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The legacy of Café Cafico: A father’s gift to his daughters

In a Mérida experiencing a cultural crossroads, a small Yucatecan family business opens Monday through Saturday in Mérida’s Centro. The aroma of roasted coffee wafting from the shop each morning has become part of the daily routine for those who live and work in the surrounding area.

Café Cafico sits a block away from Paseo Montejo and half a block from Santa Ana Park. For a quarter century, passersby, neighbors, and curious visitors have stopped there to pick up their ground coffee or enjoy an espresso. Federico Navarro, Cafico’s founder, was a legendary host who delighted in people stopping by for a chat.

Today, Fico is no longer there, but those who knew him say they can still feel his presence. Eloisa, Mercedes, and Esther, his three daughters, continue what their father started. Taking the reins of Café Cafico has been for them an experience of equal parts love, grief, and healing.

Don Federico worked in customs during the nineties. During the 1994 crisis, he lost his job. His father took him to the mountains of Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Veracruz in search of a good coffee bean supplier to sell and start his own business.

None of the Navarro sisters is quite sure how the idea to sell coffee came about or why. None remembers their father being particularly fond of drinking it. What they do remember are the sacks of coffee piled in their home’s dining room, from where Fico started his business. He did everything: roasting the coffee, grinding it, packaging it, and delivering it to his customers. By 1999, he had the downtown location. Back then, the business was called Café Árabe de Altura (High-Altitude Arabic Coffee).

In the following years, the Navarro family experienced a rupture. Their parents’ divorce caused an estrangement between Fico and his daughters that would only heal when they began having children of their own. For a long time, Elo, Meche, and Teté knew very little about their father’s life.

These were the years of Café Cafico’s consolidation, during which Fico enjoyed serving people at his shop. He was visited by locals, out-of-towners, foreigners, and tourists. He dedicated himself to getting to know them and learning their preferences for when they returned. For some, he would have the newspaper ready; for others, he would immediately serve their favorite drink. In the area, he was known as the coffee man of Santa Ana and became deeply beloved.

Fico grew close to his daughters again. They noticed he had changed. They created a family chat for dad and his daughters, where he would narrate his daily life and report activities like how much exercise he had done in the park and what he had eaten, as if delivering the evening news.

That’s how things were when a stroke took Fico from them. It happened in the coffee shop, and he immediately recognized it as the same thing that had struck his brother months before. The ambulance took a long time to arrive. When they finally got him to the hospital, he was already in serious condition.

The following days were filled with uncertainty. Though lucid at first, life gradually slipped away from Fico’s body. While unconscious, his daughters played him messages of love and encouragement sent by his customers, who were also his friends.

Mercedes recounts what she told her father while caring for him in the hospital: “If you want us to keep Cafico, we’ll keep Cafico.” As if feeling great relief upon hearing this, Fico passed away shortly after.

The Navarro sisters never doubted the decision to take over the coffee shop, but they had no idea how to operate it. They didn’t even know how to roast coffee. Not only that, but they all had jobs in education, plus partners and children. Something they learned in those days is that a business doesn’t wait for the pain and confusion of losing a loved one. The next day there were orders that needed to be fulfilled.

At first, everything was chaos and confusion. They arranged for a nearby coffee shop to roast coffee for their first customers. Later, Teté’s husband’s cousin taught them how to roast, just as Fico had taught him years before. On the first day, the sisters watched him use the roaster. On the second day, they helped him, and on the third day, they did it themselves.

Seeing them exhausted, their mother suggested they take turns going two days each, instead of all three being there every afternoon. Gradually, the new normal for Cafico and the Navarro sisters took shape.

Elo, Meche, and Teté began finding clues that Fico had left scattered here and there. In their father’s phone, they located conversations with coffee suppliers and the accountant. In the kitchen, they found bags with samples of different roasts. Throughout the shop were notebooks with precise instructions and notes made by all the students Fico had taught to roast during his more than twenty years running the coffee shop.

People would come by asking about Fico, and his daughters had to relive the story of his passing again and again. Four years after his death, people still come in who haven’t heard what happened.

Like a puzzle, the sisters have been able to reconstruct their father’s life through the testimonies of the people whose lives he touched. “We learned about everything he was that we didn’t get to experience ourselves.” The biggest surprise was discovering how many people loved him, from locals to whom he would offer free coffee when they were students, to foreigners who would return years later to resume some fascinating conversation.

“We’ve grown much closer as sisters. Sometimes weeks would go by without seeing each other; now we see each other every Saturday, we talk, we gossip.”

Saturday morning is when the three sisters meet at Cafico to roast and plan pending tasks. During the week, you’ll find one of them there from 4 to 6 in the afternoon.

The coffee shop maintains Fico’s spirit, but they’ve added their own touch. They expanded the beverage menu. They replaced their father’s chalkboard with a large, visible menu board in the center of the shop. They’ve grown the business’s social media presence.

In a forgotten WhatsApp conversation on Fico’s phone, they found a logo that a customer had gifted him but he had never used. In the center of the circular logo appears the kind countenance of the coffee man of Santa Ana. Today, the brand carries that face on its cups, signs, and labels as a tribute to a man who, without being perfect, left his daughters the formula for happiness.

“I think he died because he had accomplished everything he wanted. My father ate delicious breakfasts every day, exercised every day, went to bed early. He enjoyed life. Who can do that?”

Now customers ask about them too. Over the years, they’ve continued their father’s work beyond coffee, weaving relationships of esteem with all the people who are drawn to the shop by its aroma. It hasn’t been easy combining their lives and regular jobs with the business, but love and respect for their father’s legacy keeps them there every day.

Sometimes they talk to Fico, whose presence can be felt in the place. If they had to guess what he would think of seeing the three of them running the coffee shop, they’re sure it would amuse him greatly.

Café Cafico, Calle 58 between 49 and 47, Mérida Centro; IG: @cafecafico

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