Located in the privileged surroundings of the Historic Center of the city of Santiago de Cuba, The Casa Dranguet stands out as a center for research and dissemination of the coffee culture, an important touristic attraction of this province and that has in its properties old coffee plantations declared as a World Heritage Sites in 2000.
The place has 4 rooms on which is done a tour through the history of coffee. In the first, it began its discovery and passage through the world, especially in Africa, Europe and Latin America, until its arrival in Cuba, and its consolidation as a crop in Santiago de Cuba after the arrival of French emigrants from Saint-Domingue, Late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth.
In a second room, the exhibition goes into the customs and ways of life in the 19th century Santiago society, and in the Dranguet family, one of the most important at that time and linked to coffee. Precisely the House Dranguet (where the Center of Interpretation and Disclosure of the Cultural Coffee Heritage resides) was the house of that family.
The third exhibition hall is dedicated to the Caminos del Café project and the coffee plantations located in southeastern Cuba, its influence on the landscape and the way of life of the villagers of Santiago de Cuba. Here the visitor can know the progress of Caminos del Café, an integral development project for a world heritage site.
Hall number four hosts a transitional exhibition belonging to the Office of the City Conservator (OCC) of Santiago de Cuba, part of it belonged to the collection of Doctor Francisco Prat Puig. There are also objects found by the staff of the Department of Archeology of the OCC, in excavations in the city of Santiago de Cuba.
Many pieces are displayed in the Permanent Exhibition room. Among them coffee makers built at different times of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a coffee pylon used in peasant houses, especially the mountains, dating from the mid-eighteenth century, a handmade coffee sieve, a coffee roaster and a coffee mill "Peugeot Frères", from France, of the early twentieth century.
There is also a set of perilla furniture, which began to be used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of eclectic style generally elaborated in majagua. They were preferred by the wealthy families and in their manufacture it was common to use the straw in the long back, adorned with small balusters and crowned with beautiful carvings.
Very interesting is the visitors the two copies of the first coffee makers known as "moka express". These were invented by the Italian Alfonso Bialetti in 1933, who was inspired by the mechanism of the primitive washer known as "Lessiveuse", using water vapor, without the need to build a complicated pressure system.
It is characterized by its octagonal design and is usually made of aluminum for its ease of transmitting and maintaining heat. The Italian company Bialetti continues to manufacture this coffee machine because of its great popularity all over the world and especially in Europe.
Location: Casa Dranguet
Address: Corona corner to Heredia
Permanent exhibition hours: Monday to Saturday 9:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m., Sundays 9:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m