As Food Production Falters Cuba’s President is Optimistic
Despite the red numbers in agricultural production – milk and meat – President Diaz-Canel is bursting with optimism.
HAVANA TIMES – With a language that seems copied from a business self-help manual, Miguel Diaz-Canel presented in Ciego de Avila his “premise for success”: “transform thinking and do it quickly.” The president chose the least suitable topic to illustrate his theory – food – and, despite the figures that the official press has been providing for weeks, he claimed that the province’s food “is in the fields.”
Diaz-Canel did not spare maxims and recipes for triumph, saying that Ciego de Avila could be the province destined to demonstrate that Cuba can reach “food sovereignty” very soon. The reality – as evidenced by Invasor, one of the regime’s most critical newspapers – is something else.
One of the emblematic companies of the province, La Cuba – which the president visited during his trip – ended 2022 with losses of 70 million pesos. In 2023, its profits were just 7.4 million, “insufficient in the face of a very complex panorama,” the newspaper stressed. Despite the “burden of results,” La Cuba earned the right to be the venue for Agricultural Workers’ Day thanks to a plebeian product, the sweet potato, which was cultivated on 2,694 hectares, with another 500 planned.
Launching La Cuba is a “long-term task,” admits Invasor, but Diaz-Canel seems to see numerous results already. “What does it take to multiply this experience?” he said. “La Cuba shows us that there are ways out.”
“Contrary” to what was said by the president, Invasor reported that Julio Heriberto Gómez Casanova, secretary of the Communist Party in the province, exposed the “lack of fulfillment for rural crops”; in particular, bananas, cassava, malanga and the sweet potato itself. “It is obvious that the plans do not meet the population’s needs,” and that “the indicators for milk and, even more so for meat, remain in the red.”
In addition, Gomez Casanova reported the “unsatisfactory results of aquaculture” in the 47 ponds of the province, although he welcomed the progress with respect to the management of his predecessor, Livan Izquierdo Alonso, promoted to Secretary of the Party in Havana: last year there were only five ponds in Ciego de Ávila.
The harvest is still another headache. “The situation is quite bitter,” said Maury Pereira, a member of the provincial bureau, without fear of making a pun. There is only “one acceptable solution”: the beginning, “soon,” of molasses production in the Enrique Varona de Chambas company, paralyzed for five years.
The seriousness of the food situation in the province had been anticipated a few days ago during a “preparatory” visit by Deputy Prime Minister Jorge Luis Tapia Fonseca. The “high-level entourage” left so overwhelmed by the difficulties that their only advice was to “produce more.” In Invasor’s devastating report about the visit it was also clear that Tapia Fonseca, like Diaz-Canel, concentrated on the few positive pieces of news: the discreet increase in banana production and the producers’ promises for the winter.
This Friday, Diaz-Canel turned a deaf ear to the approach and asked to “banish the philosophy of complaining about what you do not have.” He invited them, rather, to look at how well the “growth of the militancy (of the Communist Party membership) and the grassroots organizations” is going. But Gomez Casanova also had negative observations about that: there are numerous “deactivations” of cadres – a sector decimated by the requests from a multitude of leaders to participate in the United States Humanitarian Parole program – and difficulties in filling their positions, in particular from the Union of Young Communists, “which has the greatest number of desertions.”
For Cubadebate, less pessimistic than Invasor when it comes to covering the visit, Ciego de Avila could not be doing better. “Good things are being done for Cuba,” although “the importing mentality has closed our horizons.” Despite the numbers provided by Invasor and the complaints of the leaders, the Cubadebate states that there are “tangible achievements in such important aspects as militancy growth and food production.”
After his trip – which continued this past weekend to other provinces – it was clear that the president did not go to Ciego de Avila to solve problems or to draw up plans, but to receive “a portrait” of the situation from an entourage of photographers. And that, without a doubt, was what he got.
Translated by Regina Anavy for Translating Cuba.