The introduction of coffee into Cuba, as before stated in this work, was due to the influx of refugees, flying from the revolution in Santo Domingo, in the first years of the nineteenth century. The majority of these immigrants, of French descent, and thoroughly familiar with the culture of coffee, settled first in the hills around Santiago de Cuba on the south coast, where they soon started coffee plantations that later became very profitable. Others located in the mountainous districts of Santa Clara around the charming little city of Trinidad, where fine estates were soon established and excellent coffee produced. From these first settlements the culture of the plant rapidly spread to nearly all of the mountainous portions of the Island, where the soil was rich, and where forest trees of hard wood furnished partial shade, so essential to the production of first-class coffee. In the mountains, parks and valleys that lie between Bahia Honda, San Cristobal and Candelaria, in the eastern part of Pinar del Rio, many excellent estates were established whose owners, residing in homes that were almost palatial in their appointments, spent their summers on their coffee plantations, returning to Havana for the winter. Revolutions of the past century unfortunately destroyed all of these beautiful places, leaving only a pile of tumbled-down walls and cement floors to mark the spot where luxurious residences once stood. Cuba, during the first half of the 19th century, and even up to the abolition of slavery in 1878, was a coffee exporting country, but with the elimination of the cheap labor of slaves, and the larger profits that accrued from the cultivation of sugar cane, the coffee industry gradually dropped back to a minor position among the industries of the Island, and thousands of “cafetales” that once dotted the hills of Cuba were abandoned or left to the solitudes of the forests where they still yield their fragrant fruit “the gift of Heaven,” as the wise men of the East declared. Of all the varied agricultural industries of Cuba there is none, perhaps, that will appeal more than coffee growing to the home-seeker of moderate means, the man who really loves life in the mountains, hills and valleys beside running streams, where the air is pure and the shade grateful, and the climate ideal. The culture of coffee is not difficult, and by conforming to a few well-known requirements which the industry demands it can easily be carried on by the wife and children, while the head of the family attends to the harder work of the field, or to the care of livestock in adjacent lands.