Haiti and Cuban eastern province for greater protection of coffee heritage

SANTIAGO DE CUBA, Cuba, Dec 8 (ACN) Specialists from Haiti and Santiago de Cuba, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization ( UNESCO), exchanged in this province on the protection of the coffee heritage.

Tatiana Villegas, director of the UNESCO office in Port-au-Prince, told the press that the objective of the meeting is to learn from what has been done to achieve the declaration of the Archaeological Landscape of the First Coffee Plantations in Southeastern Cuba as a World Heritage Site.

She pointed out that the results of the joint work of scholars from the two nations will allow strengthening the proposal to obtain the international status granted by UNESCO, since the Haitian coffee heritage was discovered in 2009 and classified as National Heritage in 2015.

Villegas highlighted the potential to achieve, in the future, greater relations between both countries, in order to create a coffee route that will contribute to the promotion of history and cultural traditions, as well as to the development of tourism.

For her part, Yaumara Lopez, chief of the Coffee Roads project of the Office of the City Conservator of Santiago de Cuba, affirmed the progress in the research, which is positive, in order to continue the cooperation between Cuban and Haitian institutions, initiated in 2004.