Jorge Diego Rodríguez, Cuba Press
VILLA CLARA, February - A large majority of the fruit and lumber trees that adorn the Cuban countryside, as well as a considerable number of the edible vegetables, are exotics.
The chronicles tell about the banana, brought from the coast of Africa at the beginning of the Colonial period, about the pineapple, which originated in Perú, and about coffee, which started being used in the island at the end of the XVIII century, since up to then chocolate was more
usual, whose base, cocoa, even though it grew wild in Santo Domingo and Jamaica, was not known by the Cuban siboneyes, but was brought over by the Spaniards, according to historians.
The banana became representative, to the point that to call a foreigner "bananized" meant that he had been assimilated by the customs of the country. However, the metamorphosis of this species has not been a happy one in recent times, since the destruction of considerable plantations
of the so-called fruit banana and the substitution of the variety called "burro," which the people loathe.
As to the plantain, its distribution was limited to people with a dietetic prescription, other than the ones that can be bought in the free market at prices that are inaccessible to the average consumer. There is a similar situation with the pineapple, which has been called the queen of fruits,
but which can also take the throne of scarcity.
The history of coffee rationing is well-known after hurricane Flora, at the beginning of the sixties. The scarcity was mitigated first in the black market and since the middle nineties also in the dollar stores.
The mango, to name one last example, was brought to the island in 1782, when Havana was no more than a village. Near La Salud church, in the farm belonging to Micaela Jústiz, the wife of the second Count of Jibacoa, the first seed was planted, introduced by Felipe Alwood. Its first crop
was only five mangoes, two of which were sold for an ounce of gold each. Those who bought them did not do so only to taste the fruit, but also to obtain the seed. Today, mangoes are quite expensive in Cuba, even though in the last two or three years, they have been plentiful in the market. The
barker who in old times offered "Mangoes, mangoes," could not have imagined that customers today could scarcely buy one large or two or three small mangoes with a day's wages.
Where other fruits are concerned, there was a mistaken policy in place for many years after 1959, which consisted in razing the trees to develop cattle ranching or to plant sugar cane or other species, with deleterious consequences for the Cuban diet.
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