Source: AFP
Cuba’s sugar cane industry, once the world leader, first lost the United States as its main customer 60 years ago and then the Soviet Union three decades later.
Today, the industry is on the brink with Cuba in the grips of a crushing economic crisis characterized by frequent power outages and severe shortages of basic supplies such as fuel, fertilizer and pesticides.
“It’s the worst time in the history” of the industry, said Reynaldo Espinosa, the 54-year-old boss of a sugar cane cooperative in Artemisa province, southwest of the capital Havana.
“Recovering our national sugar production will take years,” Espinosa told AFP as he described preparing for the planting season “with zero resources.”
He said his cooperative’s production had dropped from 84 to 28 tonnes of cane per hectare in the past five years as he rattled off a long list of obstacles: “Zero fertiliser, zero herbicide”, dire fuel shortages and power outages “very often during productive hours”.
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“It’s really hard” to keep going, Espinosa said.
A sharp drop in production
The agricultural cooperatives were established by the communist state 30 years ago in an effort to revive the industry after the fall of the Soviet Union, which was Cuba’s main ally, investor and client.
It had replaced the United States as Cuba’s main sugar importer until the 1960s, when sanctions began as the island turned toward communism.
Source: AFP
When the USSR collapsed 30 years later, Cuba suddenly lost 75% of its exports and its main source of credit.
Most state farms were converted into cooperatives that remained in government hands.
But sugar prices plummeted around the same time, and US sanctions left the industry — and others — in dire straits.
The number of sugar mills in Cuba has since fallen from 156 to 56, and the 2022-2023 harvest has just reached 350,000 tons — 4.4 percent of what the country produced until the early 1990s.
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“We are paralyzed”
Since the coronavirus pandemic hit its tourism industry hard, Cuba has experienced its worst economic crisis since the 1990s.
Source: AFP
The structural weaknesses of the centralized economy have led to its inability to adjust, and limited economic openness in recent years has not done enough to create stability or increase foreign reserves.
Since March, Cuba has been experiencing a new wave of blackouts as the government is unable to import sufficient fuel or the equipment needed to repair the country’s aging thermal power plants.
For the producers, this meant difficulties and uncertainty.
“We have to work with hoes … and machetes because we have nothing else,” said Leonardo Hernandez, 64, co-director of the Artemisa cooperative, whose irrigation and weeding machines remain unused without fuel.
“We are idle… we have nothing to work on,” added Jose Clavijo, a 59-year-old engineer. “We are paralyzed and we want to work because we need it.”
Source: AFP
