Archaeological Landscape of the First Coffee Plantations in the South-East of Cuba

25 years on the World Heritage List

By Daily Pérez Guillén

On November 29, 2000, the UNESCO added the Archaeological Landscape of the First Coffee Plantations in the South-East of Cuba to its World Heritage List. These ruins were designated as such for being a unique and eloquent testimony to a form of agricultural exploitation in a virgin forest. Coffee production in the southeast of the provinces of Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo during the 19th and early 20th centuries resulted in the creation of a unique cultural landscape, exemplifying a significant stage in the development of this agricultural system. Traces of these coffee plantations have disappeared worldwide.

The World Heritage Site covers an area of 81,475 hectares and 171 remains of old coffee plantations in varying states of conservation. This vast territory also includes a network of roads used as communication routes between the different plantations and coffee export points.

The integration with the environment and the maximum utilization of natural resources within the agro-industrial system are highlighted in the landscape. Experts believe that the main artistic value of these works lies in the aesthetic and formal solutions of their architectural features, expressed in volumes, interior and exterior decorative elements, and the productive and domestic components present in the coffee barracks.

Each of these ancient coffee plantations presents unique features in its housing and/or production system. Amazing gardens can still be found with low walls recreating various geometric shapes, arcades supporting structures at different heights, aqueducts that transported water to different production areas or to homes adapted to the topography, large drying sheds extending into terraces, residential houses and warehouses, bakeries, coffee houses, and other structures.

Arriving mostly from Saint-Domingue as a result of the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, military personnel, civil servants, artisans, merchants, and landowners were welcomed in the eastern part of the country, and their cultural influence permeated the art, commerce, industry, customs and more.

Many of those who embarked on the Sierra route were former plantation managers or owners in the neighboring Caribbean nation who acquired new properties in the mountains near Santiago de Cuba.

Samuel Hazard, American traveler and chronicler, recounted in his text “Cuba with Pen and Pencil” what he observed during his stay there in the 19th century: “After the ingenios, the cafetales are the most extensive agricultural establishments carried on in Cuba, – the latter exceeding the former generally in their handsome appearance and care.”

On the one hand, the economic power of their owners and, on the other, the mastery of the engineers, builders, carpenters, and slave labor created these monuments of hydraulic engineering, road engineering, and domestic and productive architecture that today deserve World Heritage status.

The ruins that still stand reveal some of the elements that demonstrate the refinement of the French owners: the existence of fireplaces, carefully polished precious wood veneers, cabinets, music and billiard rooms and libraries, wooden shutters, and Italian-style gardens that took advantage of the uneven terrain.

These buildings reveal the struggle of French and Haitian settlers against nature, which translated into economic progress, even at the expense of African slaves. But they knew how to establish a dialogue to plant, more than coffee trees, a culture of connection with the rivers, streams, springs, and forests of rugged topography that were used for the material and spiritual well-being of those who lived there.

In the second half of the 19th century, Cuba began its struggle for independence from Spanish colonialism, and many of these haciendas began their path to decline. At the beginning of the 20th century, a new wave of production was recorded, but in the following decades, other productions gained ground in the market, and many gradually deteriorated.

Towards the 1940s, research related to the traces of coffee growers in the eastern region emerged. Several researchers, whose noble interests converged in the Humboldt Group, traveled to these areas and made location plans, architectural surveys, and took photographs.

Researcher Fernando Boytel Bambú retraced those steps in the 1960s and restored perhaps the most emblematic of the haciendas, La Isabelica, leading to the creation of a museum there representative of the domestic and productive environment of a 19th-century French coffee plantation.

Later, the Casa del Caribe, the Faculties of Construction and History of the University of Oriente, the Flora and Fauna Office of Baconao Park, and other institutions joined the initiative. On December 30, 1991, the group of 94 coffee-growing settlements located in the province of Santiago de Cuba was declared a National Monument.

The Office of the City Curator of Santiago de Cuba and the Provincial Center for Cultural Heritage lead the management and conservation of this heritage to this day.

Recently, the Coffee Culture Interpretation Center (Casa Dranguet) and the joint venture Biocubacafé S.A. announced that they are consolidating alliances to preserve the tangible and intangible heritage of coffee culture in southeastern Cuba.