The province has planted only 24% of the planned amount of land
14ymedio, Havana, 28 November 2024 — With a run-down and ancient group of 15 sugar mills at their disposal, the Cuban authorities declared last Monday the start of the 2024-2025 milling throughout the country. In Ciego de Ávila, however, it is not the present sugar campaign that worries the workers, who already foresee the failure of the future harvest. According to the local press, there has been a delay in the planting, and the amount of land worked is minimal. Of the 7,541 hectares projected, only 24%, or 1,801, have been planted.
“The lack of diesel has been the fundamental cause” for the delay, Cuban Vice President Salvador Valdés Mesa told Invasor, after visiting the region. According to the newspaper, the next few weeks will be “vital,” but the figures are too similar to the 23% of the October campaign.
The numbers — “lean” as the newspaper describes them — do not promise the glorious recovery of the sugar industry that the State has been announcing for years. On the contrary, the debacle seems more irreversible than ever.
“It was impossible to take advantage of the Ciro Redondo Sugar Company land. The raw material for the mill, the “Colossus,” inactive in the last campaign, along with the continual lack of fuel and organizational problems in the Enrique Varona,* also threatened the success,” says Invasor.
At the moment the province is focusing on quickly planting 180 hectares in the final stretch of the year
At the moment, says the media, the province is focusing on quickly planting 180 hectares in the final stretch of the year, 50 of them for the Ciro Redondo mill, the only one that joined the Avila campaign this year.
Invasor has been announcing the slow pace of the expected Ciego de Ávila harvest for months. For the production of molasses, for example, which should have begun 15 days before the harvest, the sugar factories had not yet finished creating “the conditions.”
However, the scenario described at the beginning of November was less worrying than now. The authorities then predicted 444,854 tons of milled cane to produce 30,500 tons of sugar, and said that the preparation of the machinery had advanced to a reassuring 75% and transport to 94%. Even in the bioelectric plant, which produces energy from the bagasse derived from the harvest, “Chinese investors” explained that there would be no problems in connecting it to the plant.
The planting, however, was still stagnant at the same 24% that Invasor criticized a few days later. Before, in October, expectations were even higher, and the province expected to plant all the available land with cane before December 31. Since then, only 66 hectares have been planted.
In other provinces the panorama is not very different. In Las Tunas, where the plan is to reach 45,000 tons of sugar, workers have been forced to extend the work “up to 10 and 12 hours a day to meet the repair schedule, affected, among other causes, by the late arrival of some resources, electrical interruptions, the potential threats of Hurricane Oscar and the rains,” explains Periódico 26 in an article published on November 19.
“There we find men who have been working continuously for almost 10 hours”
“There we find men who have been working continuously for almost 10 hours, and their overalls, hands and faces carry stains of grease and sweat as symbols of the arduous day. Stains that do not hide the joy of knowing they are essential,” romanticizes the local newspaper.
At the national level, and based on past campaigns, the authorities do not expect good results either. “A very complex harvest is coming,” William Licourt González, general secretary of the sugar workers’ union, said in October, before calling on the entire sector to work. On that occasion he also announced that 15 mills would be in charge of grinding, compared to 25 a year earlier and the 161 active on the Island in 1959.
The sugar industry, once a jewel in the crown of the regime, this year reached its most critical point. The Government has not only been forced to cease most of its important sugar contracts, such as the one it had with China, but also this 2024, for the first time, the Island imported more sugar than it exported.
At the domestic level, sugar has become priceless for Cubans, who find it increasingly difficult to find and with very high prices. This week, in the Plaza Boulevar market in Sancti Spíritus, a pound reached 550 pesos.
*Translator’s note: The Enrique Varona sugar mill has its own railway transport system.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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