I love earth, I owe everything to it.

Roberto Betancourt Verdecia’s hands reveal the craft of farming, his words revealing the peasant soul that has always been with him, “a legacy inherited from the best farmer I knew in eastern Cuba, my father,” he says with the same humility as his home, where he grew up, near Bartolomé Masó, in Granma province.

He always knew, from what he saw, that the sweat of a man, when he works well, with love and purpose, greatly improves the land, “and Martí was right,” he argues, as his hands caress the freshly harvested beans in the yard of his house in the community of Pozo Colorado, in Sancti Spíritus.