The Coffee
Estate Is, In Fact, A Kind Of Forest, With The Trees And Shrubs Arranged
In Straight Lines.
The _mayoral_, or steward of the estate, a handsome
Cuban, with white teeth, a pleasant smile, and a distinct utterance of his
native language, received us with great courtesy, and offered us
_cigarillos_, though he never used tobacco; and spirit of cane, though he
never drank.
He wore a sword, and carried a large flexible whip, doubled
for convenience in the hand. He showed us the coffee plants, the broad
platforms with smooth surfaces of cement and raised borders, where the
berries were dried in the sun, and the mills where the negroes were at
work separating the kernel from the pulp in which it is inclosed.
"These coffee estates," said he, "are already ruined, and the planters are
abandoning them as fast as they can; in four years more there will not be
a single coffee plantation on the island. They can not afford to raise
coffee for the price they get in the market."
I inquired the reason. "It is," replied he, "the extreme dryness of the
season when the plant is in flower. If we have rain at this time of the
year, we are sure of a good crop; if it does not rain, the harvest is
small; and the failure of rain is so common a circumstance that we must
leave the cultivation of coffee to the people of St. Domingo and Brazil."
I asked if the plantation could not be converted into a sugar estate.
"Not this," he answered; "it has been cultivated too long. The land was
originally rich, but it is exhausted" - tired out, was the expression he
used - "we may cultivate maize or rice, for the dry culture of rice
succeeds well here, or we may abandon it to grazing. At present we keep a
few negroes here, just to gather the berries which ripen, without taking
any trouble to preserve the plants, or replace those which die."
I could easily believe from what I saw on this estate, that there must be
a great deal of beauty of vegetation in a well-kept coffee plantation, but
the formal pattern in which it is disposed, the straight alleys and rows
of trees, the squares and parallelograms, showed me that there was no
beauty of arrangement. We fell in, before we returned to our inn, with the
proprietor, a delicate-looking person, with thin white hands, who had been
educated at Boston, and spoke English as if he had never lived anywhere
else. His manners, compared with those of his steward, were exceedingly
frosty and forbidding, and when we told him of the civility which had
been shown us, his looks seemed to say he wished it had been otherwise.
Returning to our inn, we dined, and as the sun grew low, we strolled out
to look at the town. It is situated on a clear little stream, over which
several bathing-houses are built, their posts standing in the midst of the
current.
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