Cuba: “Without sugar there is no country”, how the most emblematic product of the Cuban economy collapsed

The men of the Yumurí sugar cooperative in Cuba have worked in the cane fields around the city of Cienfuegos since they were old enough to wield a machete.

Cutting cane is all Miguel Guzmán has done in life. He comes from a family of day laborers and began the arduous and thankless work in his adolescence.

For hundreds of years, sugar was the pillar of the Cuban economy. Not only was it the island’s main export product, but also the cornerstone of another national industry, rum.

Older Cubans remember when the island was essentially built on the backs of families like Guzmán’s.

Today, however, he openly acknowledges that he has never seen the sugar industry as bankrupt and depressed as it is now; not even how much the lucrative quotas purchased by the Soviet Union ceased after the Cold War.

Uncontrolled inflation, shortages of basic goods and the decades-long embargo imposed by the US have generated a dismal economic outlook throughout all areas in Cuba. But things are particularly bleak in the sugar market.

“There are not enough trucks and fuel shortages mean that sometimes it takes several days before we can work,” Miguel says, waiting under a small patch of shade for the Soviet-era trucks to arrive.

The harvest hours lost while men and machinery wait immobile have hit production levels sharply.

Last season, Cuba’s production fell to only 350,000 tons of raw sugar, a historic low for the country, and much lower than the 1.3 million tons registered in 2019.

Miguel is one of the fastest cutters on his team – or platoon – recognized by his bosses as one of the most efficient in the country. However, he says that he does not receive any financial incentive for further production beyond his love for the craft.

“My salary almost doesn’t allow me to buy anything anymore,” he comments without exaggerating about the worsening inflation in the country. “But what can we do? Cuba needs sugar.”

This is definitely how it is: Cuba now imports sugar to satisfy domestic demandsomething that was previously unthinkable and is very far from the glory years when Cuban sugar was the envy of the Caribbean and was exported all over the world.

Inside Ciudad Caracas, a 19th-century sugar mill near Cienfuegos, the air is thick with the overwhelming smell of molasses.

As rusty, obsolete gears grind tons of sugar cane into pulp and juice, workers tell me that It is one of only 24 sugar mills in operation in Cuba.

“There are four more than initially planned for this season, thanks to the work and effort of the workers,” says Dionis Pérez, Communications Director of the state sugar company Azcuba. “But the other 29 are unemployed,” he acknowledges.

“It’s a disaster. Today the sugar industry in Cuba almost doesn’t exist,” says Juan Triana of the Center for Studies of the Cuban Economy in Havana.

The drop in sugar has serious implications for other parts of the Cuban economy, he argues, including its revenue from rum exports. “We are producing the same amount of sugar that Cuba produced in the mid-19th century.”

Definitely, The problems have been exacerbated by the “maximum pressure” policy introduced by former US President Donald Trump. His administration intensified the trade embargo on the island, a measure later extended by President Joe Biden.

But the problems facing Cuban sugar are not solely the fault of the US embargo.

Years of chronic mismanagement and lack of investment have also ruined the once-thriving industry.. Today, sugar receives less than 3% of state investment, as the Cuban government supports tourism as its main economic driver.

A man who can still get enough sugar is Martín Nizarane. As part of a new generation of private Cuban entrepreneurs, his company Clamanta produces yogurt and ice cream in a factory on the outskirts of Havana.

As Nizarane shows me bags of sugar imported in bulk from Colombia, he says he hopes to double his production soon.

The company has been hailed by the Cuban president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, as a model for the future.

For many, such praise from above amounts to a paradigm shift.

The Cuban state may still consider it a dirty word, but this is capitalism pure and simple, so Martín Nizarane displays his revolutionary credentials by adorning his office with photographs of him hugging the late revolutionary leader Fidel Castro.

I told him that only people with close ties to the Cuban Communist Party can own a private business as sophisticated as his.

“I am not an employee of the Cuban State. This is a form of non-state production that sells both to other non-state entities and to state companies,” he replies.

“The State treats me like just another private businessman, without any special privileges.”

The disappearance of sugar is only part of the faltering Cuban economy.

On March 1, in the midst of rising inflation, The government imposed a five-fold increase in the price of fuel subsidized at gas stations.

It was a difficult but late decision, officials said, arguing that the government could no longer afford such high fuel subsidies.

As he stood in line to fill his tank the day the new prices went into effect, Manuel Dominguez said he wasn’t convinced.

The only thing he knows is that the measure is harming drivers like him and that Cubans are suffering now more than you can remember.

“There is no relationship between what we earn and the prices we see, whether it’s fuel or food in stores or anything else.”

“There has to be a correlation between our salaries and what things cost because, right now, for the average Cuban, fuel is simply unaffordable.”

A few days later, the Minister of Economy and Planning, Alejandro Gil Fernández, was arrested for alleged corruption. Some think that they have made him a scapegoat for the situation of the Cuban economy.

Either way, it was an extraordinary and very public fall from grace. But most people think that It will take much more than a ministerial head to get Cuba out of its economic problems.

Returning to the sugarcane fields of Cienfuegos, the cutters carry out their exhausting work with little optimism.

Invariably, when talking about the sugar industry in Cuba, someone quotes the island’s famous refrain: “Without sugar there is no country.”

For Cuban economist Juan Triana, this idea is being tested to the limit.

An essential part of national identity –part of the very DNA of the island– is eroding before the eyes of Cubans.

“For more than 150 years, the sugar cane industry was both the main export earner and the locomotive of the rest of the economy. That is what we have lost.”

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