How Cuba’s sugar industry has been ground into dust
Al Jazeera :
From the moment Spanish colonists first planted cane here in the 16th century, sugar has been etched into this island’s soul. For countless Africans brought here to cut it, sugar meant servitude. Later, it fuelled rebellion, when slaves wielded their machetes against the Spanish to emancipate themselves and win their nation’s sovereignty.
Sugar also brought development and luxury to Cuba. During the “Dance of the Millions”, when the price of sugar soared after the outbreak of World War I, the local “sugarocracy”, not knowing what else to do with their dizzying profits, commissioned decadent Renaissance and Art Nouveau mansions that still line Havana’s more affluent suburbs.
But for decades, the industry has been in decline. While the island regularly produced more than 7 million tonnes in the 1980s, last season – squeezed by new “maximum pressure” United States sanctions – it yielded only 480,000 tonnes. This year, the target is even lower as Cuba heads for its worst sugar harvest in more than a century.
“Once we were the country that exported the most sugar,” Dionis Perez, director of communications at Azcuba, the state agency that regulates sugar production, told Al Jazeera. But “this is the first year that Cuba doesn’t plan to export more sugar than it consumes”. Each year, from November to May, it’s time to cut cane. But in the fields, farmhands like Odel Perez are in a jam.
For weeks, the island has been crippled by gasoline and diesel shortages, affecting both motorists and sugar workers who are supposed to be harvesting.
“Sometimes, you have to stop for one, two or even three days while you wait for more diesel,” Perez told Al Jazeera.
Even when he can work, he faces fields overgrown with weeds, which entangle and sometimes kill the cane. His Soviet-built harvester now guzzles up not only sugarcane but small trees growing in the fields.
“To kill these weeds you need herbicide,” he said, while hacking away at undergrowth with his machete. “But we didn’t get any this year.”
In the Cienfuegos refinery, where Perez’s cane is processed, the scent of molasses fills the sultry air as cane is unloaded from rusting wagons onto a conveyor belt, where it then moves through a series of huge grinders.
Workers describe the technology in this 19th-century refinery as “obsolete”, while exuding genuine pride about how they manage to keep the machinery running. But here, too, scant cane deliveries are causing problems.
“The key to a successful harvest is continuous grinding,” said Yoel Eduarte, the refinery’s administrator, adding that the mill is designed to work 12 days straight before stopping for 12 hours for maintenance. But he has had to switch it off for days on end over the past month, he told Al Jazeera, and “things break when we turn it back on again”.
Addressing breakdowns requires spare parts, which are lacking for want of cash. The state’s solution is to shut down more refineries so those still running can cannibalise the motors, magnets and electrical breakers that still work. During last year’s harvest, 36 refineries were in action; this year, it is down to 23, according to the Cuban government.
Eusebio Leal, the late historian of Havana, once said that after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, “the first imperialist attack against Cuba was to eliminate the sugar quota”. Former US President Dwight Eisenhower’s July 1960 decision to cut the quota, which had provided a guaranteed market in the US for Cuban sugar, was a gambit that would soon evolve into an embargo on the island. Its aim, according to the State Department, was “to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”.
