace and the poorest peasant in his scanty hut use the same red flannel bag and drink the same coffee. It is quite as rich and delicious served in coarse pottery in the bodegas about the market-places, where the workmen assemble in the early dawn, as in the dainty Sèvres at “El Louvre” or “La Dominica,” where the élite tarry the night away. So universal is its use that the mayorals, boyeros, cartmen, and, indeed, every class of white laborers on plantations, exact their cup of coffee before they begin the work of the day.
After the harvest, the coffee-plants which were not disturbed during the summer are carefully weeded, the decayed and decaying fruit removed, and the ground kept cleanly swept. Mamey, marmocillo, zapote, and aguacate trees are by reason of their splendid shade the chosen growth of a cafetal. The fruit of all is rich, juicy, and greatly prized in the cities, while in the country the abundance is in many instances a nuisance and an expense. While Don Ruano had men employed in carrying off baskets of fruit to be cast away and we had barrow-loads of lemons wheeled from our garden, no way was provided by which this superabundance could be transported to a market. The cities received their supplies entirely through private enterprise, either by trains of pack-horses or by small vessels from one port to another, whose traffic, always hampered, was now almost suspended by military espionage and exactions. Therefore tropical fruits were often more expensive in Havana than in many interior cities of the United States.