Private producers hold 84.5% of the livestock mass, but the Government continues to prioritize the State sector.
14ymedio, Havana, 15 July 2025 — There is no more precise metaphor to describe the situation of Cuban livestock than the image of a skinny cow, chased by rustlers in the early hours, locked up before sunset to avoid becoming meat, and poorly fed by bureaucracy and improvisation. That portrait, as sad as it may seem, is very close to the panorama that the Agrofood Commission of the Cuban Parliament released on Monday, a session that purported to be a road map to rescue the sector and ended up being a collective confession of impotence.
The official narrative, as usual, invoked the “blockade,” recent rains and financial constraints. But the data are more stubborn than the slogans. Livestock, far from advancing, has decreased without pause since 2019, in milk and meat. And it does so in the midst of a monumental paradox. Private producers hold 84.5% of the livestock mass, but the Government continues to prioritize the State sector, unable to guarantee even the shade under which its cows graze.
“What is this idea of prioritizing State enterprises?”
The economist Pedro Monreal was right in his criticism. He pointed out that the parliamentary discussion revealed the fundamental inconsistency of trying to fit a private activity within a State regulatory corset designed for a centralized economy and without real incentives. “What is this idea of prioritizing State enterprises?” he asked on X.
But the nonsense goes further. The plan to save livestock includes dollarizing some of the scarce, if not symbolic, milk and meat production
and genetic material in a clumsy attempt to attract foreign exchange. “We have the regulation, the idea, the approval, but then we get stuck in the implementation… everything is complex for us,” admitted Deputy Nidia Montes de Oca. The example she used to illustrate this disorder could not be more revealing: genetic procedures that in the private sector are solved with an invoice and nitrogen, get lost in the State’s bureaucratic maze without an exit.
Parliament, in a rare moment of frankness, acknowledged the structural inefficiency and Kafkaesque slowness surrounding the implementation of any policy. “In a country where a liter of milk costs 200 pesos on the street, and the State wants to pay only 30, where do producers get any incentive to continue milking their cows for the official system?” questioned another MP.
“This is not solved just by Agriculture or the Minint; we all have to unite.”
One of the most alarming revelations of the session was the mention of a scourge that is little talked about in official media: the theft of livestock. The deputy for Contramaestre (Santiago de Cuba), Víctor Manuel Montesinos, warned: “For every 100 cases, only one or two are clarified.” And he added: “This is not solved just by Agriculture or the Minint [Ministry of the Interior]; we all have to unite.”
Monreal quipped: “Where is the State? Did it give up its most basic function, that of ensuring security in the countryside? Or is it preparing to install its own version of a Wild West sheriff?”
Insecurity, coupled with lack of inputs, deteriorating infrastructure and uncompetitive prices, has placed private producers in an unsustainable position. Some, like Rolando Benítez Fernández, a resident of Remedios, said without exaggerating: “Today those who keep livestock are heroes. I sleep with a gun next to me, keeping watch 24 hours a day. This is not business; it’s passion and sacrifice.”
“I sleep with a gun next to me, keeping watch 24 hours a day.”
In the meantime, the 63 measures adopted for the development of the sector remain in the drawer. The so-called Livestock Promotion and Development Law has been unable to promote anything or develop anything beyond discourse. As another parliamentarian pointed out: “What we are seeing here today is not promotion or development; it is the decline of livestock farming.”
This decline is not only economic. It is also moral. It is the symptom of a model that insists on ignoring that without real incentives, without respect for the laws of the market, without simplification of formalities and without legal or physical security for producers, the famous “glass of milk for every Cuban” that Raul Castro promised two decades ago will never be a reality.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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