The price of cocoa beans was rising rapidly in international markets, from $2,000 a ton in 2022 to more than $12,700 in 2024
14ymedio, Madrid, 30 July 2025 — For Baracoa, chocolate was once the goose that laid the golden egg. The town was once the epicenter of Cuban cocoa production, responsible for 85% of the country’s total output. But the goose has flown along with hundreds of tons of beans, which are being sold to the private sector, where prices on the international market are soaring. In an article published on Wednesday in the communist party newspaper Granma, Cuban officials and the paper itself lamented the “shortsightedness” of those who decided to allow private companies to take over chocolate production.
Granma does not name names but it accuses small and medium-sized private companies (MSMEs) of acquiring 101 tons of cacao over an unspecified period of time. One of them, reportedly located in the rural town of Paso de Cuba, bought close to half of the beans from the state-owned Agroforestal y del Coco company. The 45-ton sale involved three separate purchases: two for 20 tons each and one for five tons.
Baracao mayor Mayelín Frómeta Alayo “deplores,” as Granma puts it, “that a key product intended for the municipality’s industry has gone elsewhere.” In overwrought prose, the newspaper — without unhesitating and repeatedly— accuses “new economic actors and self-employed workers” of taking advantage of a situation caused by the ongoing problems of the Cuban economy.
Mayelín Frómeta Alayo “deplores,” as Granma puts it, “that a key product intended for the municipality’s industry has gone elsewhere.”
The root of this problem lies in the delayed reopening of the town’s cocoa factory, which restarted operations in 2018 after its predecessor—inaugurated in 1963 by Ernesto Che Guevara—was declared inoperable. Authorities then invested an unspecified amount of money, which the Granma estimates at 43 million “in both national and foreign currency,” with no indication of how much they expected to recoup or how quickly. “The product will be sold abroad at an excellent price,” Reynaldo Mosqueda Martínez, an engineer and investor in the project, said at the time.
The machinery for the renovated factory was imported from Italy and Switzerland, which sent workers to assemble the parts, train local employees, and launch the operation. “No one expected it would all be done in a matter of a few weeks, especially at a time of economic challenges and setbacks, but no one thought continue reading
In fact, the process dragged on for five years for reasons that remain unclear. The only ones mentioned were the pandemic and the delayed arrival of foreign technicians, though Granma now also cites the “comprehensive and intensified economic and financial siege by the U.S.” The factory was finally inaugurated in November 2022, though it was not widely covered by the press until it became fully operational in the summer of 2023.
Meanwhile, despite all the difficulties, the fields kept producing, with cacao beans piling up in warehouses year after year. “The surplus of raw material was growing,” says Raúl Matos Pérez, director of the Agroforestry and Coconut Company in Baracoa. Even after selling off a significant portion to Baracoa Cocoa Derivatives, there were still 800 tons left “not counting what was stored in towns and warehouses in other eastern provinces,” he says.
Then a solution came from the private sector, which had cleverly found a way of selling the coveted crop. Matos Pérez says that initially the proposal was to start exporting but the idea went nowhere. “The decision was then made to sell it to the chocolate factory, which would store it until its business was fully up and running,” he says. But the raw material continued piling up, though to a lesser extent due to the country’s economic crisis.
No one in the article explains who made the decision or why not to export the cocoa, whose value in international markets was rapidly growing, from $2,000 a ton in 2022 to more than $12, 700 in 2024. Ultimately, the frenzy ultimately slowed, with the current price settling at roughly $8,000.
Granma criticizes the government’s failure to change direction “when it became clear that the factory’s reopening would be delayed and the opportunity to export the cocoa would be lost.”
While Granma believes it was not a bad idea to keep the product in state hands, it criticizes the government’s failure to change direction “when it became clear that the factory’s reopening would be delayed and the opportunity to export the cocoa would be lost.” It was at that moment that MSMEs and self-employed workers, whom the government had recently granted permission to sell cocoa-derived products, got the green light to start producing chocolate themselves.
“Logic went out the window and easily avoidable mistakes were made. In the voracious rush to get things done, decision-making became sloppy,” states the paper, adding that officials should have had plans in place to deal with a worst-case scenario. It accused those responsible of not even considering “the impact that allowing MSMEs to get into the chocolate business would have on Baracoa’s cocoa development strategy.”
The factory has a production capacity of 7,000 tons, much more than the 2,200 tons that, according to Granma, it produced in 2025, or the 150 tons it is projected to produce in 2025 amid the ongoing financial crisis.
“Could the municipal authorities not have hired 120 self-employed workers, not to mention the more than 400 who were informally processing and marketing cocoa?” the article asks critically.
This concludes the first part of a report that will continue perhaps tomorrow, Thursday, in which the Granma promises to reveal what happened next.
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