The official press says machete workers will receive 700 pesos per ton and their income could reach 22,000 pesos a month
14ymedio, Havana, January 25, 2026 – Day Zero has arrived. The machines will not cut the cane at the Enidio Díaz Machado mill in Campechuela (Granma province), and if the goal of producing more than 17,000 tons of raw sugar is to be met, it will have to be done as it was centuries ago: by hand.
According to a report published this Saturday in the State newspaper Granma, provincial authorities “assessed” preparations for the upcoming sugar harvest. Faced with the “complex period” they foresee—due to the “difficult situation with the availability of fuels and other inputs,” such as lubricants—the “key strategy” will be to “increase by nearly 80% the volumes of cane to be milled through manual cutting.”
“It will be a complex harvest and we cannot give up contributing the maximum possible to production. We have to rely on coordination between sectors and the participation of all the municipalities in Granma,” said Governor Terry Gutiérrez during a session of the Provincial Government Council held on Friday.
To incentivize workers to carry out this arduous labor, a payment of 700 pesos per ton was offered to machete workers, who, according to Granma, could reach monthly incomes of up to 22,000 pesos.
The production also faces “the unfavorable performance in land preparation and planting activities”
The production, which is intended “mainly for the rationed family food basket and for social consumption,” also faces “the unfavorable performance in land preparation and cane planting activities during January, a situation involving the province’s five sugar agro-industrial companies.” Likewise, “the occurrence of fires” remains a risk, prompting a call to keep watch over the cane fields.
The difficulties in getting the milling machinery running at Enidio Díaz Machado are a chronicle of a death foretold. A year ago, the province of Granma “officially” celebrated the start of the 2024–2025 sugar harvest, but “technical problems stopped the machines” just two hours after work began.
The causes have not changed since then. The harvest, which was supposed to begin in December 2024, could not start due to “shortages of lubricants and fuels” for the machinery. Several weeks passed trying to solve the “technical failures and shortcomings,” and when cane milling finally began, it ran only from 5:00 to 7:00 a.m. and at barely 70% of capacity.
The condition of the mills is one of the reasons milling nationwide is minimal. It should be recalled that in 1959 Cuba had 161 sugar mills in private hands that produced 5.6 million tons of sugar that year. The plants were kept in shape during the decades of Soviet subsidies, yielding the best sugar production figures between the 1970s and 1980s—more than 8.5 million tons—though never reaching the Fidelist utopia of “the 10 million.”
In 1959, Cuba had 161 mills in private hands that produced 5.6 million tons of sugar that year
Traditionally, Cuba consumed 700,000 tons and exported the rest, but with current production the picture has changed radically: it has now been forced to import much of the sugar it needs for its population and has been unable to fulfill export contracts. There is an even more serious symptom: since at least 2020, every harvest on the Island has been labeled the worst of the last 100 years. For example, the 2021–2022 harvest closed with 473,720 of the projected 911,000 tons. The following season it fell to 350,000 tons, well below the 400,000 required for domestic consumption.
A year later, the 2023–2024 harvest was practically the death of Cuban sugar, with production of barely 160,000 tons, while the most recent one, according to data compiled by the EFE news agency and published by this newspaper, barely reached 147,652 tons.
All of this led to the Island paying the United States $14.9 million for sugar last year alone, while in 2024 it spent $11.1 million, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in addition to importing significant quantities from France and Brazil.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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