El café en Cuba. El café aparece en nuestra isla de Cuba, por las semillas o las plántulas traídas desde República Dominicana en 1748 por el comerciante José Antonio Gelabert, de referencia habanero pero cuyo apellido permite suponer que se trataba, en realidad de un catalán, los primeros cultivos se iniciaron en la zona del Wajay y Artemisa, extendiéndose luego por la región central de la isla. Curiosamente los primeros usos que se le dieron al café en Cuba parecen haber sido medicinales. Se sabe que los médicos y boticarios lo recomendaban, junto con el tabaco, el ron y algunos caldos de vinos añejados en las cavas de las mansiones coloniales, como panacea contra todos los males del… More
The coffee appears on our island of Cuba, by seeds or seedlings brought from Dominican Republic in 1748 by merchant Jose Antonio Gelabert, referring to habanero but whose last name allows to assume that it was actually a Catalan, the first crops started in the Wajay and Artemis area, then spreading through the island’s central region. Interestingly the first uses given to coffee in Cuba seem to have been medicinal. It is known that doctors and apothecaries recommended it, along with tobacco, rum and some aging wine broths in the cavas of colonial mansions, as a panacea against all the evils of the body and spirit, though it is likely that at that time already in our country some landlords will plant coffee for their own use. When in 1762 Havana was taken by English troops, the first houses of coffee were opened in the capital. The first establishment for sale of cafe finished crash was the Tavern Cafe at Old Square on the corner of Merced Street. In the 1880-1900 s more coffee houses opened in Matanzas, Camag üey, Cienfuegos and Caibarien After the Haitian Revolution, between the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the meridian of world coffee production moved from the ancient island of La Espa olaola to the east of Cuba. Many of the producers fleeing the ′′ Jacobins black ′′ found refuge in areas that now belong to Santiago and Guant ánnamo. These French landlords found the climate of those mountains ideal for coffee farming, and soon covered them in large, medium, and modest cafés. Some of them had sentimentally joined slave mulattas and libertas. Among these transgressors was German citizen Cornelio Sochay, owner of the famous Angerona estate, married to Ursula Lambert, a Haitian mulatto of great refinement who came to Cuba fleeing the slave revolution on his home island. This couple had a beautiful and difficult love story, which ended with his death and her prison, and was immortalized in Cuban filmmaker Sergio Giral’s oak oak film. Something like this happened in another cafetal, La Isabellica, which had better luck. Cuba soon gained preeminence in the international trade in coffee, although some years later it was surpassed by other enclaves. But those lands founded by settlers of French ancestry also became semi-autonomous centers of life, where they harvested legumes, fruit, medicinal plants, etc. Her main legacy has been the coffee culture that still endures in the South-East-and also in areas of the West and Central-on the largest island in the Caribbean.
By 1827, the country already had more than two thousand cafets. Decades later Cuba had become one of the largest exporters of coffee worldwide. The Fraternity Hacienda, located in the Santiaguero municipality of Songo La Maya, is part of that heritage and, in particular, the archaeological landscape of the first cafetalera plants of the south-east Cuba, consisting of 171 cafetaleras and declared in 2000 World Heritage Site by UNESCO. The farm La Fraternity belonged to Sunday Heredia, father of French th poet Jose Maria de Heredia. ·