CHAPTER XVIII
COFFEE
TO either Arabia or Abyssinia belongs the honor of having been the birth place of those previous shrubs that were the forerunners of all the great coffee plantations of two hemispheres. And from the seeds of this valued plant is made probably the most universally popular beverage of the world. The people of Europe, North Africa and Western Asia all drink coffee. The same is true in most countries of South and Central America, while in the United States and the West Indies no breakfast is complete without it.
Of all known nations, however, the people of Cuba consume the greatest amount of the beverage per capita. Both in the city and in the country, the fire under the coffee urn always burns, and neither invited guest nor passing stranger crosses the threshold of a home without being offered a cup of coffee before leaving.
The introduction of coffee into Cuba, as before stated in this work, was due to the influx of refugees, flying from the revolution in Santo Domingo, in the first years of the nineteenth century. The majority of these immigrants, of French descent, and thoroughly familiar with the culture of coffee, settled first in the hills around Santiago de Cuba on the south coast, where they soon started coffee plantations that later became very profitable. Others located in the mountainous districts of Santa Clara around the charming little city of Trinidad, where fine estates were soon established and excellent coffee produced.
From these first settlements the culture of the plant rapidly spread to nearly all of the mountainous portions of the Island, where the soil was rich, and where forest trees of hard wood furnished partial shade, so essential to the production of first-class coffee. In the mountains, parks and valleys that lie between Bahia Honda, San Cristobal and Candelaria, in the eastern part of Pinar del Rio, many excellent estates were established whose owners, residing in homes that were almost palatial in their appointments, spent their summers on their coffee plantations, returning to Havana for the winter.
Revolutions of the past century unfortunately destroyed all of these beautiful places, leaving only a pile of tumbled-down walls and cement floors to mark the spot where luxurious residences once stood. Cuba, during the first half of the 19th century, and even up to the abolition of slavery in 1878, was a coffee exporting country, but with the elimination of the cheap labor of slaves, and the larger profits that accrued from the cultivation of sugar cane, the coffee industry gradually dropped back to a minor position among the industries of the Island, and thousands of “cafetales” that once dotted the hills of Cuba were abandoned or left to the solitudes of the forests where they still yield their fragrant fruit “the gift of Heaven,” as the wise men of the East declared.
Of all the varied agricultural industries of Cuba there is none, perhaps, that will appeal more than coffee growing to the home-seeker of moderate means, the man who really loves life in the mountains, hills and valleys beside running streams, where the air is pure and the shade grateful, and the climate ideal. The culture of coffee is not difficult, and by conforming to a few well-known requirements which the industry demands it can easily be carried on by the wife and children, while the head of the family attends to the harder work of the field, or to the care of livestock in adjacent lands.
The plant itself is an evergreen shrub with soft gray bark, and dark green laurel-like leaves. The white-petaled star-shaped flowers, with their yellow centers, are beautiful, and the bright red berries, growing in clusters close to the stem are not unlike in appearance the marmaduke cherries of the United States. The fragrance that fills the air from a grove of coffee trees can never be forgotten.
The shrub is seldom permitted to grow more than ten feet in height and begins to bear within three or four years from planting. The berries ripen in about six months from the time of flowering. Each contains two seeds or coffee beans, the surrounding pulp shriveling up as the time approaches for picking.
During the gathering of the crop women and children work usually in the shade of taller trees, such as the mango or aguacate, stripping the fruit from the branches into baskets or upon pieces of canvas laid on the ground, which may be gathered up at the corners and carried to the drying floors where the berries are spread out as evenly and thinly as possible and given all the air and sunlight available. Early in the morning these are raked over to insure rapid drying. When sufficiently dry the berries are run through hulling machines which remove the outer pulp, leaving the finished green bean of commerce.