Five Generations in a Cup | Part Four | Marta's Second Harvest Costa Rica

A work of fiction inspired by true history. All characters are invented; the historical setting is real.

"Stories break silence and nourish those who work, feel, and dream."

Carmen Naranjo, Costa Rican novelist and essayist (1928–2012)

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Marta Second Harvest (1961–1963)

Marta stood at the gate of the abandoned farm outside Naranjo, in Costa Rica's Central Valley. Two suitcases sat at her feet. Four coffee saplings, wrapped in burlap, sat under one arm. A tin of seeds rode in her coat pocket. The gate hung open on one hinge. Weeds had swallowed the nearest terrace up to her waist. She had heard about neglect like this before, in family stories about Pinar del Rio a hundred and seventy years earlier. She knew the shape of the work in front of her before she took a single step onto the land.

A coffee broker in San José named Carlos Mora had found the place. He advanced Marta and Rafael credit against the land's eventual sale. The coffee farm's late owner, Rogelio Ugalde, had since died without children of his own to claim it.

His nieces and nephews lived in the capital. None of them showed any real interest in the property beyond eventually selling it. Mora warned Marta that convincing them to sell to a Cuban family with almost no money would take time she might not have.

A neighbour named José Barrantes, known to everyone as Chepe, walked over on Marta's second morning to see who had moved onto Rogelio's old land. He also farmed the next coffee hillside over. He had kept half an eye on the abandoned coffee terraces for years, more out of habit than duty.

Chepe knew the soil, the rain patterns, and which of the old coffee bushes still had life left in their roots. Marta knew terracing, pruning, and how to read a harvest by the colour of a coffee cherry in the dark. Neither of them wasted much time deciding they could use each other's knowledge.

Chepe then brought her a cup of his own coffee that first week. He brewed it the Costa Rican way, through a cloth filter set over a wooden stand. Marta tasted it and named the variety before he told her. It was Caturra, a shorter bush that grew well at altitude and yielded more cherries per acre than anything she had grown in Cuba. Chepe laughed and said she had just taught him something about his own hillside. Marta said that was usually how it worked between two people who both knew coffee.

Word reached Marta by letter that spring. Several workers from Buena Esperanza had made it to Florida before Cuba tightened its borders. Rafael's old shipping contacts in Havana had arranged passage for a handful of them in 1960, a young field supervisor named Tomás Reyes among them. Nearly a quarter million Cubans left for the United States in the years right after the revolution. Most had far less warning than Tomás did.

He wrote to Marta from Miami, working in the produce trade instead of coffee. He asked after Émile and the others still on the old land. Marta wrote back. She kept his letter.

The Ugalde heirs let Marta work the abandoned coffee terraces while they arranged a sale. Nobody else wanted the trouble of the place, so the arrangement cost them nothing to allow.

Marta and Rafael then spent that first season clearing weeds and rebuilding the coffee drying floor, plank by plank. Marta grafted her Cuban coffee saplings onto rootstock that had survived years of neglect. She planted her seeds along the highest terrace, the one Chepe said caught the best morning light. Manuel and Lucía worked the rows alongside their parents most afternoons, the way Marta once had alongside her own grandmother.

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A dry spell hit the Central Valley that first August, longer than Chepe had ever seen it run. Marta's young Cuban saplings wilted fastest, since their roots had not yet reached deep enough to find water on their own. She wanted to carry buckets up from the stream twice a day, the way she would have on a smaller Cuban plot. Chepe told her that would exhaust her before it saved a single bush.

Chepe showed her a trick his own father had used on that same hillside. He mulched each sapling thick with dried banana leaves, to hold whatever moisture the soil already had. Marta had never grown coffee anywhere near a banana tree in her life. She tried it anyway because Chepe had never once been wrong about that ground. All four Cuban saplings survived the dry spell. Two of the older, neglected bushes nearby did not.

Farmers had grown coffee had grown in Costa Rica's Central Valley since the late 1700s. By 1829 it had already become the country's main export, shipped for generations to buyers across Europe. Marta found that history easier to work with than she expected.

She wrote to the same contacts in the Netherlands and Germany she had corresponded with for thirty years from Cuba. She described the new farm and asked whether they would consider Costa Rican beans from her instead. Two of them wrote back within the month, willing to try a sample once she had one to send.

Rafael spent those same weeks working the docks in Puntarenas, on Costa Rica's Pacific coast. He learned which shipping lines still ran routes to Rotterdam and Hamburg. Ports were ports, he told Marta, whatever flag flew over them. He found an agent willing to book cargo space for a farm as small as theirs. Larger exporters rarely bothered to arrange that for anyone outside their own network.

By the second harvest, the terraces looked like a working coffee farm again instead of an abandoned one. The recovery did not go unnoticed. A coffee export company out of San José had been buying up small coffee farms across the Central Valley. A man named Federico Vargas ran it. He wanted to fold them into one large coffee operation.

Vargas drove out to see the recovered coffee land for himself before he ever spoke to the Ugalde heirs. He found Marta in the drying yard and complimented her work in a tone that made the compliment sound like an opening offer. He said a woman with no legal claim to the property yet would be wise to sell her labour to him. Gambling everything on land that was not hers, he said, was not a serious plan.

Marta thanked him for the visit. She told him the coffee land would belong to whoever earned it, and that she intended to be the one who did.

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Vargas came to see the Ugalde coffee land again a few weeks later, once word spread further that someone had brought it back to life. He offered the heirs a price in cash Marta could never have matched, payable in full within the month.

Flor Ugalde, the niece handling the estate's affairs, told Marta about the offer directly rather than simply taking it. She said she liked what Marta had done with her uncle's coffee land. Still, a family with children to think about could not turn down money like that out of sentiment alone. Marta asked for one week before Flor decided anything. Flor agreed, though she made no promises about what a week would change.

Marta did not spend that week hunting for more money because there was none left to find. She spent it going through the journals she had carried across two countries. They held decades of letters and shipping records, naming every serious coffee buyer she had ever dealt with in Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Rotterdam. She wrote to each of them again, asking for something specific this time. She wanted a signed statement. Each buyer would purchase Costa Rican coffee grown under her name, at a fixed premium price, for the next five years running.

Four of them answered before the week was out. Marta brought the letters to Flor Ugalde in San José herself, along with sample beans from the terrace she had replanted first. She told Flor that Vargas could offer more money today, and that his company already had no shortage of land.

What Vargas could not offer was a guaranteed buyer at a set price for five straight years. Marta's relationships were older than most of his own contracts. Chepe came with her that day. He told Flor plainly that the land had never looked better in the years he had watched it sit empty.

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Flor read through the letters twice. She said her uncle Rogelio had spent forty years on that land and never once made this kind of money on paper alone. She asked Marta why she had not simply matched Vargas's price with a bank loan instead of showing up with letters.

Marta said a bank in San José had already turned her down twice that year. She had no local credit history, and no collateral beyond four coffee saplings and a strongbox of old journals. A loan, even if she could get one, would put her in debt to a stranger. That stranger would not care whether the coffee ever got picked.

The buyer contracts put her in a relationship with people who needed the harvest to succeed exactly as much as she did. It was the same arrangement, she said, that had kept her family's coffee moving for five generations. A revolution had taken the land out from under her once already, but it had never touched a single one of those relationships.

Flor sold the farm to Marta for less than half of what Vargas had offered. The terms let Marta pay the balance over four years, straight out of the harvest itself. Flor told her later that the decision had not been an easy one to defend to the rest of the family. Two of her cousins had wanted the cash from Vargas outright. It took a full afternoon of arguing before they agreed to let her sign with Marta instead.

Flor said the money had mattered less than one thing in the end. Someone had finally made her uncle's land worth something again, instead of simply worth more. Vargas's company absorbed three other small farms in the valley that same year. The Ugalde land was not one of them.

Marta signed the papers in San José in March 1963. She was fifty-one years old. It was the second time in her life she had put her own name on a coffee deed. This time, no one else's name would ever go there in her place.

She thought of Isabel walking into a Havana notary's office in 1791 with eleven acres and almost nothing else. She understood, more clearly than she ever had in Cuba, exactly what that must have cost her to do alone.

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The coffee farm outside Naranjo was smaller than Buena Esperanza had ever been, eight acres against a hundred and seventy. It was fully hers, though. No partner's name sat on it; she owed a debt to. No government could fold it into something larger without asking.

Chepe stayed on as her foreman that same year, the way Émile's family had once stayed on for four generations under three different owners. Marta paid him a real wage from the first season on. She made sure everyone who worked the rows knew exactly whose name sat on the deed, and why it mattered that it did.

Marta did not keep her method to herself for long. Chepe asked her, within the year, to help him write a letter of his own to a buyer in Rotterdam. She sat with him at her kitchen table and showed him exactly how she had done it. Word spread through the valley. Within a few years, half a dozen small farms around Naranjo carried buyer letters modelled on Marta's own. Each one was a way to avoid selling cheaply to a man like Vargas out of fear.

Chepe came by that evening with two cups of his own coffee, the Caturra he had taught her to name. He said the land had waited a long time for someone who would stay. Marta said she had waited a long time herself for a country willing to let her in .

She wrote back to Tomás Reyes in Miami that spring. The farm finally had a name of its own, she told him: Finca La Segunda Cosecha, the farm of the second harvest. There would always be a place for him on it, she wrote, coffee or no coffee, whenever he wanted one. She did not yet know how many more letters it would take. She did not know how many more years would pass before he wrote back to say he was ready to take her up on it.