Visited in January 2023.

Coffee is certainly not a native crop for Cuba, and even the Spaniards who arrived preferred cocoa for a long time, but from the mid-18th century they tried to grow coffee, though not very successfully on the western plains. Everything changed at the end of the same century. On the neighboring island of Hispaniola (Haiti), where coffee production was quite successful, a slave revolution occurred, and those French planters who were not slaughtered by the former slaves escaped, including through the Windward Passage to neighboring Cuba. There, with the Spaniards, everything was still the same. The slaves did not rebel, and it was possible to continue to exploit their sweat and blood. It turned out that the Sierra Maestra mountains with their forests (the beans grew well in the shade of the trees) were much better suited for growing coffee than the plains. The landscape was difficult, it had to be transformed, but soon the slopes were covered with hundreds of new plantations. UNESCO also noted the efforts to transform the relief and the technological innovations that were born in this regard: transport infrastructure, irrigation systems, aqueducts, bridges, and so on. Like sugar ingenios, Cuban cafetals were arranged in roughly the same way. In the center is the planter's house in the Basque style, suitable for the climate, around it are the slaves' dwellings, a mandatory area for drying grain (secadero), outbuildings for cleaning and frying the product, workshops. Well, and fields, sometimes with orchards that provided the same shade. Cuba's coffee golden age was short-lived, by the beginning of the 20th century it was all over. It was difficult to compete with Brazil or Colombia, and sugar production turned out to be more profitable. 171 plantations are included in the UNESCO list, but almost all of them are purely archaeological sites (hence the wording "archaeological landscape"). Only Cafetal La Isabelica, 30 km from Santiago, has been restored and turned into a museum. We got there by taxi to the La Gran Piedra stop, then the road to the plantation was so broken that we had to walk the last 2 km.