A ‘veguero’ from San Juan y Martínez points out the unfair treatment by Tabacuba, which gets richer while the ‘guajiros’ get poorer.
14ymedio, Madrid, August 11, 2025 — Alfredo Pérez, a veguero of the best tobacco area in Cuba, San Juan y Martínez (Pinar del Río), has put a damper on the fiesta in the State newspaper Granma, which last Saturday celebrated the recent harvest. The Ministry of Agriculture reported in the country’s flagship newspaper the success of the 2024-2025 campaign and claimed that they have recovered the curing sheds lost by the passage of hurricane Ian in 2022, as well as tobacco production, with six million cigars for export.
“It’s a shame that the end of this ’24/’25 tobacco harvest is slowly becoming, for most farmers, a dead end,” says Pérez, who recounts the chain of catastrophes looming over farmers as a direct consequence of Tabacuba’s refusal to update its prices for purchasing tobacco.
The veguero recalls that the hurricane destroyed most of the tobacco infrastructure, some 90% of the curing sheds. Michel Alejandro Valdés Rabelo, general director of the state Empresa Acopio y Beneficio de Tabaco Hermanos Saíz, said in an interview with the newspaper El País a week ago that “in San Juan and Martínez, of the 1,765 curing sheds that there were at that time, 22 remained standing.” The official boasted about the recuperation of at least 1,300. What he did not explain is that the guajiros had to pay a good price for the investment, believing that the sale of the product would serve to balance the accounts. Nothing could be further from the truth, says Pérez.
“Already in the prices of these new constructions we noticed the evident increase in the cost of the materials.”
“Already in the prices of these new constructions we noticed the evident increase in the cost of materials, besides adding the costs in hard currency, making these new investments more than twice as expensive as those built before 2022, but keeping the same sales price of our tobacco, which seemed illogical and very dangerous,” he said. However, they received false promises that they keep resisting. They were given a two-year deferral of payment, which they considered more than sufficient for the price increase to give them enough profit to cover their debts and the following season.
“But the reality has been different. Today, Tabacuba refuses to update the cost sheet in our favor, leaving us completely vulnerable, since we have no money to invest in the harvest. Nor do we have the tobacco, because we have collected it (delivered it to Cubatabaco). We have only an abundance of debts, some for production and others for investments,” he says, pointing out that if they could not be better paid, at least the price of materials and inputs should have been capped.
On the contrary, a bag of fertilizer that cost 200 pesos in 2022 has risen to 1,600 today, but tobacco sales prices are completely paralyzed. “A curing-house-chamber of finished tobacco used to cost about 30,000 pesos; today it exceeds 100,000. The production cost for 100 pounds of sun-grown tobacco, which was estimated at 4,000, today exceeds 10,000 pesos, clearly generating losses,” he calculates.
So far, he argues, they have remained silent and calm, because at least they benefited from the amount in freely convertible currency (MLC) that was paid to them as a stimulus. The exchange rate was very beneficial, being “the only incentive for farmers, so we set up the economy on the informal value of the MLC. Today, it has fallen dramatically due to the latest changes in the country by the partial dollarization of the economy,” he explains.
“The levels of investments and purchases of inputs and equipment by Tabacuba show clear economic solvency.”
Since 2023, the MLC, created four years earlier at a parity with the official dollar rate, has experienced a very strong rise in the informal foreign exchange market. In January of that year it was equivalent to 155 pesos, but despite some slight fall, it began to soar until May 2024, when it hit the ceiling: it was then exchanged at 310 pesos. In January 2025, it made a short drop to 240, predictably by the announcements of dollarization made by the Prime Minister, Manuel Marrero, at the National Assembly. The virtual Cuban currency rose in February until it was around 260 pesos in March, but the drop since then has been brutal, reaching 210 this Monday.
Given the magnitude of the problem, Pérez has posted on his Facebook profile a battery of ideas for authorities, and believes that they should be taken into consideration immediately. The first is to update the cost statement in national currency so that a profit margin independent of the “stimulus” is obtained. The payments should be made immediately in cash to the farmers for the already finished campaign. This would “give us the opportunity to update our economy in order to be able to honor our debts and our commitments to the workers and to have the strength to start the next campaign.”
Pérez states that tobacco is a product with a secure market and a demand much greater than production, so no one should resist favoring it. “In addition, he adds, the levels of investments and purchases of inputs and equipment by Tabacuba demonstrate clear economic solvency.”
At the end of February, during the Cigar Festival, the company Habanos S.A. (a joint venture formed equally by Cubatabaco and the Spanish company Altadis) celebrated having achieved record revenues of 827 million dollars -106 million more than a year earlier- that is to say 14.7% more. At that time, many guajiros regretted that the money went to the state coffers, but the farmers did not get any return. “We have always been an advanced and protected sector compared to the others in agriculture and the country in general,” says Pérez, concluding: “Today, we are clearly being held back, because we do not have the possibility to market it freely, which would be fair, nor to achieve a good business within the Tabacuba group.”
Translated by Regina Anavy
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