[NYTr] Once a Sugar Baron's, then Harvard's, Old Botanical Garden Thrives in Cienfuegos

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[Interesting article deespite the typical Chicago Trib sniping and the
snide headline.-NYTr]

Chicago Tribune - Dec 13, 2007
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-letter_webdec13,1,7992335.story

LETTER FROM CUBA

Beauty grows in a garden quite contrary

By Michael Martinez

PEPITO TEY, Cuba--The last vestige of Americanism at the Cienfuegos
Botanical Garden is carved into a tall royal palm. That it's inscribed
into Cuba's national tree highlights how historically intertwined the
two countries have been, despite their hostility over the last half
century.

"Harvard Biological Laboratory," the letters say outside what had been
called the Harvard House, now home to a library and offices belonging
to the communist government-run garden.

For 80 years, Americans had operated a sugar plantation and adjoining
botanical center 9 miles outside the port city of Cienfuegos. Then came
Fidel Castro's 1959 communist revolution, and the Yanks were ousted.

The socialists renamed this community Pepito Tey, after a revolutionary
killed in the tumult.

Before then the hamlet had been called Soledad, or Solitude, developed
by a Boston Brahmin and sugar trader named Edwin Atkins who began
visiting Cuba at age 14 in the 1860s. He took over a plantation in a
foreclosure in the 1880s.

So averse are Cubans to the old American-maintained name that one
staffer corrected a visitor's tourist book by crossing out the
"Soledad" next to Botanical Garden.

The old plantations are a bad memory of brutal labor and even slavery
in the 1800s. And in his time, sugar baron Atkins was an interesting
combination of a "genius" and a tough character, said Chet Atkins, 59,
a great-grandson who made his own mark as a congressman representing a
district in Massachusetts that included Harvard University from 1985 to
1992.

"He set up the garden for both good purposes and also for very selfish
purposes," such as research to improve sugar production, Atkins said in
a telephone interview from Boston, where he's now a consultant. Edwin
Atkins and his wife, Katherine, even named newly discovered native
Cuban plants after themselves, Chet Atkins said.

Harvard's involvement in what eventually became the garden began in
1899 when Edwin Atkins donated $2,500 for a traveling fellowship in
botany, followed by a $100,000 endowment in 1919, according to
university publications provided by Harvard officials.

The revolutionaries kicked out the Atkins family in 1959, and Harvard
left Cuba in 1961, according to Atkins and Harvard officials. The
family remains divided over how Castro expropriated their land, Atkins
said.

The family's old sugar works is now just a steel skeleton, the apparent
victim of continuing 100-year lows in the island's sugar harvests. But
the botanical garden thrives.

The 222-acre preserve now stands as Cuba's oldest and most popular
botanical garden, drawing 20,000 visitors a year, according to staff
members. The National Botanical Garden outside Havana is much larger at
1,500 acres, but it was founded in 1968 and lacks the champion trees
that lord over the sanctuary near Cienfuegos.

Still, some staff are privately concerned that their Eden has forgone
too much maintenance under the government's belt-tightening.

The neglect is largely kept to back-lot trails, where weeds grow knee
high and riverbank woodlands surrender to savannas with towering palms.

The main tourist thoroughfare, though, seems to have weathered
austerity and revolution well enough, in the opinion of Harvard
officials who visited the garden in 1999, the first and only official
occasion since 1961.

Atkins, who has visited the site seven or eight times in the past 10
years, agrees.

Indeed, many trees still flag a thin metal ID tag from as early as the
1930s. One tropical tree whose fruit is referred to as "monkey pot" and
resembles apples was identified as "Lecythis elliptica 4/22/33."

The reserve's grand entrance, lined like a Beverly Hills boulevard with
mature royal palms as far as the eye can see, carries visitors to a
collection of 200 palm tree species, 60 ficus species and 23 kinds of
bamboo. In all, 1,400 species of plants have put down roots here.

A tour by Tania Dominguez Soto, 31, an agronomist at the garden since
2000, offered a whimsical interpretation of the flora kingdom.

Spanish moss and red bromeliads thrived in one tree known as "the beard
of an old man." Across the road was the "elephant's leg" tree, and it
indeed looked so, several stories high.

Next to white and pink hibiscuses stood the "monkey trap" tree, so
dubbed because the primates get their hand stuck in the fruit shell
while seeking nuts.

The sausage tree bore freakish salami-size fruit, but the African plant
is also called the "telescope tree" because if the 2-pound fruit lands
on your head, you'll see stars, Soto said.

In a land renowned for a certain beverage served in demitasses, no
Cuban botanical landmark would be complete without a coffee tree.

The beans fall where they may, Dominguez said, holding a branch. "And
no, we don't serve them in the coffee here."

Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune