History

When the Spanish arrived in Costa Rica in 1522 they were frustrated by not finding either large amounts of gold or large amounts of labor and so Costa Rica became a kind of backwater for the Spanish; it was ruled over by the Bishop of Leon in Nicaragua who rarely visited and when he did demanded that people work harder and that they build more churches. The consequence of Costa Rica being a backwater in the Spanish colonial world was that a strong labor system was never instituted. The country was very poor and mostly relied on agriculture for survival. Luckily for Costa Rica large amounts of gold and silver were never found; if gold and silver had been found then a strong system of enslavement would have been instituted by the Spanish as they instituted such systems in important mining centers such as Guatemala and Peru.  If you go to countries in Latin America where the Spanish had strong mining interests in the colonial period you will normally find places that have terrible race relations between the indigenous community and the Europeans. The Spanish that came to Costa Rica were conquerors. They had fought the Moors for 700 years in Iberia; they knew nothing of business or trade. After defeating the Moors in 1492 they sailed out to sea to look for new lands to conqueror, new people to enslave. The most important personality qualities for the conquerors were bravery and courage and that is true even today in Latin America, as one friend put it to me, what is important as a man in Latin America is how many bullet holes do you have in your body at the end of the year. This outlook on life was different in the Portuguese colony of Brazil, where the most important thing wasn’t bravery or courage, but rather how smart and cool you were. That is the French influence coming through in Brazil. In fact, the French were the first Europeans to settle Rio de Janeiro and their original name for Rio was “France Antarctique”. 

The crop that laid the basis for the Costa Rican economy was coffee. Coffee came to Costa Rica as a curiosity and when people started to plant it at the beginning of the 19th century few were patient enough to wait the five years for the plants to mature. At that time most people in Costa Rica drank chocolate or refined sugarcane. By the 1830s and 1840s coffee became the major export crop for Costa Rica. The highlands of Costa Rica were perfect for coffee cultivation; there was light rain, cool temperatures and volcanic soil. The first country to receive coffee from Costa Rica was Chile who shipped the product to Europe. The first European country to ship directly from Costa Rica was Great Britain; in 1843 the British Captain William Le Lacheur pulled into Puntarenas and started to export coffee out of Costa Rica. By the end of the 19th century the coffee crop was king in Costa Rica; the industry created its own elite known as the cafetaleros, who ruled the country.

The most important event to push the coffee industry into high gear in Costa Rica was the building of the railroad from the Caribbean port town of Limon to the highland capital of San Jose. The Americans that built the railroad were Jon Meiggis who had built railroads in the Andes and his nephew from Tennessee, Minor Cooper Keith. The construction of the railroad began in 1876; the work was finished in the mid-1880s. Thousands of people died from malaria during the building of the railroad. To finish the job Italians and West Indians were brought in; ever since there has been a large Italian community in Costa Rica; they are loved by Costa Ricans – the original Italian colony in Costa Rica was located in the town of San Vito de Java; the colony produced coffee as you might have guessed by the name. With the completion of the railroad coffee production as well as banana production increased dramatically. Companies like the United Fruit Company of Boston moved into Costa Rica in order to control the exportation of bananas; the Europeans came for coffee: Costa Rica became part of the world economy.

You can't talk about Costa Rican history without mentioning the legend of Juan Santamaria. To tell the story of Juan Santamaria you must first tell the story of William Walker. Walker, an American from Tennessee, was what was known in the mid-19th century as a filibuster, you would call such a person today a terrorist. Filibusters were Americans who thought it was their mission, as commanded by God, to govern land outside the U.S.: the filibusters took the famous motto "Go West" as, yes, "Go West", but then go Southwest, and go until you get as much land and wealth as you can: Walker was the most famous filibuster of the 19th century. Walker must have possessed a large intellect; he received his medical degree while still a teenager. He was a small man and when I think of him, I think of the darker flipside of Andrew Jackson. After finishing his medical degree he went to Europe in the 1840s, while there he witnessed the Revolutions of 1848: he went  to England, France, Germany and Czechoslovakia. Those revolutionary movements had been about identity, especially identities within the decaying Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Walker returned to the States, practiced medicine outside of Philadelphia and hated it - his medical degree had been from the Univ. of Pennsylvania. He then went to New Orleans to get a law degree and then headed off to San Francisco where he hired himself out as mercenary. He first tried to carve out his own Republic in the north of Mexico and Baja; the Mexicans chased him off. In 1855 he headed to Nicaragua to fight in the Civil War between the Conservatives who dominated the city of Granada and the Liberals centered in Leon. Walker fought with the Liberals and eventually took over the power of the state and declared himself Emperor of Nicaragua and the Costa Ricans and Hondurans eventually had to run him out, as he was determined to create slave states in Central America - that had been the drive behind his fanatical will to conquer; he would return to Central America two more times in order to try to establish slave states: on the third attempt the British picked him up on the Honduran Coast and watched him be shot by the Honduran military: his grave is in the Honduran town of Trujillio. But on his first attempt to conquer Central America, Walker was stopped by a young boy from the Costa Rican town of Alajuela, Juan Santamaria was a young drummer boy who as legend goes threw a torch onto the roof of the farmhouse Walker was staying at in Guancaste during the Battle of Rivas. But before he was able to throw the torch onto the roof of the farmhouse, Walker's men fired a massive round of bullets into his body - Juan Santamaria fought through the hail of bullets and lit the house on fire that Walker was stationed in (When Walker retreated out of Costa Rica and Nicaragua he threw dead bodies into the water wells so that after his retreat 27,000 people would die of cholera). April 11th is the day to remember Juna Santamaria; the Airport is named after him and there are statues of him in National Parks.

I thought about the history of Costa Rica as we drove through the mountains above Cartago, up and up we went each turn of the road seemed to take us into a new landscape, a new climate. Fields were covered in mustard plants and onions. Our destination was Irazú Volcano. As you drive up the side of the volcano be sure to stop and buy the cheese that is produced on the small farms along the road. The name of my favorite Costa Rican cheese is palmito; it is like string cheese but better and much more tasty.

When you reach the top of Irazú, you will first feel a little dizzy, as the altitude is much higher than in San Jose, then you will smell the scent of sulfur that emanates from the volcano. When you look down into the volcano there is blue water and as you look beyond the blue water and the lip of the volcano you will see the tops of clouds; it feels as though you are above the world looking down on the clouds below. The area around the volcano is the color of black ash. People walk along the fence that protects people from falling down into the volcano. Others walk through the field of black ash that lies back from the volcano. The volcano exploded in 1723 and covered the nearby town of Cartago in ash. At that time there were very few people living near the volcano: Cartago was the original capital of Costa Rica and in 1723 there were only seventy houses and two churches. Most people at that time lived far from Cartago and many never came down off the mountains to go to church or buy goods. 

On the way back from the volcano we were both very thirsty so we stopped and had an Imperial. Imperial is the national beer of Costa Rica and it is the finest beer I know. The only other beer that I’ve tried that compares to Imperial is the German beer Bitburger. Imperial, is everywhere in Costa Rica; it is the taste of Costa Rica; it’s a reflection of the great pride that Costa Ricans have for their country. You can’t find Imperial outside of Costa Rica so be sure to buy some bottles to take back with you. 

We drank some more and then headed down into the coffee region of Valle de Orosi. Here you could see the importance of coffee: almost every field was covered in coffee and people drank industrial amounts of coffee. In some areas of Costa Rica children are given coffee in baby bottles. We drove around and headed for Carrara Lake. On the way to the lake we stopped in a small restaurant called "La Casona del Cafetal". As we ate you could see the lake nearby and we sat back and enjoyed the sun and cool air. The highlands of Costa Rica are almost always cool and at night it can be cold. Back in San Jose we had dinner in an excellent Chinese restaurant. Costa Rica like Panama has a very large Chinese community as well as a large Jewish community: the largest Chinese community in Central America is located in El Salvador.