SANTO DOMINGO, RD – Ding ding ding, ding ding ding… the little spoon clinked, searching for the last grain of sugar at the bottom of the steaming cup. Its sound rose above the merriment of voices, when ideas could still be voiced aloud, joining in with the cups over there and over there, as if communicating through an invisible thread that ran along the austere wooden bar.
This is how the hours passed for over 90 years at La Cafetera on El Conde Street in colonial Santo Domingo. Depending on the time of year, people spoke louder or softer, but it was a space for ideas, for encounters, for art made word, stroke, or song. It was a place where people smoked mindfully, and between sips of rum and coffee, most preferred the latter, black and warm.
Dominican style, espresso or half chicken. It didn't matter, always served by a diligent hand and a sincere smile, which included a wink in the dark times, when the caciques dared to violate the portico flanked by the sirens, who from above seemed to say "shhhhhh!", and the subject was changed .
Founded between 1930 and 1932 by the Spanish immigrant Benito Paliza Torre , this house turned into a café was the cultural, political and human epicenter of several generations of Dominicans and foreigners, which, when it closed in September 2024, extinguished forever one of the warmest lights of the capital's historical landscape, especially of the Colonial City.
The scent that perfumed history
Located on El Conde Street, La Cafetera was not simply a business: it was a symbol. Its façade, adorned with three wrought-iron balconies in the Art Nouveau style, added in a 1944 renovation by the architects Auñón and Ortiz, made it recognizable from any point along the promenade, especially because of the mermaids that embrace the balconies.
Inside, time seemed to stand still: wooden shelves, antique instruments, faded signs, and that echo of footsteps on worn tiles that told more than they showed, all enveloped in that hypnotic aroma of freshly ground or freshly brewed coffee, steaming and ready to enjoy, almost always with a newspaper or a book in front of you.
An atmosphere of contemplation and freedom, where the trivial and the transcendental were served at the same time, sometimes with a double melt, a fruit smoothie, a shot of rum or whiskey or a beer to mitigate the heat.
The shared homeland
La Cafetera became a natural refuge for exiles. Dozens of Spanish intellectuals, artists, and scientists found an unexpected and generous haven in Santo Domingo after the end of the Spanish Civil War and the beginning of the Franco dictatorship in 1939, and many of them found solace and tried to rebuild their lives from this place.
José Vela Zanetti , muralist; José Almoina , historian; Eugenio Fernández Granel , philosopher; and Wifredo Lam , Cuban painter with ties to the exile community, were just some of the names that graced those tables, steeped in nostalgia, politics, and creativity. They spoke of Spain, yes, but also of the future, the Caribbean, resistance, and, very quietly, of freedom.
A plaque on its facade still commemorates them today: "To the Spanish intellectuals and artists who were refugees in 1939 and to the Dominicans who welcomed them."
The place of bohemianism
During the 1950s and 60s, culture pulsed with tremendous force at La Cafetera. The voices of poets, painters, critics, and chroniclers rose amidst the steam from the cups. Names like Pedro Mir , Aída Cartagena Portalatín , René del Risco Bermúdez , Manuel del Cabral , Juan José Ayuso, Grey Coiscou, Rafael Añez Bergés, Marcio Veloz Maggiolo , Silvano Lora , Eligio Pichardo , and Jeannette Miller were constant presences.
The writer Jeannette Miller recalled it this way in an interview for Diario Libre: “During the week… Marcio would go with René, probably to talk about songs and boleros. Those gatherings were the most important thing about La Cafetera. It was a place to think and to disagree.”
It is also said that Pedro Peix , the legendary and subversive journalist and writer, self-proclaimed "paradigm opponent", distributed his censored texts there and argued with anyone who dared to contradict him.
And for generations, they paraded through its narrow aisle and sat on its swivel benches—very hard indeed—" The consecrated figures of Dominican culture ," as the writer Plinio Chahin called them. Poets of the "surprised poetry" movement, Antonio Fernández Spencer; of the Generation of '48, Víctor Villegas; Luis Alfredo Torres, of the independent poets of the '40s; Manuel del Cabral, also a representative of postwar poetry.
Also in the 80s, styles, artistic languages, and the ideas of poets and painters like Manuel García Cartagena, Plinio Chahín, Víctor Bidó, César Zapata, Hilario Olivo, Elvis Avilés, and Ramón Medina intertwined there. The best part was when someone brought up the topic of metapoetry or when we talked about the cursed poets. Or the damned poets, which for some was the same thing.
Art critics like Abil Peralta, Cándido Gerón, and Danilo Lasosé also “contributed to the debate with an analytical, committed, and effervescent perspective in an open, contradictory, and democratic context,” recalls Plinio Chahin. This context became much more open after 1979, following Joaquín Balaguer's removal from power.
“The coffee shop was the place where the actors of Dominican intellectual life shared, discussed and dreamed of a different country through words, music and color ,” says Chahin, especially from the 80s that he lived between the door and the first empty bench.
The table of colors
It's impossible to talk about La Cafetera without mentioning the painters who made it their spiritual center. From the post-war period until the 1970s, figures like José Cestero , Paul Giudicelli , Guillo Pérez , Silvano Lora , Gilberto Hernández Ortega , Eligio Pichardo, Ramón Oviedo, and Cándido Bidó would arrive with stained fingers and clothes to discuss, between sips of coffee, color theory, modernism, abstraction, and cultural politics.
The artist and cultural activist Silvano Lora once said that “at La Cafetera you learned more than at any art academy .” It was his alternative university, his free forum, his refuge after the galleries.
Some brought their sketches. Others displayed, spontaneously, drawings on napkins or paintings in progress, which they then symbolically hung “in the spoken word.” La Cafetera was not only visited by artists: it was itself a vibrant work of art.
Indifference towards a symbol
La Cafetera del Conde wasn't just a café: it was a heart that beat with the city. Spaces like that, where citizens meet to debate, reflect, and share ideas, are essential for a vibrant and thoughtful society.
“I arrived in Santo Domingo from Puerto Plata at the beginning of the 1980s. I lived in boarding houses in the Colonial Zone, and my refuge for reading and gatherings with friends was La Cafetera. I enjoyed its atmosphere of intellectualism, poetry, visual arts (with the ever-present José Cestero always on the first stool at the bar), and politics, all enveloped in the aroma and flavor of the coffee that Don Franco offered. I deeply regret its closure, which we see as a severe blow to the daily cultural, artistic, intellectual, and political life of the country,” says journalist José Francisco Arias with nostalgia and frustration.
La Cafetera was a place where people passed through, sat, and enjoyed coffee, and its disappearance represents an irreparable loss for the urban cultural fabric. “I thought the Ministry of Culture was going to do something to prevent such a sad and regrettable end for this place, but it seems they only dedicated a plaque. La Cafetera, with its history, its voices, and its collective memory, deserved much more. Restoring it is not a symbolic gesture: it is a cultural imperative,” said the painter Juan Mayí, who is pained by its closure and, more than that, outraged by it.
The fact that the Ministry of Culture failed to act to preserve such an emblematic site reveals, for Mayí, a worrying institutional indifference. “Because without these spaces, where will those who still believe in thought, in art, in dialogue meet today? Let this call not fade into oblivion. Let it be heard. Because the city needs, and deserves, for the Cafetera del Conde to reopen its doors,” said the award-winning artist.
A decline that was palpable
As the colonial area gradually emptied of cultural life, a phenomenon of the new millennium, La Cafetera endured like an island of memory. However, modern times, the migration of its owners abroad, and tax problems with the DGII in 2013, foreshadowed a long-awaited farewell.
On September 13, 2024 , the establishment at 253 El Conde Street closed its doors for good, after 92 years of history, silences, secrets, loves, and heartbreaks. The news caused consternation, and even the then Minister of Culture, Milagros Germán, said: “This place was more than a café. It was a living space of Dominican collective memory. To lose it is to lose part of who we are.” And there it remained.
Resistance, memory and respect
In a world where the dizzying pace of the present devours memory, some places endure. Old cafés, witnesses to revolutions, gatherings, love letters, and silent conspiracies, still open their doors as if time itself stood still. They are living vestiges, not ruins, but spaces where history sits down to coffee with the present.
While La Cafetera on Calle El Conde closed its doors, silenced by forgetfulness, in other cities around the world some emblematic cafés continue to thrive, protected by a consciousness that recognizes their value as heritage—not only cultural, but also emotional and social.
In Madrid, Café Gijón opened in 1888, and Café Comercial in 1887, becoming epicenters of 20th-century literary and political life. In Paris, the celebrated Café de Flore, founded in 1887, was the spiritual home of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and so many others. In Buenos Aires, the aromatic El Gato Negro, opened in 1928, stands strong on the legendary Corrientes Street. In Mexico City, Café de Tacuba has been serving coffee and memories since 1912.
These spaces remain standing because someone—a city, a government, a community, a conscious act—decided not to close the door on the past and instead transformed these places into tourist destinations, places of worship, and even cultural pilgrimage sites.
A human landscape
Every café has its regulars, and La Cafetera had its own: the tailor Roque Félix , who stood at the door as an unofficial guardian; the actor Antonio Lockward , an eternal conversationalist; groups of young poets who came looking for their idols among the benches.
There, the births of books, exhibitions of visual artists, and farewells of those who left without knowing if they would return were celebrated.
In 2022, the Ministry of Culture officially declared it a Cultural Space of Letters , although that recognition perhaps came too late. Today the establishment remains closed, its facade still standing, and the benches emptier than ever, occupied by ghosts of memory.
The story of La Cafetera lives on in those who experienced it, in those who heard about it, and in the nostalgic memories it holds. Perhaps one day someone will revive it, perhaps a visionary Ministry of Tourism. Or perhaps, as with good coffee, only its aroma will remain in our memories.
At La Cafetera, history was served, words were drunk. Exile, love, insomnia, ideas, and even revolutions were shared. To call it a café is to diminish it. It was, as Pedro Mir wrote elsewhere, “the small homeland of the soul.”
And that, even though it closes, never dies. It is an Aleph.
