The Coffee History of Puerto Rico

By Israel Melendez Ayala

From Whetstone Magazine: Volume 08, available for pre-order now!

Every morning after walking our dog, my fiancée and I get coffee at Cuatro Estaciones in the Plaza de Armas, a café in the colonial city of Old San Juan. Locals and tourists frequent this café for its location and the specific strong flavor of its espresso. There are nine cafés in the small city, not counting the restaurants and bars that also serve local coffee, which was once consumed in boutique coffee shops in Vienna and Madrid. Puerto Rican coffee even reached the Vatican.

Coffee’s origin story is not exact, but the most common dates back to 850 CE. The Ethiopian ancestors of today's Oromo are believed to have been the first to discover and recognize the energizing effect of the beans from the coffee plant. This is where the story of Kaldi, an Ethiopian goat herder, comes from: After seeing the effect that some plants with reddish fruits (coffee tree) had on his flock—whose sheep were very active even at night—he decided to try them.

The earliest credible evidence of any coffee drink or knowledge of it appears in the mid-15th century, in the Sufi monasteries of Yemen. It was there, on the Arabian Peninsula, that coffee beans were first roasted and ground similarly to how they are prepared today. Enslaved people who were taken from what is now Sudan to Yemen and Arabia through the great port of Moca, were also known to have eaten the fleshy part of the coffee cherry as a stimulant.
By the 16th century, it had spread to the rest of the Middle East, Persia, Turkey and North Africa. Later, coffee spread to Italy and the rest of Europe to Indonesia and, in 1720, to America, introduced by French settlers to their Caribbean colonies of Martinique and Haiti. It reached the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico in 1736.

Before Puerto Rico

The Arabs were the first to appreciate coffee as a social drink. However, it spread so rapidly among groups of intellectuals and scholars that it also raised questions; at times, some emirs prohibited its consumption. 

The Emir Khair Bey observed that coffee led to a lack of sleep among some consumers, so he brought together a group of doctors and lawyers to decide whether the drink was in line with the Qur’an, which prohibits all forms of intoxication. In 1511, all the coffee shops were closed; when he learned that criticism against his power came from coffee drinkers, Bey carried out a campaign against the damages of coffee. The closure of the coffee shops caused rebellions, prompting them to cancel the ban.

The Christian kingdoms also had their own crusade against coffee. Some priests said that it was an “invention of Satan.'' Some Christian kingdoms prohibited it and punished its use. Among those was Gustav III of Sweden. He banned coffee roasting and sent sniffers into the street to track scofflaws by the scent of their coffee. 

“It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects,” Frederick the Great of Germany wrote in an anti-coffee manifesto in 1777. “Everybody is using coffee … My people must drink beer.” 

This repression failed. People continued to consume coffee.

The Vatican Connection

Pope Clement VIII was advised to ban coffee, as it represented a threat from the infidels. After having tried it, the Pope declared that leaving the pleasure of this drink only to his infidels would be a pity. 

“Why, this Satan’s drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall fool Satan by baptizing it and making it a truly Christian beverage,” he said. The coffee was well received by the monks for the same reasons as the imams: It allowed them to stay awake for a long time.

After decades, coffee continued to be consumed in the Holy See and even with by the current Pope Francis; although he is known to be very fond of wine and is a certified sommelier, he likes to drink coffee, too. 

Previously, the coffee sent to the Vatican came from Puerto Rico, by the Cooperativa Cafeteros de Puerto Rico, which registered the Café Rico brand in 1924. For a long time, it was considered the best coffee in the world. It had a factory with a coffee cupping laboratory and the only one that had a certified coffee taster in the entire archipelago. 

The company was bought by Puerto Rico Coffee Roasters in 2008, owned by Coca Cola, which changed the quality of the coffee by mixing it with lower quality foreign beans. Puerto Rico Coffee Roasters owns almost 80 percent of the production of torrefacto—a particular roasting process—in Puerto Rico. It is “an oligopoly,” says Eliezer Molina, a former gubernatorial candidate and agriculture activist. 

“They own the 10 biggest coffee companies of Puerto Rico,” and owe nearly $68,000 in back wages, damages and penalties after the U.S. Department of Labor investigated the operation.

Between the 1950s and 1960s, the Vatican bought about 15,000 quintals (1 quintal equals 100 pounds of coffee) each year. It was the only government that directly purchased Puerto Rican coffee, and although there were many more foreign buyers, the Pope’s prominence made him a symbol of Puerto Rican coffee exports.

Coffee Grows on the Island

Introduced to Puerto Rico in 1736, coffee production began to expand, rapidly and in large volume, in the mid-19th century. However, it was in the 1870s that it began an accelerated increase in its worldwide production and sale, with 843 registered coffee haciendas throughout approximately 69 out of Puerto Rico’s 78 municipalities since 1877. 

Spanish Captain General Felipe Ramirez de Estenós, reported that he distributed coffee seeds to several farmers in the town of Coamo in south central Puerto Rico in June 1755 for experimental planting purposes. This started the transformation of the precarious economy. Since 1530, when the gold was exhausted and the empire focused on richer colonies, Puerto Rico had been focused on farming, woodwork for the military and contraband. Within the next few years, the experimental coffee seeds resulted in a drastic change in Puerto Rico’s economy and rapid population expansion as the island became a high-volume exporter of coffee.

Owing to the rapid appreciation of the product, La Real Compañia Barcelonesa started exporting coffee on its route between Puerto Rico and Barcelona. The demand for Puerto Rican coffee increased thanks to its quality and flavor, as Fray Iñigo Abad y Lassierra mentioned in 1788 “…coffee, which bears fruit slowly, requires little care and has assured markets abroad where it is craved because of its quality and the harvest.” 

In 1768, the crown recognized the economic potential and offered the coffee growers of the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean a five-year grace period in the payment of taxes. This attracted more farmers to work coffee lands, as well as Europeans to emigrate, creating a disadvantage among the local “criollos”—originally meaning the descendants of European colonists who had been born in the colony—who did not possess the wealth of the Europeans. The social structure changed simultaneously with the economy and coffee production in Puerto Rico. A new economic social hegemony emerged: European landowner (hacendado) and merchant who sells the product abroad at a higher price.

Many of the European farmers were slave traders and increased the importation of enslaved people for greater production, which leaves a very bitter taste in the local coffee history. Also in 1768, the Compañía del Asiento de Negros was founded, an official commercial entity that replaced the Barcelonesa, with the mission of bringing enslaved people to the islands and exporting the products. The company made contracts with farmers, bought all of their production and then sold it abroad as a distribuidor with higher prices. This is still happening in the international coffee industry. 

In 1770, Puerto Rico exported 7,280 quintals, and only five years later, it was exporting 11,162 quintals of coffee. The coffee turned into dark brown gold for Spain and its hacendados and merchants, but not its workers, whether they were enslaved or criollo. By the 1780s, coffee surpassed tobacco as the main Puerto Rican agricultural product.

Meanwhile, Spain established the decree of private property in 1778, which of course came with property tax. It was another disadvantage for the criollos who did not have the wealth to buy land and pay the taxes. Wealthy European immigrants took the lands they wanted, which sometimes displaced local inhabitants.

In 1787, Irish Old San Juan resident James O’Daly brought in new machinery to make coffee “limpio” (clean or “pilado”): the bean without the layers of fruit. This production consisted of “limpiar” (cleaning) the “collor” coffee using gristmill machines made of wood, driven by animals. 

By mid-1797, coffee was being planted in all the cities of the island. Most of the local farmers were poor. since coffee farming was the best way for them to obtain income. Most of it, though, was absorbed by the colonists who had capital or access to credit from the international market, so they could access better technology, labor and lands.

The Effects of Abolition

Due to the Haitian Revolution, the coffee industry in Puerto Rico was greatly improved with the immigration of French citizens from Haiti, which at the time was the major exporter of coffee to world markets, who brought much knowledge of production and increased the quality of the coffee in Puerto Rico.

Inequality increased with the Real Cédula de Gracia, in 1815, decree that encouraged wealthy European immigrants who pledged allegiance to the Catholic Church and the Spanish Crown to take land in Puerto Rico.  They received benefits like tax breaks according to the number of people they enslaved, and importation without machinery taxes. They also obtained free trade with Spain or any other nation. 

Then, in December 1849, Captain General Don Juan de la Pezuela, ordered the police and government band together, under the pretext of maintaining civil order in Puerto Rico. This included creating a general registry of laborers, of those over 16 years of age who did not own land—mainly non-Europeans, of course, and therefore, people who had to work for a wage to survive. As part of this registry, the state issued a notebook that the workers had to keep all the time known as “libreta del jornalero.” This contained the name of the laborer, their town of residence and a description of their physical characteristics. In it, the employer had to write down when the workday began and ended and how their conduct had been.

This libreta del jornalero was the instrument that the authorities created to control the free population as the system of using enslaved people for labor began to falter. England was pressing for the abolition of the slave trade. Escapes and revolts were increasing, and the strength of the abolitionist sector was also growing inside the colonies. Thus, the libreta pleased the hacendados, giving them a tool to ensure no worker could leave their job until their employer indicated their contracts were fulfilled. Many laborers didn’t read or write, so they were lied to; if they abandoned work, they were punished with more work by the state. This exploitative method ended with the abolition of slavery on March 22, 1873.

These decisions by the crown consolidate poverty and solidify the social gap between small producers, as well as socioeconomic hegemony. The merchants appropriated most of the profits using credit and control over foreign sales channels. The landowners earned money by controlling the grain storage and processing facilities; the means of transportation and sales contacts for the product; hoarding the crops; and offering advances of money and seed, thus guaranteeing the labor of an indebted workforce, especially after abolition. Many of these harvesters were criollos who could not read or write, so had been fooled by the wealthier foreigners, who would eventually be the new criollo social elite.

The Puerto Rican coffee production, market and fame continued expanding internationally during the second half of the 19th century. It was the sixth largest exporter of high-grade coffee worldwide in the 1890s. For a small island competing against bigger coffee producing countries like Brazil and Colombia, that was a great achievement. In 1898, approximately 600,000 quintals were produced and exported for a value of 13.9 million Spanish pesos. But this glory started to fade because of global overproduction of coffee causing the fall of prices and decreasing profits. 

A New Colonizer

That year, Puerto Rican coffee received an even bigger blow: colonization by the United States. The industry faded drastically due new U.S. investors interested only in sugar. Hurricane San Ciriaco made landfall in 1899 and destroyed many of the coffee plantations, which made it easier for the investors to abandon the crop.

After the invasion, the U.S. imposed a military government as well as cabotage laws, which controlled the shipping of goods between two nations—except for the sugar market. It devalued the currency, which was a big hit on the economy, particularly in the coffee sector. Debt piled up. Merchants provided loans to the landowners, who gave them to laborers and medium and small producers. This created a chain of dependency and an unstable base for the coffee economy. Many people were victims of excessive speculation in terms of land and product prices, buying farms at astronomical prices in the 1890s and borrowing, counting on productions that would give the income to pay off the debt. 

At the same time, the coffee producers had diminishing returns, since the United States was not willing to pay for expensive coffee, but commercialization would be practically impossible because the trade had to be approved by the United States. 

The local coffee industry was mentioned in a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt on December 11, 1906, by R. Gómez Cabot and Salvador Amill Negroni, coffee hacendados and merchants:

“Our coffees being of a superior quality, they are highly appreciated in the European markets, where they sold at a much higher price than all other coffees from America (continent)…the United States imposes the Dingley tariff on all Europeans products…causing the Europeans to retaliate on Puerto Rico’s coffee with heavy duties on them so that the high prices paid for Puerto Rican Coffee does not benefit the country, but remain in the European treasuries, shipping then to the United States they have to compete with the lower grades of coffee imported there free of duty from nearly all the American countries…in 1896, coffee exportation was $16,000,000 to the with nearly $10,000,000 in profit, has been reduced to $6,000,000, with practically no profit at all for the planters.” 

“The United States did what every empire does,” says Molina. “It imposed its interests on its new colony to satisfy the economy of the metropolis, and with it, weakened the elite and the already established economic structure, creating a dependence that guarantees [the Empire’s] interests above the local economical interests.”

In 1899, Hurricane San Ciriaco caused damage of approximately $10 million to coffee fields, destroying 55 to 60 percent of the crops and 90 percent of the harvest. Farmers would have to start again by clearing the land to plant new coffee trees that would take between three to five years to bear fruit. To achieve this, they needed money and employees. But there was a shortage. 

“The sugar industry that was totally supported by the United States, excluded from tariffs, which had the funds to pay employment and restore the harvest. The indebted coffee growers clamored for credit and aid, but the merchants were reluctant to finance the unfortunate coffee," says Molina.

“These U.S. colonial policies disrupted Puerto Rico’s coffee industry, implementing a sugar economy and creating massive poverty among the population because there were less jobs from the fragile coffee industry, obliged to look for other jobs or work for the sugar industry at low wages,” says Fernando Lloveras, president of the nonprofit organization Para la Naturaleza, which protects and conserves local nature and agriculture. “Many landowners could not pay their debts or compete with the new market and product that the United States began to exploit in Puerto Rico for sugar. Thousands and thousands of lands were concentrated in sugar and accompanied by an oligopoly of new landowners from the new metropolis who continued to take the land from landowners who were rich and are now poor because their product was not protected or did not have tax benefits, such as what it was for coffee in Spanish empire times.” 

During the first decade of the U.S. occupation, colonial sugar interests had pretty much taken over, and the Puerto Rican coffee class was displaced. 

Several producers and exporters came together and formed the National Coffee Growers Association. Puerto Rican coffee had been an American product since 1898, so they believed it deserved the same tariff protection as sugar. But thanks to colonial contempt and the U.S.’s investments in Brazilian coffee since 1876, this was not achieved.

The 20th Century

In 1922, an office of the Federal Land Bank was established granting mortgage loans and financing that coffee growers used to pay their old debts. However, the farmers had to pay an interest rate of up to 3 percent and purchase mandatory insurance, because the bank does not bear the hurricane risks despite being in a tropical area. A strategy? It might have been.

The coffee growers looked for ways to survive against a sugar market that kept growing. In 1925, the existing cooperatives became one, La Cooperativa Cafeteros de Puerto Rico. Partners created most of the value of the coffee that they supplied through 5½ percent interest loans and torrefacto. They also classified, processed and exported the highest-classified bean. Eventually, they integrated a series of services such as credit, insurance and equipment to help and lift the burden on coffee producers.

The cooperative was a banner for the industry, but the hurricanes San Felipe (1928) and San Ciprián (1932), the Great Depression and World War II kept diminishing the industry. Operation Bootstrap (1947) was the last blow. 

The government shifted Puerto Rico to a manufacturing- and tourism-based economy.  U.S. companies were enjoying tax exemptions by the Industrial Incentives Act of 1948 and taking advantage of Section 262 of the Revenue Act of 1921 for those U.S. companies receiving income from U.S. territories. Of course, Puerto Rican companies were not eligible for these tax breaks, creating an enormous disadvantage for locals who wanted to create or maintain a business and solidifying a colonial economy dependent upon the U.S. interests. 

Puerto Rico was urbanizing, and agriculture was replaced by a dependence upon imports. Coffee was one of them, because many were moving to the metropolitan area for stable jobs; in addition, “neither the insular government nor the U.S. created a program or assistant for agriculture,” says Salvador Coleman, the agroecology coordinator for Para la Naturaleza. 

This provoked a gradual abandonment of agriculture by industrial companies. Even sugar production came to a halt.

Coffee producers lowered their prices and quality to compete against cheaper imports. They eliminated the hand-selection of coffee beans that guaranteed quality and uniformity in the bag. Some producers mixed the local beans with those subsidized setting prices.

By 1968, low-cost foreign coffees were imported to satisfy the demand, owing to the lack of production as workers moved to industrialized jobs. Blended coffee was being sold at same price as not blended and exported with a subsidy from the local government to try to keep the coffee industry alive. This subsidy fluctuated depending on the world price in order to guarantee the exporter a net profit of around $3/quintal, which was not enough for defray expenses from the export drop.

In 1969, the government stopped the subsidy. In a globalized market, rich states could buy cheaper coffee from poorer ones, as the U.S. has been doing since the 17th century with Brazil, and as big international coffee companies do today. Puerto Rico and these other state have to devalue quality and price to profit in a hyperinflated world that consolidates dependence on wealthy states.

“We have a model economy of consumption and not of production. That is the phenomenon that creates the collapse of all what is national (Puerto Rico) production.” says Molina. “The inflation that exists in Puerto Rico for being a colony, is the factor that makes that in the process of preparing the product much more expensive than the imported goods because their labor is cheap, currency and therefore their product is too. Then our production has to compete in a society that is struggling with a brutal economic recession with austerity measures from PROMESA, the Hurricane Maria, tax haven for foreign companies so locals would take what’s affordable.” 

After a history of nearly 210 years of sweat and hard work to achieve superior coffee, it’s stopped being exported. Today there are only 4,737 farms, compared to 21,693 farms and ranches registered and exporting prime products around the world in 1899. The coffee quality is lower, and Puerto Rican beans are mixed with lower quality foreign beans. 

The scenario is still precarious today. Café Rico, once the prime jewel of Puerto Rico’s coffee and the Vatican's favorite choice, was bought by Puerto Rico Coffee Roaster, the company headed by Coca Cola, in July 2008. The company obtained all of Café Rico’s machinery and roasting and manufacturing technology, as well as that of the other nine main coffee companies of the archipelago. It now possesses 80% of production and sells coffee of Puerto Rico as a brand, but mixes it with foreign coffee beans

“…using class A coffee with 3rd class coffee and even sometimes low local class too. Buying and producing it at low prices but selling it locally and abroad at higher prices…,” writes local news source Noticel. This is what multinational coffee companies do around the world, which makes it harder for small locally owned coffee producers with integrity and pride in their specific beans.

“It is an oligopoly that affects the market, blocking any competition and small and medium coffee growers. I don’t know how the government allows this,” says Lloveras. This also affects customers.

The coffee that the U.S. and its investors denied and dropped in order to benefit their interests in sugar, tourism and manufacturing has now been bought and controlled by American investors with colonial benefits and profits. Hurricane Maria did a lot of damage to coffee, unprotected as it was. Now, more foreign investors take advantage of Puerto Rico. 

Coffee is a heavily traded global commodity, and high-quality arabica beans are in high demand and the fastest-growing segment of the market, behind crude oil. Over 2.25 billion cups of coffee consumed worldwide on a daily basis. It could be a stronger income for Puerto Rico’s, but the unsovereign economy doesn’t help local coffee producers and those who want to join the industry. 

Still today, some producers are resisting and looking for ways to preserve the practices that made Puerto Rican coffee so prestigious. But the colonial status makes that only a dream.