14ymedio, Yankiel Gutiérrez Faife, Rosalía (Villa Clara province), 23 November 2024 — To plant peanuts, without which Villa Clara’s famous turrones* would not exist, three things are needed: experience, technique and luck. Braulio, a 62-year-old farmer from the Rosalía sugar workers’ town in Camajuaní, certainly has the first two. The third is harder to come by. Nevertheless, this year he decided to take a chance and sank twenty-five pots into the ground instead of the usual three. His neighbors, with the usual wisdom of the Cuban countryside, foresaw a good harvest and even better sales.
In October, the radio began giving news of Cyclone Oscar, and Braulio’s life got complicated.
Even for an expert in the cultivation of peanuts like him, the rules of the game had changed. The plant depends on the level of humidity. It is sown in the rainy months, and the furrow needs to be wet, but not too wet. Otherwise, the plant will rot. The downpours that the hurricane brought put Braulio face to face with that risk, and he had to counterattack quickly.
He hired four locals for a few days to speed up the harvest, paying them 600 pesos for the morning shift and another 600 for the afternoon. For the rice and beans – which he also had to collect – he paid a similar amount or made a payment in kind. After the downpours, the peanuts showed unequivocal signs of maturity: yellow flowers with dark spots.
Once the plants were uprooted, they had to be dried, an almost impossible mission until Hurricane Oscar departed from Cuban shores. Some peanut pods had begun to germinate. For Braulio, it was the sign that he had to start threshing. He promised each guajiro 150 pesos for each can of peanuts that they managed to collect. The work was not easy: it was necessary to separate the healthy pods from those that had already sprouted or rotted.
The threshing is done by hitting the peanuts in a tank or on a canvas, but in the face of urgency, Braulio had to hire several people to do the process by hand, pot by pot. When the sun finally came out, they stretched the canvas on the lawn of the farm and let the pods dry for three days.
The result was satisfactory: 210 cans of peanuts in good condition; about 190 to sell and the rest for sowing next year. “Last year there were few farmers planting peanuts,” says Braulio. “A can was worth up to 2,000 pesos because there was little availability in the area, and the turrones demanded it. Five or six buyers a month came looking and couldn’t find them.”
After the harvest, Alberto, a friend of Braulio who makes turrones and lives in Zulueta – a town in neighboring Remedios – went to his farm to buy his peanuts. He left with the 190 cans that Braulio had planned to sell, at 1,500 pesos each.
The predictions of his colleagues in Rosalía were not wrong. With the sale he earned 285,000 pesos. He subtracted 49,500 pesos for the payment of workers and 14,000 for herbicides, insecticides and other supplies. The net profit brought by the harvest was 221,500 pesos, much more than in previous years, but on the informal foreign exchange market, this exceptional performance is equivalent to just $675 for an entire harvest.
From the furrow of Braulio to Alberto’s factory, the route of the turrones in Villa Clara is one of the most traditional in Cuba. The peanuts are cleaned and ground by hand – Alberto designed a peeling machine -, and the resulting dough is sold to the confectioners of the province. In Santa Clara, for example, one of the most successful businesses is that of Orelvis Bormey, whose original motto for his Casa del Maní, located a few blocks from Vidal Park, left no doubt of its quality: “unshelled and peeled.”
With a novel advertising and distribution system, in addition to deals with the State to export, Bormey and his wife, Jenny Correa, have been producing peanut butter for more than a decade. They also owned one of the 315 pioneering businesses that became private enterprises in 2021.
Although the activity in networks of the Casa del Maní decreased considerably after the pandemic, they then received their raw material from state cooperatives of Encrucijada. That year they came to have three points of sale in Santa Clara and Encrucijada, and their products were sold at Abel Santamaría International Airport and in several hotels in the central region.
Already at that time – after having made a first shipment of their turrones to Italy – they regretted that the lack of agricultural inputs complicated the acquisition of raw material and that they would have to resort to coconut, cheaper, to maintain diversity in their catalog.
Last June, at the Expocaribe fair in Santiago de Cuba, Correa was still looking for international customers. “Entrepreneurs with very particular interests have approached us,” he said with enthusiasm, “but without clear results.” Contradicting its founding motto, Bormey presented among its products “unshelled roasted peanuts.”
*Translator’s note: Turrones are similar to nougat confections but use sugar instead of honey.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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