Santiago Rivera hopes they will see him and his family. To Rivera, a member of a Nicaraguan coffee-growing cooperative, and tens of thousands of small farmers in Latin America, the bean is their survival. Now, in homes and cafes throughout the Bay Area, it seems many people are seeing Rivera in their cups. The vision is giving coffee a new cachet and offering the people who grow it a better life. Buyers say they're saving the world one latte at a time.
Growers just call it a good deal.
Coffee always has been a very un-forgiving business, but to us it's a way of life, it means a lot. We're glad that Americans are starting to understand. Like most coffee growers in Nicaragua, Rivera has been poor all his life. Preyed upon by coffee middlemen and subject to the abrupt price swings caused by international speculators, he couldn't get ahead. In the 1980s, Nicaragua's coffee zones were ripped asunder by the Contra rebel war.