The legend has it that Aztec deities never forgave Quetzalcoatl for having introduced men to the cacao plant. That cost him a terrible exile as he was condemned to wander aimlessly around the world. But the mistake had already been made. The Theobroma Cacao or the food of the gods –as Swedish naturalist Carlos Linneo called it- had been taken down to earth.

What Mexican gods or Emperor Montezuma never imagined, though, was that by offering chocahualt to Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes they were putting in the stranger’s hands a much mightier treasure than the gold and silver he filled a whole room with to pay a ransom that never quite came through.

Used in ancient America as currency of change –for the value of its seeds- cacao started making the rounds in a piecemeal fashion only to land on the tables of the planet’s inhabitants, beginning with Christopher Columbus and Cortes, who took the precious seeds beyond the seven seas and presented the King of Spain with Montezuma’s favorite beverage.

Thus, cocoa reached the shores of Europe and started spreading all over Asia, Africa and in the rest of the Americas. And so it wound up in Cuba, the largest Caribbean island, where it soon began to feel like home.

Chroniclers say the first cacao plant came to Cuba un 1540, but it wasn’t until 1548 that the first plantations began to pop up in the central part of the island: the Iznaga and La Avispa cocoa fields. Both estates fostered what for many years were just small plantations harvested by Cuban farmers. Sooner rather than later, the sip of coffee became the treat of choice for visitors and callers, and the cup of milk and chocolate turned out the perfect dish before bedtime and at daybreak –even though they were bound to import cacao at the price of gold for a mighty long time.

But life takes many twists and turns. It wasn’t the Spaniards, but the Frenchmen who definitely put cocoa on the map in Cuba. Shooed away by the slave uprisings of the Haitian Revolution, the French fled from death and reached Cuban shores on boats and dinghies. Among the few belongings they brought with them, a few cacao seeds were in their bags.

Even though since 1791 the first French-owned cacao plantations were challenging the steep hillsides of Santiago de Cuba’s Gran Piedra, pretty soon Lomas del Gato and Ti Arriba –with sweltering temperatures and amid the growing drive of coffee- pushed cacao planters to other regions. That’s how the fabulous cocoa got to the fertile lands of Baracoa, a spot trapped in the mountains that averages 60 to 80 inches of rain every year, with mean temps in the neighborhood of 24 to 28 degrees Celsius and soils so rich that any seed dropped in it takes just a few days to germinate.

Baracoa, the city of chocolate, is today’s cocoa stronghold in Cuba, absorbing three quarters of the national output. Small patchworks of land grown here from the 19th century to the mid 1900s with bitter and low-quality cocoa crops have long since given way to top-of-the-line plantations that saw the light of day after the 1959 Revolution. The application of new technologies, the creation of highly genetic seedlings, and nonstop research in an effort to make the plants far more resistant to diseases and plagues have really paid off.

Today, over two thousand peasants from Baracoa –many of them clustered in cooperatives- dedicate their lives to the growing of cocoa, a grateful and demanding tree that bears fruits all year round, but that yields as much as 80 percent of its finest crops between the months of January and June. This is a job that takes talent and expertise to prevent the pods from becoming windfalls for mice –gnawers love the fruit’s semiarid flavor- or from shifting into a fast-paced fermenting process as a result of its high content of sugar.

However, it’s not the three the one that calls the shots in the chocolate-making process, but the moment when the fruit’s pulp is removed and the seeds are put to dry to little by little squeeze the best of them and whip it into the great-tasting Cuban chocolate the island nation produces today, with more than 95 percent of its entire output labeled at first-string crop.

The dried seeds are still fermented through a set of procedures that has remained quite unchanged for centuries. That process is what actually makes cocoa get the unique color, flavor, acidity and aroma it sports today. After that, the product is sent back to the factory where a number of other items like chocolate paste and cacao oil –both widely used in today’s international market- are thoroughly churned out.

Even though Switzerland –one of the world’s leading chocolate producers- usually buys certain amounts of Cuban cacao, the island nation has laid out a perspective plan to gradually rekindle the local industry that currently supplies a fifth of the domestic market. For that particular goal, the country counts on the excellence of its own cacao, especially the one reaped in Baracoa.

And regardless of the fact that only 7 percent of the cacao output worldwide is labeled as fine chocolate, roughly the entire production of Cuba’s Baracoa ranks in that category, simply because in that paradisiacal eastern spot people ooze chocolate and are convinced that any day now Quetzalcoatl will come down to Baracoa to sip at a cup of chocahuatl sitting on a cliff by the sea.

(RECUADRO 1): CACAO, WHO ARE YOU? The theobroma cacao is a tree that grows just 20 degrees north and south of the Equator. Its abundant fruits grow near the trunks. These are reddish-purplish pods when they are unripe that turn yellow when they are ready to be plucked out of the trees. The fruits harbor countless seeds shrouded in a pale-yellow pulp of pleasant citric flavor that, among other components, contain sugar, water and tannin. The cacao tree is planted with seeds, stakes or by grafting procedures. The cacao fruit not only yields chocolate. The pulp that wraps the seeds could be processed to obtain wine, vinegar and alcohols. The husks are used to feed animals, while the kernel is squeezed to get cacao oil and other byproducts. Even the husks or empty pods are used as organic material in natural fertilizers.

(RECUADRO 2): CURIOUS RECIPES Despite the fact that chocolate in Cuba has been served in a variety of ways for a long time, from bars, kisses and covered waffles to ice creams and the well-known chocolate balls people in Baracoa love to make –with ground cacao mixed with flour- there are many curious recipes, like the one discovered by Havana University Emeritus Professor and Ph. D. Delio Carreras Cuevas in the book Libro Mayor, Atramentarium, et Culinarium, that was shelved in the old Santo Domingo Convent, former home to the Pontifical and Royal University of San Geronimo of Havana since its foundation on January 5, 1728.

The Dominican nuns suggest in their prayers to Santo Domingo to prepare chocolate in the following way:

Alpha) Heat it and melt some butter in a bowl, then add sugar from the soils of the island and mix it with the butter by whipping it intensely until the mixtures becomes a thick blister…

Beta) Break gently, as when eggs are hatched, eight eggshells and mix them well with 400 grams of butter and sugar…

Gamma) With a wooden spatula, pour tour tablespoons of well-strained flour…

Delta) Make the chocolate melt slowly (…) in a bronze pot and before it solidifies, pour it over the abovementioned mixture…

Epsilon) Add a tad of vanilla lightened with honey and beat it till it gets thick…

Kappa) Smear some butter onto the bottom of a bronze basin and pour the aforesaid mixture into the hole, letting it take a slow burn for 20 minutes of a canonic hour. The morning hours are better for this preparation since the brains are lighter and the mind isn’t dumb.

Lambda) Once you notice the basin is not hot and the mixture is beginning to go numb, slice it in rectangles which is the best geometry for this Goliardic poetry –inspired in Gluttony- of our Holiest Order.