I Dream of My Grandmother’s Cuban Coffee
Cuban coffee shaped my life—but why is it so hard to pin it down?
In December, I went home to Miami, Florida, for the first time in six years. Generally, I have a hard line on the hours I drink coffee: I can drain cup after cup in the morning, but as soon as it hits noon, the caffeine free-for-all comes to an end. My body seems to know what’s good for it, and becomes repulsed by even the merest suggestion of coffee in the afternoon.
But in Miami, I crave coffee at all hours of the day. We drove—yes, drove; it was quite the trek from Madison to Miami—into the city around 5 p.m. on Christmas Day. The first thing I did was ask my partner to take us somewhere to get coffee—specifically, Cuban coffee.
I grew up watching my grandmother make coffee for people at all hours of the day. Dropping by for a spontaneous visit was enough of an occasion for a fresh round of coffee.
My grandparents moved to a house in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami in 1980 after living in New Jersey for over a decade; they had emigrated from Cuba in 1967. Later, my grandmother’s two sisters moved into a duplex across the street (one still lives there today) and came over daily, sometimes multiple times a day. My great-grandmother lived with my grandmother until she passed, so my grandmother’s house was always the family gathering place, a hub of activity at all hours. And that meant there was always coffee being made.
When I first started working as a barista in 2010, I didn’t connect that background with the lattes and flat whites I was making. Still, people did occasionally order Cuban coffee. Almost everyone who did instructed me to put raw sugar into the portafilter (the little handle you see baristas jiggling when making coffee on an espresso machine—a portmanteau of “portable” and “filter.”). The raw sugar was supposed to sit atop the ground coffee, and the water would run through both the grounds and sugar to make a sweet drink. (I should note that I almost always said no when people asked for this. I was told adding sugar to the portafilter would stick to the valves within the espresso machine and ruin it, though there seems to be some disagreement about this.)
However, that was not the way my grandmother made coffee, and that gap has made me aware of Cuban coffee’s slippery definition, of the difficulty of linking it to a single approach or technique. Most people agree that Cuban coffee involves some combination of coffee and sugar, but what is it exactly? A coffee? A style? A method? And why is it so hard to pin down in the first place?
Con Azúcar
I can’t even count the number of times I watched my grandmother make coffee when I was growing up. As a child, the process struck me as regimented and predictable, every gesture repeated, every step memorized. But as I got older, its making seemed less precise, reliant more on muscle memory than measurements. This is a theme in my grandmother’s culinary life: When I asked her to share the recipe for arroz congrí (click on this link! It goes to an article I wrote about one of my favorite Cuban dishes), she couldn’t give me a single measurable quantity. It was about instinct and feel, honed over decades.
The process began when she opened a canister of pre-ground coffee, poured heaps of it into a Moka pot (at some point, she graduated to a tiny, at-home espresso machine), put the pot on the stovetop, and let the coffee brew until the Moka pot whistled. My grandmother loved her coffee piping hot—it was not uncommon to burn your tongue drinking her coffee. Once she began using the espresso machine, she’d stick the steam wand into a cup of just-brewed coffee to make the coffee even hotter.
As the coffee brewed, she’d prepare a small pitcher by pouring heaping tablespoons of white sugar (never brown or raw sugar, although that might have had more to do with convenience than preference). Then, she’d add a splash of coffee and would vigorously whisk it with the sugar to make a kind of paste. Finally, she’d pour the rest of the coffee into the sugar paste, which sat like a layer of crema on top. She’d serve small, one-ounce pours to everyone—if not when you first arrived, then certainly after dinner.
That’s the Cuban coffee I know, which differs from the “raw sugar in the portafilter” method. I don’t wish to lay claim to the idea that there’s one correct way to make Cuban coffee—rather, I’m curious about why there seems to be so little agreement about how Cuban coffee is made.
Whether or not your concept of Cuban coffee involves vigorous whisking or a sprinkle of raw sugar, this discrepancy piqued my interest. But what I find more fascinating is that Cuban coffee isn’t really Cuban in the first place.
Origin Stories
For the most part, when you see the name of a country in front of the word “coffee,” it means that the coffee was grown there. (There are a few exceptions, like “Italian roast” and “French roast,” although these terms refer to a roasting style rather than a country of origin.) That’s not generally the case for Cuban coffee, though. So what do we even mean when we say coffee is Cuban?
The Cuban coffee I grew up with was exclusively sold pre-ground in vacuum-sealed bricks; popular brands include Cafe La Llave, Cafe Pilon, and Café Bustelo. These bricks seemed to come into favor in the 1980s: An old article in the Chicago Tribune asserted that “the relatively compact brick of coffee, which crumbles when the package is opened, more easily fits onto supermarket shelves than cans and also costs less, saving money for both roaster and consumer.”
All of these brands’ origin stories involve Cuba in some way: Either the founders were from there or had visited and modeled their coffee after what they saw and experienced in Cuba. But as common as it is within specialty coffee for a bag to have some details about a coffee’s country of origin, that information was missing on the bricks I grew up with.
Every few years, I go searching for more about Cuban coffee, and am always surprised by how little I find. I knew that U.S. embargoes against Cuba greatly affected the availability of Cuban coffee, and that when the USSR collapsed, so did Cuba’s coffee production. But I wanted to know what exactly was in those bricks of coffee. I emailed a marketing person from Bustelo, requesting to interview someone to learn where the company sources its beans, but I ran into a brick wall. Coffee still grows in Cuba, but I’m pretty sure that if we have these bricks in the U.S., and if trade between the U.S. and Cuba is severely prohibited, it stands to reason that they do not contain any Cuban-grown coffee.
Does that mean Cuban coffee is a style? I’d argue yes, to an extent: Perusing the Bustelo website, you’ll find coffees sourced and roasted in various ways: a medium-roast Colombian coffee, a dark-roasted Nicaraguan coffee. The company’s framing suggests Cuban coffee is a style of preparation, not a method of roasting or sourcing. But even defining that style is a challenge.
I still want to learn more about Cuban coffee. When I mentioned to a colleague that I was looking for more information, he told me he’d drunk coffee made from Cuban coffee beans before, and described it as rich and nutty.
For me, Cuban coffee exists as something both tangible—something I’m desperate for more information about—and ethereal. It’s tied so closely to my childhood memories, even though that coffee I remember seems to defy other descriptions of Cuban coffee. Somehow, having a shot of espresso at 12:01 p.m. will keep me up all night and unsettle my stomach, but I could drink a coffee prepared by my grandmother (or truly, from any ventanita—small windows most Cuban restaurants have to serve coffee and quick items like pastries) at any time of day without suffering negative consequences.
Perhaps trying to find out more about Cuban coffee is a way of attempting to explain this discrepancy. Perhaps I should leave well enough alone, and allow these memories to exist purely on their own—a pull to my childhood, a thread that ties me back to a feeling I can’t explain. It’s pretty cool coffee can do that.
I learned about Cuban coffee from my partner, who’s also Miami Cuban (and also worked at Starbucks for a time—he’s the barista of our household!). He didn’t make it at home until I had my first Cuban coffee visiting family in Miami, including the coffee his abuela made to greet us, and I took an interest in the style. Now we have a couple sets of espresso-size coffee cups he picked up in Miami (one with “But first, cafecito” printed on the side), and I’ll occasionally request a Cuban coffee as an after-dinner drink, or we’ll have a round to serve to friends. Never as our morning coffee, though. I think of it as primarily social, and also for drinking in the evening. He makes it the way you describe, with an espresso machine and stirring the sugar into a paste in the cup. We’ve had a few discussions about what makes it “Cuban” coffee and not just a sweetened espresso. To me it comes down to the whipping step—and the cultural context.