While most foreign observers might have found a mule train in the Sierra Maestra quaint, I saw it as evidence of local peasants’ economic autonomy. The boldness of its display was startling. Unlike central and western Cuba, where the cultivation and internal marketing of homegrown coffee had not only been banned five decades earlier but strictly enforced, the same was not necessarily true in the East. As the leader of the mule train explained: “Fidel took a lighter touch with us. He owed us because we allowed his revolution, so my father got title to this bit of land, and we have always grown our coffee and gone up and down with mules to sell it—although we couldn’t sell it to anyone but the state until the Russians left. Before, the Russians gave him [Fidel] the money to put in this road. That made a difference. Less mud. But mules really don’t slip!” Road to La Gran Piedra, July 2016.
