Cuban Coffee: Sierra Maestra Origins, History and Exports

Say "Cuban coffee" in Miami and most people will picture a cafecito: a small, sweet, strong shot made with whatever dark-roast beans the café uses. Cuban coffee as an origin, coffee actually grown in Cuba, is a different and much rarer thing. Cuba was once one of the Caribbean's big coffee producers, and its history is closely tied to Haiti's and Jamaica's. This guide covers where Cuban coffee is grown, how production collapsed and partly recovered, and why it is hard to buy in the United States.

How coffee came to Cuba

Coffee was introduced to Cuba in 1748, when José Antonio Gelabert brought plants to a farm near Havana. The industry took off after 1791, when French colonists fleeing the revolution in Saint-Domingue, today's Haiti, settled in the southeast and brought plantation methods with them. Their hillside estates around Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo are now a World Heritage Site: UNESCO inscribed the Archaeological Landscape of the First Coffee Plantations in the South-East of Cuba in 2000. The same wave of upheaval shaped coffee across the region; see our Haitian coffee page for the other side of that story.

Where is Cuban coffee grown?

Most Cuban coffee comes from the mountains of the east. About 92% of the crop has been grown in the Sierra Maestra, often under forest shade, according to the sources compiled by Wikipedia. Both arabica and robusta are grown, mostly on small family farms, and the harvest runs from September to January, peaking in October and November. That is a similar season to Jamaica's, and like the Blue Mountain growing area, the Sierra Maestra is exposed to Caribbean hurricanes.

A 2024 article sponsored by the Italian roaster Lavazza, which runs a farmer programme in Santiago and Granma provinces, said arabica makes up as much as 60% of Cuban coffee and named the varieties Isla 6-14 and Isla 6-11, bred for resistance to leaf rust, along with Bourbon and Caturra. The same article estimated Cuban production at 9,000 to 11,000 tonnes in 2022, with about 1,500 tonnes of arabica exported. Because it is sponsored content, treat those figures as the company's.

From boom to collapse

Cuban coffee exports exceeded 20,000 tonnes a year in the mid-1950s. A 2024 study in the International Journal of Cuban Studies, covering 1950 to 2017, found peak production of 60,326 tonnes in 1961 and a low of 4,973 tonnes in 2012, the year Hurricane Sandy struck eastern Cuba. The authors attributed the long decline mainly to internal causes: conflict, migration, poor management and economic crisis. The harvested area fell from about 170,000 hectares in 1961 to about 28,000 hectares in 2013, and production fell from 440,000 bags of 60 kg in 1989/90 to a low of 7,000 bags in 2007/08 before recovering to roughly 100,000 to 130,000 bags a year, according to figures compiled by Wikipedia.

The domestic market tells the same story. Pure coffee returned to the ration book in 2005, but in 2011 roasted peas were again mixed into the ration blend because of higher robusta prices, while much of the island's better arabica is sold abroad.

Who sells Cuban coffee?

All Cuban coffee exports have been handled by a single state company, Cubaexport, which pays growers and processors regulated prices. Japan and France have been the main markets, with smaller volumes to Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand. Japan's role mirrors its place as the largest buyer of Jamaica Blue Mountain, described on our Blue Mountain and Japan page. Organic Cuban coffee has been exported to Europe and Japan since 2003.

Can you buy Cuban coffee in the United States?

Only in narrow circumstances, and the rules have changed several times. The US embargo, in place since 1962, blocked Cuban coffee for decades. In April 2016 the State Department updated its Section 515.582 list to allow imports of Cuban-origin coffee produced by independent Cuban entrepreneurs, with documentary evidence of their independence from the state sector, law firm Hunton reported. Nespresso then launched a limited Cuban coffee, Cafecito de Cuba, in the US; it bought the coffee through Cuban export channels in Europe and obtained a US Treasury licence to ship the finished pods. US policy toward Cuba has since been tightened more than once, so anyone thinking of importing should check the current Office of Foreign Assets Control rules rather than rely on the 2016 position.

For travellers, the general principle on our bringing coffee back from Jamaica page applies: customs and agricultural rules at home decide what can come in, and for Cuba sanctions law adds a further layer.

Origin versus style

The confusion between Cuban coffee as a drink and Cuban coffee as an origin is a good example of why exact names matter. "Cuban-style" coffee says nothing about where the beans grew, much as "Blue Mountain style" says nothing about Jamaica; see Blue Mountain style coffee. Unlike Jamaica Blue Mountain, Cuban coffee has no protected origin name we could find in major consumer markets, so a buyer who wants beans actually grown in Cuba has to rely on the importer's documentation.

How it compares with Jamaica Blue Mountain

Both islands grow arabica in eastern mountains, both export much of their best coffee to Japan, and both have seen production cut by storms and disease. The difference is control of the name. Jamaica built a legally defined growing area, licensed trade and protected marks around Blue Mountain, explained on our Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee page; Cuba's coffee is better described as a state-exported national origin with famous mountains but no comparable consumer-facing certification.

Disclosure: this site is published by Mamre Blue Coffee, a Jamaica Blue Mountain estate (see about us), so we rely on official and independent sources for the facts on this page.