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Cuba’s plantations of Coffea arabica hark back to the mid-18th century when the first fields were established in the zone of El Wajay, in today’s La Habana province.
The island nation’s subtropical climate –located between the Cancer and Capricorn tropics, temperatures hovering around 23 to 28 degrees Celsius, and heights in the neighborhood of 350 and 750 meters high above sea level- favored dramatically this particular crop.
The arrival of French West Indians from Haiti, following the 1801 independence war, the first of its kind in Latin America, not only brought in new elements to Cuba’s ethnic-cultural mosaic, but it also boosted significantly the development of agriculture and coffee growing on the Caribbean island.
They moved from the southern regions of eastern Cuba all the way to the west, thus giving way to three major coffee-producing areas, all of them nestled up in the mountains:
- Sierra Maestra and Nipe-Sagua-Baracoa, in eastern Cuba
- Guamuahaya, better known as Sierra del Escambray, in central Cuba
- Sierra de los Órganos, in western Cuba
We can no doubt say –hedonism apart- that Cuba’s coffee grows in the atmosphere. Only a handful of moments leave the so-called “black nectar of the white gods” away from the life of the islanders.