Cuban Police Crackdown on Farmers Selling Coffee
despite production falling 51% in the last five years
A coffee grower from Sancti Spíritus lost everything by trying to sell coffee beans on his own, without going through the State agency Acopio.
HAVANA TIMES – The story of Isidro, a guajiro — as he will be known to protect his identity—is spreading in Sancti Spíritus, after authorities confiscated 465 little bags of coffee he was saving to sell. In his eyes, he has done nothing wrong, but in Cuba, what he did is illegal.
The farmer decided one day to invest in his business and expand it beyond the coffee plantation he cultivates himself. So, he sold his motorcycle to use the money to buy beans from other producers. “This is now a small business that’s making money, because of the price of coffee,” a resident who also requested anonymity told 14ymedio. In the province, the price of the native product is between 200 and 240 pesos, unroasted (250-gram bags, already roasted and ground, cost between 1,350 and 1,500 pesos). (350 pesos = 1 USD)
“The man was crazy. They had to bring him to Sancti Spíritus because he said he wanted to kill himself. He had lost his money, his motorcycle, everything.”
The police, who accused him of “hoarding” and prohibited him from selling the coffee to any buyer other than the State agency Acopio, gave the confiscated product to the Cabaiguán roasting plant.
The line for breaking the law is thin, the resident continues. He usually goes to the farms to buy coffee directly from the producers, to resell it in the city, but he’s stopped doing so now, “until the dust settles.” He adds: “If the police catch you with a backpack of coffee, even a small one, they’ll take it away.”
At the beginning of last September, the government issued a new resolution on the marketing of agricultural, forestry, and tobacco production that penalized private farmers with more controls, reserving the monopoly on purchasing from these private farmers and setting prices for products destined for export, including coffee, despite these farmers having far more successful production than on the state farms.
For example, private farmers produce more than 80% of fruit trees, almost 80% of beans, and three-quarters of vegetables, root vegetables, and corn, according to official data presented by economist Pedro Monreal, who harshly criticized the new regulation. As he posted on social media at the time, he believes the resolution “expresses the arrogant notion that centralized planning is more effective than the market in ensuring ‘economic calculation’ (rational distribution of resources).” Furthermore, he observed, it represented a “variant of ‘forced’ contracting,” like the one imposed on the guajiro Isidro.
The harshness of the raids has not increased the presence of coffee in the island’s bodegas (ration stores). Just a week ago, the official press argued that the disappearance of the product and the collapse of its production was due, above all, to the lack of workers to harvest the fruit.
In that unusual note, published by the official newspaper Granma, they didn’t hide the sector’s collapse. “In 2023, the situation with the coffee was tense, and resources for harvesting and transport were insufficient,” Felipe Martinez Suarez, director of the Agroforestry Experimental Station in the municipality of Tercer Frente, in Santiago de Cuba, told the Communist Party newspaper. He nevertheless emphasized that the company was able to develop “more resistant” coffee trees thanks to aid from Vietnam.
According to the National Statistics and Information Office, coffee production fell by 51% in the last five years.
Translated by Translating Cuba.
Cuban coffee is a decent coffee. The roasted ground and whole bean product sold retail is usually a medium dark roasted arabica bean that is better ground coarse than used as an espresso ground. That said, it would be a better coffee if sold as a specialty coffee than it is as a mass-produced generic coffee. In other words, there is nothing special about Cuban coffee beans. This “guajiro” had the right idea. Better to sell it in small batches as a specialty coffee. But wait, why would we expect Cuban leadership to choose to do anything in a way that maximizes production. After all, I think that I read recently that Cuba now imports sugar!