Tuesday, April 9th, 2019 - Coffee and Tobacco Growing in Vinales

Vinales is a small town - basically two main streets parallel to each other. It earned the UNESCO recognition for it's karst landscape and traditional agriculture. We had walked to the main 'parque' the previous night, which took very little time.

Here's the only photo I took of the main street, to give you an idea.

The delight that greeted us in the morning was the flurry of 'four-legged' traffic that we met on the street outside our casa.

These carts were not designed for tourists as we had seen in Havana. These were regular people going about their day's work. Our itinerary today said we were going to a tobacco farm, so we met our local guide and headed out toward the outskirts of town. 

You know that there were little things to notice.....

Delicious fruit and veggies cart

Onion delivery service

An ambition for a rooftop table that went awry

Cuban version of the 'jockey'?

Finally we were far enough out of town to see fields of tobacco plants.

We were seeing signs of that 'traditional' agriculture that UNESCO had recognized.

Tobacco shed with karst backdrop

Horse sheltering in  traditional hut.

Before long our guide stopped to talk to a friendly fellow with a big smile who was walking back from town. Our guide knew him, said his name was Antonio and that he was in his 80's.

He liked the photo I took

He wandered off and I thought this was the end of this lovely encounter.

This man was cutting cloth on his porch to make rag rugs.

We turned the corner and there again was Antonio and we found ourselves in his little coffee farm, about to be charmed in a most delightful way.

First, Antonio instructed us on the use of the pilon to remove the husk from the outside of the coffee bean which has been sun dried. It must be boring, as Antonio said that they often stop to chat to a neighbor, maybe take a little rest here and there. It also gave rise to a dance, called the pilon dance. None of us managed to master that one!

 We were shown all the traditional steps in making coffee - roasting, grinding, the traditional wooden stand of the cloth filter and the array of pretty cups in the kitchen. We were also shown the 'bottle tree' on which they dried out water bottles. 

A neighbor helped prepare the coffee.....

....and Antonio's son served it.

Our local guide joked about Antonio's sexual prowess telling us about his carrot juice viagra. He called him 'Antonio Casanova' and by the end of our delightful encounter with him, I had been charmed into buying a small water bottle full of his coffee beans for $5 - probably more expensive that Starbucks! It was a truly fun seduction!

Off we went again, past more beautifully colored homes to the tobacco shed.

The farmer told us that they plant 22,000 plants each year. Although he only employs three people, they coordinate with neighbors at key times like this to work collectively. The government provides the infrastructure that they need to produce the tobacco - plants, seeds, equipment etc, but they are obliged to sell 90% of the resulting crop back to the government at prices set by that monopoly. He said that they get to keep 20% for personal use, and after we had scratched our heads about the math, we realized that we had entered the 'grey' area of creative financing!

Tobacco Flower

We were shown all the steps of tobacco production, how the leaves are separated from the top of the stalk to the bottom and lined up on the horizontal poles of the drying shed.

We learned that the leaves are sufficiently dried when the stalk is the same brown as the leaves, which usually takes three to four months.

The bulk of the crop is sold to the government in 50 kg bales, (current price around 45 CUC) and rolling the cigars occurs in factories elsewhere. It needs fermentation to bring out the flavor before being rolled. Each family has their own recipe - he said he uses honey, pineapple, rum and guava. It is boiled for 15 minutes, then dried again and layered like lasagne between palm leaves for a year. After that, the cigar itself is rolled using just three leaves.

And I just like this composition!

We had a chance to sample - but not me!

During the afternoon, a few of us walked a few kilometers out of town to another odd, also 'naive' art installation called the 'Prehistoric Wall Painting'. On the way we were able to get closer to the steep rock faces - the structures are called 'mogotes' - which are the limestone hillocks of the karst topography. I thought the little homes set them off nicely.

The Prehistoric Wall painting is 120 meters high (360 ft), 160 meters long (480 ft)  and was painted by Leovigildo Gonzalez after being commissioned by Fidel in 1961. It took 18 years for four people to complete it. Lonely Planet describes it as 'either impressively psychedelic or monumentally horrific, depending on your viewpoint!' I'll let you make that call for yourself!

As we departed, at the precise time our vintage 'taxi' arrived, the skies opened up and it poured. It was a most interesting drive, with questionable wipers for a good while and a steady drip from a variety of different places!

As I walked from my casa to the dinner meeting place, the water was very often ankle deep. It was somewhat disconcerting to recall the number of horse, oxen and dogs that I had seen in the streets earlier and I wondered just what might be mixed in with the rushing waters! I prayed that I had no unknown cuts in my feet!

Dinner was a lovely 'cooking school' at Balcon del Valle. The meal was delicious, fresh and we relished the post-rainfall and final glimpse of the lovely hills and mountains.

I thought these diners had the right idea in their hope that the rain had cleared!

Tomorrow, off to Cienfuegos via the Bay of Pigs.