The cultivation is maintained because it is a tradition, because as a business “it does not work,” say the guajiros
14ymedio, Havana, 28 March 2025 — The tobacco industry in Cuba has not been balanced for a long time. While Habanos S.A. declared a record income at the beginning of the year, the Cuban growers barely have enough inputs to maintain their crops. Some of them declared this week to the official press that the cultivation is maintained because it is a tradition, because as a business, “it doesn’t give results.”
Guerrillero begins its report with the good news: tobacco farmers who have improved their yields. Some are former soldiers who return to the lands of their childhood to sow the leaf and honor tradition – the watchword – that families have been following for decades: harvesting tobacco in Vuelta Arriba.
For the farmers, however, life is not rosy despite the fact that they work in one of the few privileged sectors of the economy. The first “stumbling block,” the newspaper explains, comes as a result of the country’s precarious energy situation. In the Gabriel Lache cooperative, everyone waters the furrows with electrical equipment, which has forced them to modify their schedules depending on the blackouts. “Sometimes they have to do it late at night or early in the morning,” the media explains.
“The cost of the resources that the company sells us is very high in relation to the price of tobacco paid in pesos”
Leonardo Díaz, 37, a tobacco farmer who has been working in Las Vegas since he was 15, tells the state press that he began the planting campaign without knowing if he would be able to water the crops. To the problem of the electrical service is added the breakage of the turbine in the middle of the dry season, and the lack of water, which “impacts the crops a lot.”
“This campaign has been difficult for me, also for that reason. Now they have provided me with an engine, and thanks to that I can get water from here or there. For the rest, in a general sense, we have received the necessary resources, but the greatest dissatisfaction of producers today is in tobacco prices,” explains the farmer.
According to him, the prices of the inputs he needs for the harvests, many of them acquired through the State, have risen, but the tobacco price “remained the same.” “In good Cuban, I can tell you that I am working for the divisa [foreign currency],” he admits to the media, and says that the entire fund in pesos goes into expenses associated with planting. “The worker charges you 1,000 pesos, plus lunch, and whatever resources cost for the cultivation. When you pay all that, the money is gone.”
Díaz insists that the situation is not new and “has been raised in several scenarios, because it is a general concern” of the farmers who plant tobacco.
He is supported by Julio Isidro Gorgoy Miranda, another grower who dedicates 2.5 hectares to sowing the raw material for cigars. “The cost of the resources that the company sells us is very high in relation to the price of tobacco in pesos,” he says.
“It’s what we like to do, but that’s a topic that creates discontent and demotivates the farmers”
According to him, in sowing about 1,000 tobacco plants, the farmer spends about 7,400 pesos. At most he would earn about 8,040, a tiny difference that barely brings him gains in a currency, moreover, that is devalued. “You would get 1,000 pesos for each quintal (about 100 lbs.) It doesn’t work,” he says.
“We will continue to do it because it is a tradition. In addition, it is what we like to do, but that is an issue that creates discontent and demotivates the farmers,” he says.
At the end of February, during the luxurious Habano Festival that Habanos S.A. celebrates annually in Havana, the company celebrated having achieved a record revenue of 827 million dollars – 106 million more than a year earlier – which represents an increase of 14.7%. Of this, only a tiny part will be reinvested in payments to and inputs for farmers.
This year’s event is also one of the most luxurious that the company has prepared – which Cuba manages with Spain – and included an exhibition fair at the Palacio de las Convenciones, presentations of new exclusive cigar bands, the traditional humidor auction, which this year raised 16.41 million dollars, and a dinner full of millionaires and waste staged in the Capitol building in Havana.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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