04 November 2024

Cuba’s first Vice President, Salvador Valdés Mesa, has said that it is essential that all those involved in the sugar sector do everything possible to “move forward the preparations for the next harvest, with responsibility and rationality.”

Addressing the closing session of the Third Conference of the National Union of Sugar Workers, he also stressed the need for workers in the sector to produce food to feed themselves and their families.

Valdés, a former trades unionist, said that the 2024-25 campaign needed to improve outcomes irrespective of whether there was more or less fuel, “so that there are a greatest number of mills in full grinding mode.”  According to previous Cuban reporting, the 2023-2024 campaign was severely set back by shortages of fuel, spare parts, and the migration of labour.

Sugar, he told unionists, remained a “strategic sector due to its contributions in products and services to national consumption and to exports,” and that it was essential that  sugarcane plantations were recovered.

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• Tourist arrivals numbers continue to decline
• Power situation worsens as fuel shortages, maintenance, and breakdowns return
• Power situation worsens as fuel shortages, maintenance, and breakdowns return
• Sherritt says its Moa nickel mine and Energas power plant fully operational
• Overwhelming support for 2024 UN  resolution calling for an end to US embargo

Acknowledging that in due course “expensive investments” would be necessary to improve agricultural yields, Valdés stressed that during the idle months between planting and cutting  and milling, sugar workers must now plant and grow food.

To this end, he said, it would  be necessary to generalise the work of those cooperatives with positive management and trade union sections with proven leadership that have been able to guarantee food to their workers and families.

“We, the cadres, have to transform this matter and save the sugar industry” to protect its workers, he said. Describing the sector as a part of Cuba’s “history, identity and tradition,” Valdés told the meeting. “The working class will not let down the Revolution, and this sector even less so. We trust in you,” the trades union publication Trabajadores reported him as having said.

Also speaking, Vice President, Jorge Luis Tapia, questioned why “almost 50% of the productive bases do not have good yields and production diversification.”

“We need to do a deep analysis to save the sugar industry. We have approved measures for the sector; the debt of many UBPCs (Basic Unit of Cooperative Production, a form of agricultural cooperative) has been renegotiated up to three times; the price of sugar cane has been raised; and differentiated attention has been promoted for retirees,” Granma quoted him as saying.

Tapia said that there would be a thorough evaluation with cooperatives whose boards of directors have not achieved what others have, despite the same fuel limitations. He also noted that it would be necessary to “transform the work of municipal and provincial governments to better serve sugar cooperatives. There are many tasks, but we must move from discourse to concrete actions and measure more closely what we do,” he told the meeting.

The  conference heard that just fifteen mills will grind cane in the coming campaign compared to 25 in 2023-24. No indication has yet been provided as to the hoped for size of the harvest.

As reported in Cuba Briefing 26 July 2024  there has been no official indication of the size of the final 2023-2024 sugar harvest despite Julio García, the Director of AZCUBA forecasting in December 2023 that production in the 2023-24 national campaign would be better than in 2022-23 when the outcome of 350,000 tons of sugar was at an all-time low.

A commentary published in September in Trabajadores warned that there are now “threats hanging like the sword of Damocles over the sustainability of sugar production.”

Citing the situation in the province of Las Tunas,  the publication wrote that the province’s sugarcane plantations “are declining at an accelerated rate as a result of repeated failures to comply with planting plans and cultural care,”  at a time of known limitations of resources and inputs.

Despite this, it observed, “the majority of workers are unaware of the 93 measures approved to save the sugar industry and there is resistance to the creation of labour collectives, whose objectives are aimed at efficiency and the improvement of wages in line with results.”

It noted also that this together with damage caused by persistent rains “jeopardises the future of this activity in a province that still has four sugar mills with the potential to produce sugar and ensure the production of derivatives.” 

Noting that the recent and current sowing campaign is far from meeting its goals,  it reported that in Las Tunas between December 2020 and June 2024, there had been a decline of 48% in the land allocated to sugarcane. It noted also that the sector lacked needed inputs, and all local sugar agro-industrial companies were in an “unfavourable situation.”

04 November 2024, Issue 1255 

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