May 19, 1997

THE DISASTER OF THE SUGAR HARVEST

HAVANA, May 14, 1997 (APIC).- The Cuban sugar harvest has practically concluded, even if there is no official data concerning the output. And, of course, there's even less knowledge about the farming-industrial output, volume of processed cane, production costs and other essential indicators. Oh!, but every Cuban knows the magnitude of the disaster: less than 4 million tons of sugar, an amount even lower than lasts year's poor output, and the second lowest in the last decades.

There are multiple and cummulative causes for this, but the key is that there's no sugar cane to process. Cuba, who served as a model to the world in sugar production, today can't even manage to produce in amounts equal to half a century ago, when it had a little more than half the present population, and, most of all, can't even make the process cost effective. Not even affordable.

In the capitalist past, a sugar cane producer (colono) would send cane to the mill for 20 thousand or 30 thousand arrobas (Spanish unit of weight measuring about 25 pounds), because its value would be less than the cost of cutting it, picking it and transportation. Nor would the owner of the mill (hacendado) have accepted it, because it would tend to make the product more expensive, up to levels not acceptable to the market. Precisely in this harvest, most of the ground cane has a yield of less than 60 thousand arrobas per caballeria ( a caballeria= 13,42 hectares).

Castro's centralized bureaucracy, through nearly 40 years, became comfortable with the anti-economic luxury of using inordinate amounts of fertilizers, insecticides, automatic sprinkling, and high fuel consumption machinery. Of course, everything paid for by the Soviet subsidies. Moreover, they would use foreign varieties of high maintenance cane, massive mobilization of city workers to the fields, very low yield of the cut, the planting, and the harvest phase....They destroyed Cuban's rich sugar cane growing tradition and left in its place, their dreams of being an emerging powerhouse, the inefficiency which always accompanies communist agriculture, and chaos.

Unfortunately for Cubans, four decades after the arrival of Castroism to power, the failure of sugar production is evidently irreversible. The yield of the cane per region is in a downward spiral. The canes arrive with an enormous amount of straw and other foreign matter. Industrial yield and recovery at the mill is also down. The process is slow and unstable.... And the costs are rising to levels which make it unprofitable to produce sugar.

The latest harvests demonstrate that there will not be a recovery. Or at least, not without a transition towards democracy along with a healthy market economy. This year, they've gone as far as stating that they will close down the most inefficient mills, if it becomes necessary. But the unsolvable problem is that, every Cuban mill today, processes cane at whatever the cost, and with sugar output truly ridiculous. And, if that were the solution, they would have to close them all down, from Pinar del Rio to Oriente.

The harvest ends. We don't know exactly what the output was, but certainly not more than 4 million tons of sugar. Under sunny weather, which would allow us to continue processing a little more, something that normally doesn't happen due to May showers. But there's no sugar cane to process, and this short and thin cane, real "caguazo" of what little is left, is preferable not to even bother with, better to leave it for the cattle to eat.

Translated for CubaNet by Lourdes Arriete