Don Manolo worked the land until his knees could take no more.

By then he was 90.

He had grown coffee in the Sierra Maestra mountains for his entire life but two years ago the ravages of time forced him to return his deeds to the state in exchange for a pension.

“We began as squatters, with no titles to the land.” His gnarled hands grip a cane for support and a wide-brimmed straw hat protects him from the harsh Caribbean sun.

Before the revolution, Manolo used to give a third of every harvest to the local landowner, he explains. One day a group of bearded men appeared on his plot.

“A lot of us wanted to fight but Fidel said not all the campesinos (peasant farmers) could join the rebel army as we were needed to produce their food,” he recalls. The rebels promised that Manolo and other farmers would soon own their land.

He was 33, the same age as Fidel, and the two men would meet again a few months later when the leader of the revolution returned to the region to give out the promised deeds.

Under the reforms, all landholdings over a certain size were confiscated and redistributed as small plots to the peasant farmers or turned into state-run communes. All major landowners - from wealthy Cuban families to foreign multinationals like Coca-Cola and the United Fruit Company - had their lands nationalised.

Sugar plantations could no longer be foreign-owned - one of the early decisions which first set Cuba at loggerheads with Washington. Castro supposedly even confiscated some of his family’s estate at Finca Las Manacas, much to his mother’s fury.

The law remains the basis of Cuba’s agricultural model.

“We held a party with a horse parade in Caney de las Mercedes that day they gave us the titles,” recalls Manolo. “We were happy because now no-one could throw us off the land.”

(Below: Don Manolo poses for a photo with a replica of the paperwork he received from – and 57 years later returned to – the Cuban state)