GAF
More attachment to the hill
Coffee recovery: main mission
Yateras has prospered a lot and everything is very different from how it was before 1959,” said Ángel Peña González, a 78-year-old retiree, who lived during the first 16 years of the misery and exploitation that peasants in a servile neocolonial republic were subjected to. United States government.
“There were only seven little schools here that the poor like me couldn't attend. You had to walk miles through demonic trails to reach them and not all parents had time and conditions to take their children,” said Ángel, who was born in Vista Alegre de Yateras and has been living in Palenque for 46 years.
“There was only one pharmacy and a private doctor to attend to everyone, they called him Martínez by his last name. Diseases "rained", the boys, mostly barefoot, walked with their bellies inflated with parasites and it was impossible to keep the sick under treatment. I lived that, because I grew up in such conditions until I was 16.”
He recalled that there were no roads either, so to go out to the city you had to walk to Boquerón, on the border with Manuel Tames, to take the only car that reached that place.
"The cultivation of coffee, the main economic line of the area, was in the hands of eight or 10 bourgeois landowners, who controlled everything: production, storage, pulping plants, commerce ...
“With the triumph of the Revolution everything changed. The lands were given to the peasants and the production of the grain reached further development,” said Ángel, who worked for 20 years in the coffee sector.
“When I started working at the Benefit Company, in 1986, Yateras produced 905 thousand cans, almost a million, which was collected by Maisí, the largest contributor in the province.
“But then the crop became depressed due to the lack of conditions to live and work in the mountains: many people abandoned their farms. As aid from the socialist camp disappeared and the imperial blockade tightened, economic difficulties increased and damage from cyclones, such as Matthew, which devastated numerous coffee plantations, increased.
