The History of Cuba, vol. 5

by Willis Fletcher Johnson

A description of all of the many varieties of the banana grown in Cuba would be perhaps superfluous. The most commonly cultivated for the table, and eaten without cooking, is known as the Manzana or Apple Banana. Its flavor may suggest the apple, although the choice of name is probably accidental. The bunch is rather small, and the fruit is bright yellow, only about one-half the length of the banana of commerce, and stands out more or less horizontally from the stem on which it grows. The average price of these when found in the market is about 35¢ per bunch.

Some three or four varieties of the red banana are grown in Cuba, and while quite hardy and easily cultivated they are not prized in the Indies as in the United States. The dwarf banana, or Platano Enano, has a very pleasant flavor, not unlike that of the Johnson, or banana of commerce, and may be found in almost every garden in the Island. The plant reaches a height of only five or six feet, and the bunches of fruit are long and heavy, filled almost to the tip, and often supported by a forked stock, caught under the neck of the stalk so that the weight of the fruit will not break or pull over the plant itself.

Another very choice banana is called the “Platano Datil,” or date banana. The stalks are relatively small and hold but little fruit in comparison with other varieties, seldom having more than two or three hands to the bunch. The fruit itself is from two and a half to three inches in length, round and plump, with a thin skin that can be slipped off, like a glove, but with a flavor that is probably the most delicate and delicious of the whole Musa family.

Approximately 125,000,000 pounds of bananas are exported from the Island each year, valued under normal conditions at a little over a million dollars. The great bulk of bananas grown in Cuba are for domestic consumption.

Agriculture, although rapidly assuming as it should the dignity of a science, still has its caprices or apparent contradictions. And so it happens that the choicest flavored and highest priced bananas of the world are grown in the waterworn pockets of almost barren dog-teethed rocks—“los dientes de perro” of the extreme eastern end of Cuba, just back of Cape Maysi.

Here the coast rises from sea level in a series of four or five steps or comparatively flat plateaux, each some four or five hundred feet above the other, until an altitude of two thousand feet is reached. The rocks are soft limestone and in the millions of waterworn pockets, the leaves and dust of the forest jungle have left their deposit for ages. In this shallow soil bananas not only grow luxuriously but have a remarkably delicate and delicious flavor, essentially their own.

The secret of this wondrous growth and par excellence however, lies not alone in the rocky soil, but in the fact that generous nature at this point, contributes an abundant shower of rain almost every day in the year. The low, heavily waterladen clouds of the West Indian seas, driven by easterly winds strike this series of table lands, one rising above the other, and shower the lands with daily rains. Hence it is that while the average rainfall of Cuba is 54 inches, this series of table land of Cape Maysi has an annual rainfall of 125 inches.

The result is that in spite of difficult access and a cultivation confined to the hoe, millions of bunches of choice bananas are grown and shipped from the mouth of the Little Yumuri every year. United Fruit steamers on their way north from South and Central American banana fields stop at the above landing to take on a top dressing of fancy fruit.

Owing to the fact that the banana has practically no season, or rather that it may bear in any month, four suckers of varying ages are set out in each hill, from which four bunches of fruit, some three months apart, will result during the year. With four hundred stands or hills to the acre, the annual yield should be, approximately 1,600 bunches, and whether the crop is disposed of in the local markets or converted into banana flour, the growing of bananas may be made one of the important industries of Cuba.

Patient toil and judicious selection have made the modern pineapple one of our most delightful of all fruits, in addition to which, in those countries not too far removed from markets, it has assumed an important place as a commercial industry. The fruit of the pineapple, like that of the strawberry, is a strange compound or consolidation of hundreds of little fruits, in one symmetrical cone, tinted when ripe with shades varying from greenish yellow to golden red or orange. Like the strawberry, it is a ground fruit that must be planted and cultivated along the lines that bring best results with ordinary field crops.