A Cafecito Story / El cuento del cafecito

by Julia Alvarez, Bill Eichner, Belkis Ramirez, Daisy Cocco De Filippis (Translator)

Overview

A Cafecito Story is a story of love, coffee, birds and hope. It is a beautifully written eco-fable by best-selling author Julia Alvarez. Based on her and her husband's experiences trying to reclaim a small coffee farm in her native Dominican Republic, A Cafecito Story shows how the return to the traditional methods of shade-grown coffee can rehabilitate and rejuvenate the landscape and human culture, while at the same time preserving vital winter habitat for threatened songbirds.

Not a political or environmental polemic, A Cafecito Story is instead a poetic, modern fable about human beings at their best. The challenge of producing coffee is a remarkable test of our ability to live more sustainably, caring for the land, growers, and consumers in an enlightened and just way. Written with Julia Alvarez's deft touch, this is a story that stimulates while it comforts, waking the mind and warming the soul like the first cup of morning coffee. Indeed, this story is best read with a strong cup of organic, shade-grown, fresh-brewed coffee.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781931498067
Publisher:	Rizzoli
Publication date:	04/26/2002
Edition description:	English/Spanish Bilingual Edition
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.27(d)

About the Author

Julia Alvarez has bridged the Americas many times. Born in New York and raised in the Dominican Republic, she is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist, author of world-renowned books in each of the genres, including How the Garc­a Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, and Something to Declare. She is the recipient of a 2013 National Medal of Arts. She lives on a farmstead outside Middlebury, Vermont, with her husband Bill Eichner. Visit Julia's Web site https://www.juliaalvarez.com/ to find out more about her writing.

Julia and Bill own an organic coffee farm called Alta Gracia in her native country of the Dominican Republic. Their specialty coffee is grown high in the mountains on what was once depleted pastureland. Not only do they grow coffee at Alta Gracia, but they also work to bring social, environmental, spiritual, and political change for the families who work on their farm. They use the traditional methods of shad-grown coffee farming in order to protect the environment, they pay their farmers a fair and living wage, and they have a school on their farm where children and adults learn to read and write. For more information about Alta Gracia, visit www.cafealtagracia.com.
Belkis Ram­rez, who created the woodcuts for A Cafecito Story, is one of the most celebrated artrists in the Dominican Republic.

Daisy Cocco de Filippis, who translated A Cafecito Story into Spanish, is originally from the Dominican Republic. She has taught Hispanic literature and culture at York College of The City University of New York since 1978, where she directs the Department on Foreign Languages, ESL and Humanitites.

Hometown:

Middlebury, Vermont

Date of Birth:

March 27, 1950

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Education:

B.A., Middlebury College, 1971; M.F.A., Syracuse University, 1975

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Joe grew up on a farm in Nebraska dreaming of following in his father's footsteps and becoming a farmer. It was a hard life with sweet moments, many of the sweetest in the company of birds.

    Early spring, Joe would plant corn, trying to keep his rows as straight as his father's. White gulls swirled around his tractor, occasionally swooping down to pick grubs from the tilled soil. Sea gulls, everyone called them.

    Every time they did so, they distracted the young Joe. His dad used to say that he could read the heartbeat of his son's attention from the zigzags in his row. But Joe couldn't stop wondering where those gulls had come from. Nebraska is a long ways from the sea.

    With the heat of summer came the long, back-breaking days of haying. Joe would stack the ninety-pound bales in the loft of the barn. The only company in that hot spot under the roof were barn swallows and sparrows sailing through the door to their nests and pigeons sitting on the rafters cooing to each other while they watched him sweat.

But the small farms started to go under. By the time Joe was a young man, his dad had to sell off most of his land to pay the bills. Farming became a business run by people in offices who had never put their hands in the soil. Joe decided this was not for him.

    The school counselor suggested teaching instead. After all, Joe loved to read and talk about what he had read.

    So, Joe ended up in the classroom. Putting books in his students' hands was not all that different from sowing seeds in a field. Still, somethingseemed to be missing from his life.

    Early mornings, in his rented apartment, he would sit at his desk, reading a book, sipping a strong cup of coffee. Sometimes, he'd look out over the fields that his father had once owned and farmed. Computerized projections now determined the size of the harvest before the seeds were in the ground. The rows were all uniform. The gulls, gone. Years went by. The fields outside Joe's windows became parking lots and housing developments, small malls with big chain stores. The coffee he drank got fancier. Beans from all over the world. The rents higher. The loneliness deeper.

    Joe married a city girl and moved to Omaha. But the marriage didn't take. For years, Joe kept to himself, following his routines, but still feeling adrift, a little lost. Finally, one Christmas, he decided to take off. A vacation might help him get out of the rut he was in.

    It being winter, it being Nebraska, he thought of the tropics. Searching the Web, he discovered all kinds of resort packages, photos showing barely clad beauties tossing beach balls with waves sounding in the background.

    That's just what he needed. Some time to figure out where he was going, maybe mend a broken heart with a new romance—and get a suntan in the bargain.

    Joe browsed for hours, sipping his cup of coffee.

    He found a great deal: Dominican Republic: the land Columbus loved the best ... Joe clicked and typed and pressed, and in a few minutes, he was confirmed on a package vacation to the lap of happiness.

---

Excerpted from A Cafecito Story by Julia Alvarez. Copyright © 2001 by Julia Alvarez. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved.

Editorial Reviews

"...highly recommended as being and intriguing blend of sparse writing, specific images, and involving discussions."—Library Bookwatch

"Eichner and Alvarez tell a complex story without being preachy or heavy-handed. They intend to inspire, and they do."—HippoPress, Manchester

From the Publisher

Review: "A Better Cup of Coffee" HippoPress Manchester-
When Joe stops at the roadside barra outside his Dominican vacation resort, he finds the local coffee comes in a single, perfect denomination, "a dollhouse-sized cup filled with delicious, dark brew that leaves stains on the cup." He takes a sip and tastes a coffee that will change his life forever.

Joe is the main character in the adult fable/parable A Cafecito Story by award-winning Vermont novelist Julia Alvarez (How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1990), In the Time of Butterflies (1993), and In the Name of Salom© (2000)). Illustrated with wonderful, imaginative woodcuts by celebrated Dominican artist Belkis Rami­rez, the book comes in three parts: The "Cafecito Story" of the books title; an afterward by Bill Eichner, Alvarez's spouse and co-owner of their organic coffee farm; and a surprisingly rich and sensible resource section.

"The Cafecito Story" unfolds through the eyes of Joe, a Nebraska native with farming in his blood. Joel feels increasingly displaced from the natural world, so he takes a getaway vacation to the Dominican Republic. 

What's so special about the cafecito he finds there? The beans were grown in the traditional way, on a shaded farm in the Dominican's mountainous interior. When Joe visits a coffee farm in the hills, the farmer Miguel tells him that the old ways are fast disappearing as farmers rent their plots to "La compania" to grow coffee quickly in full son, for better short-term yields. The result is the destruction of a sustainable way of life through deforested mountains, depleted soils, and pesticides and chemical fertilizers that wash into the rivers. And for the coffee drinker half a world away, notes Miguel, "The sprayed coffee tastes just as good if you are tasting only with your mouth. But it fills you with the poison swimming around in that dark cup of disappointment."

I'm drinking a cup of certified organic coffee as I write this. How could I drink anything else? This book is meant to be more than light summer reading. It's meant to change your thinking, and it's likely that it will.  Eichner and Alvarez's real-life story picks up where the fable leaves off. Eichner writes in the afterward about Alta Gracia, their organic coffee farm established with them campesino neighbors in the Dominican Republic. Where the fiction is simple and prose sometimes choppy, the afterward is much more lyrical. It clearly conveys the rewards of helping to renew a landscape scorched by agribusiness, the joys of seeing the songbirds return and the literacy rate rise, and the fulfillment in transforming the dream of sustainability into a reality.

Like a young tree, the parable and the real-life story intertwine and take root in the reader. In part three, an extensive and imaginative list of resources will help coffee drinkers participate in fair trade, a set of marketplace practices that create a better future for half a million family coffee farmers around the world.

In an age when we often want to make a difference but are uncertain of where to begin, drinking a better cup of coffee doesn't seem like much to ask. After all, writers Eichner, "Anyone can begin by planting a tree, or a hundred trees…. The future does depend on each cup, on each small choice we make."
Eichner and Alvarez manage to tell a complex story with global consequences without being preachy of heavy-handed. They intend to inspire, and they do.

Karen Marzloff