This Thursday, the President of the Republic of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, visited Yateras, the fifth municipality to which the country’s leadership arrives in the province of Guantánamo since 2024 began.
The mountain has to produce its own food, said the president during his visit to Yateras. (Photo: Revolución Studies)
The mountain has to go back to what it was. That aspiration comes from traveling the winding paths of a beautiful landscape, where greenery and palms enchant, and where people wear nobility on the surface and in a gesture of the hand that is raised lovingly and healthy to greet.
Knowing stories of producers who succeed and expand, and knowing that the mountain climate gives a lot in terms of crops, the President of the Republic of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, arrived this Thursday morning in the municipality of Yateras, in that kind of itinerary-workshop that began in 2024 and will cross the archipelago – municipality by municipality – to learn first-hand how important programs are progressing, in the productive and social spheres.
The first point on the tour – which also had the presence of the member of the Political Bureau and Secretary of Organization of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Roberto Morales Ojeda, and with authorities of the territory – was the “Mártires de la Jaiba” farm, belonging to the Guantánamo Poultry Company. Inaugurated in August 1992 by Army General Raúl Castro Ruz, the place produces semi-rustic chickens for the Turquino Manatí Plan, and is part of the Yateras municipal self-sufficiency program.
Various topics were discussed on the farm, and they all had as their common theme the well-being of workers and inhabitants of the area; and also the idea – recurrent in these times, which the President shares in every dialogue that is promoted – that Cuba cannot wait for the ship to resolve its food issue, and that the importing vocation must gradually become, out of necessity. , in a vocation of ingenuity, to plant food wherever there is a suitable space.
The farm visited, including a hatchery, has around thirty workers distributed in various areas, and today faces the challenge of producing the food that birds demand for the incubation processes. One of the hosts of the visit, Eider Álvarez Ramírez, had explained early to reporters that the place has spaces for laying hens, an incubation plant, a farm for various crops, and a place for raising pigs. dark layer.
The journalists were able to learn that the productive center aspires to increasingly venture into beekeeping, and has among its essential purposes that of exploiting the land to obtain the food that is lacking. Eider Álvarez also addressed the issue of the social projection of the group, whose fruits are intended to serve pregnant women, the Family Care System (SAF), and highly sensitive spaces such as the Maternity Home.
The conversation accompanied the Head of State’s passage through the different spaces of the Farm: They talked about the workers’ salaries – about three thousand pesos, which is not much, as the president said -; and they also reasoned about the financial losses -caused because since last June the incubation was stopped due to a food deficit-; about the benefits that workers are already seeing so far this year; and about the need to continue diversifying productions.
“The mountains have to be capable of producing their food,” said the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in this visit – which is the fifth to a municipality in Guantanamo -; and he recalled that an increased productive capacity will mean well-being for workers and their families.
Once he was informed of everything that is being done on the farm to rescue productive habits that became distorted with the passage of time, Díaz-Canel commented: “If the boats arrive again – in clear allusion to what can arrive from other latitudes-, we must maintain this.”
This was the same tone that marked the reflections in the Base Business Unit “Industria Molino Palenque”, a coffee drying plant that is now on hiatus and that also has the challenge of diversifying productions. There the dignitary asked about the possibility of planting rice in the mountains, praised the sovereignty they have when it comes to grains, and addressed the issue of starting to grow potatoes if you have the right seeds. “We have to continue diversifying productions, he insisted, so that people earn more and can live better.”
He said it because the area is producing bananas, cassava, malanga, sweet potato; because a climate like that of the mountains is full of potential and that must be taken advantage of.
Through narrow roads came the visit to the “Fausto Favier Favier” polyclinic, which includes almost twenty medical offices and which has been immersed in a constructive investment for twenty years – an endeavor that has not reached its goal. And before touring the spaces of the health center, the president exchanged with a crowd that was waiting for him, with children from Yateras who heard an explanation about the objectives of the tour and what they saw along the way.
Before entering the polyclinic, the Cuban president asked what is missing there to complete the construction work. They then explained to him that now there is no cement or steel. The dignitary recalled that the contract through which the health center will be restored – thanks to an MSME – must be designed rigorously and reviewed letter by letter, to avoid incorrect execution.
“You are making a tremendous effort,” the Head of State expressed to the Health professionals, who have achieved admirable figures so far this year, despite the construction difficulties, and other problems such as the deficient mountain health transportation: There the polyclinic has zero infant mortality, and zero maternal mortality, in addition to a very low figure regarding the indicator of low birth weight.
Challenges, as in all of Cuba, are not lacking in Yateras. But the potential and steps forward are weighing encouragingly in the balance. That is why when President Díaz-Canel left the polyclinic and met the people again, he commented to everyone: “With what we have seen, with what we have been able to appreciate in today’s visit to Yateras, in contact with a town like “Yours – so generous, so kind, so polite – I can tell you that you are as robust as that ceiba.”
As if guarding the polyclinic and the nearby spaces, a gigantic ceiba tree had caught the attention of the president and had motivated his praise for the way of being of the Yaterenses. Like a huge umbrella, the tree gave freshness this Thursday to a town that received its leaders with firmness and energy. A people stripped of defeatism, as Díaz-Canel asked these difficult days to be assumed, from which Cubans will know how to get out with their own hands and intelligence.
