Where several small coffee farms are located in the same vicinity, hulling machines may be purchased jointly, and serve the needs of other growers in the district. The crop when dried, cleaned and placed in hundred-pound sacks, is usually strapped to the backs of mountain ponies and thus conveyed to the nearest town or seaport for shipment to Havana. A coffee planter can always store his crop in the bonded warehouses of Havana or other cities, and secure from the banks, if desired, advances equivalent to almost its entire value. The price of green coffee on the market at wholesale ranges from 20¢ to 25¢ per hundred weight. It is a common sight either in Bahia Honda or Candelaria to see long trains of ponies bringing coffee in from the outlying foot hills, or mountain districts. It is usually sold direct to local merchants, who pay for the unselected unpolished beans, just as they come from the hands of the growers, $20 per hundred weight. This high price is paid owing to the fact that the Cuban product is considered, at least within the limits of the Republic, the best coffee in the world, and it will bring in the local markets a higher price than coffee imported from the foreign countries. The retailers after roasting coffee, get from 40¢ to 50¢ per pound for it. In spite of its superiority and the demand for native coffee, less than 40% of the amount consumed is grown in Cuba. Most of it is imported from Porto Rico and other parts of the world, and this, regardless of the fact that nearly all of the mountain sides, valleys and foothills belonging to the range that extends through Pinar del Rio from Manatua in the west to Cubanas in the east, are admirably adapted to the cultivation of coffee, as also are the mountains of Trinidad and of Sancti Spiritus in the Province of Santa Clara, the Sierra de Cubitas and la Najassa in Camaguey, and the Sierra Maestra range that skirts the full length of the southern shore of Oriente. The available lands for profitable coffee culture in Cuba are almost unlimited and are cheap, considering the fertility of the soil, the abundance of timber still standing, the groves of native fruit trees, the good grass found wherever the sun’s rays can penetrate, the splendid drinking water gushing from countless springs, and the many industries to which these lands lend themselves, waiting only the influx of capital, or the coming of the homeseeker.