Cienfuegos, Cuba – “With out sugar, there’s no nation,” the previous Cuban saying goes.
From the second Spanish colonists first planted cane right here within the sixteenth century, sugar has been etched into this island’s soul. For numerous Africans introduced right here to chop it, sugar meant servitude. Later, it fuelled rise up, when slaves wielded their machetes in opposition to the Spanish to emancipate themselves and win their nation’s sovereignty.
Sugar additionally introduced improvement and luxurious to Cuba. Through the “Dance of the Hundreds of thousands”, when the worth of sugar soared after the outbreak of World Warfare I, the native “sugarocracy”, not realizing what else to do with their dizzying earnings, commissioned decadent Renaissance and Artwork Nouveau mansions that also line Havana’s extra prosperous suburbs.
However for many years, the trade has been in decline. Whereas the island commonly produced greater than 7 million tonnes within the Eighties, final season — squeezed by new “most strain” United States sanctions — it yielded solely 480,000 tonnes. This yr, the goal is even decrease as Cuba heads for its worst sugar harvest in additional than a century.
“As soon as we had been the nation that exported essentially the most sugar,” Dionis Perez, director of communications at Azcuba, the state company that regulates sugar manufacturing, instructed Al Jazeera.
However “that is the primary yr that Cuba doesn’t plan to export extra sugar than it consumes”.
Out of date expertise
Annually, from November to Might, it’s time to chop cane. However within the fields, farmhands like Odel Perez are in a jam.
For weeks, the island has been crippled by gasoline and diesel shortages, affecting each motorists and sugar staff who’re presupposed to be harvesting.
“Typically, it’s a must to cease for one, two and even three days when you watch for extra diesel,” Perez instructed Al Jazeera.
Even when he can work, he faces fields overgrown with weeds, which entangle and generally kill the cane. His Soviet-built harvester now guzzles up not solely sugarcane however small timber rising within the fields.
“To kill these weeds you want herbicide,” he stated, whereas hacking away at undergrowth together with his machete. “However we didn’t get any this yr.”
Within the Cienfuegos refinery, the place Perez’s cane is processed, the scent of molasses fills the sultry air as cane is unloaded from rusting wagons onto a conveyor belt, the place it then strikes by means of a sequence of giant grinders.
Employees describe the expertise on this Nineteenth-century refinery as “out of date”, whereas exuding real delight about how they handle to maintain the equipment operating. However right here, too, scant cane deliveries are inflicting issues.
“The important thing to a profitable harvest is steady grinding,” stated Yoel Eduarte, the refinery’s administrator, including that the mill is designed to work 12 days straight earlier than stopping for 12 hours for upkeep. However he has needed to change it off for days on finish over the previous month, he instructed Al Jazeera, and “issues break once we flip it again on once more”.
Addressing breakdowns requires spare components, that are missing for need of money. The state’s resolution is to close down extra refineries so these nonetheless operating can cannibalise the motors, magnets and electrical breakers that also work. Throughout final yr’s harvest, 36 refineries had been in motion; this yr, it’s all the way down to 23, in response to the Cuban authorities.
Financial tailspin
Eusebio Leal, the late historian of Havana, as soon as stated that after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, “the primary imperialist assault in opposition to Cuba was to eradicate the sugar quota”.
Former US President Dwight Eisenhower’s July 1960 resolution to chop the quota, which had offered a assured market within the US for Cuban sugar, was a gambit that will quickly evolve into an embargo on the island. Its intention, in response to the State Division, was “to result in starvation, desperation and overthrow of presidency”.
But, sanctions alone don’t clarify why Cuba’s sugar trade has been fading for many years. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 eradicated the principle purchaser, sending the island’s economic system right into a tailspin.
After the worldwide worth of sugar fell all through the Nineties, former Cuban President Fidel Castro in 2002 introduced plans to shut about half of the island’s 156 mills. Extra had been dismantled within the years that adopted, slowly turning into ruins.
Within the final six years alone, sugar manufacturing has fallen from greater than 1.5 million tonnes a yr to lower than half 1,000,000 tonnes, amid harder sanctions on Cuba imposed by the administration of former US President Donald Trump and saved in place by present President Joe Biden.
Economists say these “most strain” measures knock billions of {dollars} a yr from international alternate earnings. Along with the COVID-19 pandemic, which shuttered tourism, they’ve practically bankrupted the island’s economic system, leaving little cash for important inputs the sugar trade wants.
Whereas herbicide was utilized to 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) of cane fields six years in the past, in the course of the present harvest solely 100,000 hectares (247,000 acres) had been sprayed, in response to Azcuba.
Not so way back, sugar was ubiquitous in Cuba. At present, it’s so strictly rationed that it has turn into a black market good, with grocers discreetly whispering the phrase to fortunate passersby.
The elimination of exhausting forex earnings from sugar exports this yr will have an effect on each Cuban on the island, with even much less cash accessible to import rooster, important medicines and much-needed diesel.
Nonetheless, Perez maintains that the trade just isn’t on the verge of extinction.
“Sugarcane is within the DNA of Cuba’s historical past,” he stated. “It’s not attainable for that to vanish.”
