Baracoa, Cuba: the First City & the Coconut-Cacao Kitchen | Sabores de la Isla
Los pueblos de la isla
Baracoa
La Primada — donde empieza Cuba, y donde sabe distinto
Capítulo VII · Los pueblos
¿Por qué la primera ciudad de Cuba sabe distinta a toda la isla?
Cuba's whole story starts here. On August 15, 1511, the conquistador Diego Velázquez planted the first Spanish city on the island — on a green crescent of coast way out east — and gave it the long name: the Villa de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción de Baracoa. For four years, this was the capital. Everything that came after — Havana, the sugar, the music, the leaving — came after Baracoa.
So did the island's first act of defiance. Up in these mountains the Taíno cacique Hatuey — who had crossed over from Hispaniola to warn the people what was coming — led the first resistance to the conquest, and was executed for it around 1512. Cubans never let the name go. They put it on a beer and a malta, and they still carry it. The first city, the first stand. Baracoa is where the island's memory begins.
El aislamiento
The mountains that made the menu
Here's the strange gift of Baracoa: for nearly four and a half centuries, you couldn't drive there. Cuba's steepest mountains wall the town off from the rest of the island, and until La Farola — "the lighthouse," one of the most beautiful and white-knuckle roads in the country — was carved through the peaks in the 1960s, the only way in was by sea. That isolation is the secret ingredient. Cut off, Baracoa grew its own cuisine the way an island grows its own species. It's the Galápagos of Cuban cooking, basically.
While the rest of the island cooked with lard and sofrito, Baracoa cooked with coconut milk and cacao. The wet green hills are the capital of coconut and chocolate in Cuba, and the flavors here live nowhere else. The cucurucho: fresh coconut cooked down with honey and fruit, packed into a cone of palm leaf, sold off stands along La Farola. Bacán, a tamal of grated plantain and crab steamed in a banana leaf. Chorote, a cacao drink thick enough to stand a spoon in. And the tiny tetí fish that surge up the rivers in season. This is Cuban food most Cubans have never tasted.
La comida
Coconut, cacao, and a town that kept its own flavor
Eat Baracoa and you're tasting the one corner of Cuba the rest of the island never reached in time to change. The cucurucho is coconut and honey and sun, nothing else. The chorote is centuries of cacao in a cup. Even the everyday rice goes rich and white with coconut milk. The first city the Spanish built became, by sheer distance, the last one to taste like everywhere else — which is exactly why a baracoeso will tell you, without blinking, that the best food in Cuba comes from its very first town.
When Columbus first reached Cuba in 1492, he wrote down a high, flat-topped mountain shaped like an anvil. That's almost certainly El Yunque — "the anvil" — still standing over Baracoa Bay. The first thing Europe ever wrote down about Cuba looks down on this town to this day.
La Farola
La receta
Taste the first city
Cucurucho Casero
- 2 cups fresh grated coconut (or grated coconut in syrup, drained)
- 1/2 cup honey (or raw sugar)
- 1/2 cup guava paste, diced — or fresh guava/pineapple
- 1 cinnamon stick (canela)
- A strip of orange peel, a pinch of salt
- Drop the coconut, honey, cinnamon, orange peel and salt into a heavy pan.
- Cook it low and slow, stirring, until it's thick and glossy — 15–20 min.
- Fold in the guava or fruit right at the end so it keeps some shape.
- Back home it goes in a cone of palm leaf; a little dish works just fine.
- Eat it warm, with a spoon and no apology.
Chorote de Baracoa
- 4 cups whole milk (or part coconut milk, Baracoa-style)
- 1/3 cup cocoa or 4 oz chopped chocolate — Africanitas, delicious chocolate covered cookies. 10 per order
- 2 tbsp cornstarch dissolved in cold water (this is what makes it chorote)
- 1 cinnamon stick (canela), sugar to taste, a pinch of salt
- Warm the milk with the cinnamon stick — low heat, don't let it boil.
- Whisk in the cocoa or chopped chocolate until it's smooth.
- Stir in the dissolved cornstarch and cook gently until it thickens.
- Sweeten to taste; a pinch of salt sharpens the cacao.
- Serve it hot and thick — the spoon should stand up halfway.
Preguntas del pueblo
What was the first city in Cuba?
Baracoa. The Spanish conquistador Diego Velázquez founded it on August 15, 1511, as the Villa de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción de Baracoa — the first Spanish settlement on the island, and Cuba's first capital from 1518 to 1522. Cuba's recorded story begins in Baracoa.
Why is Baracoa's food different from the rest of Cuba?
Isolation. Ringed by Cuba's steepest mountains and reachable only by sea, Baracoa had no road to the rest of the island until La Farola was cut through the peaks in the 1960s. Cut off for four and a half centuries, it grew its own cuisine — coconut milk and cacao, not the lard and sofrito of the west. It's the most distinctive regional kitchen in Cuba, and most of Cuba has never had it.
What is a cucurucho?
Baracoa's signature sweet: fresh grated coconut cooked down with honey and fruit — guava, pineapple, orange — and packed into a cone of royal-palm leaf. You buy it off a roadside stand along La Farola and eat it with your fingers. It tastes like nowhere else in Cuba.
What is chorote?
A thick, almost-pudding hot chocolate from Baracoa — local cacao, a little cornstarch to thicken it, warmed with cinnamon. It's the daily cup of a town that has grown cacao for centuries.
La despensa de Baracoa
The coconut-and-cacao pantry of Cuba's first city.
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