Cuba’s Communist Party Daily Slams Cacao Farmers
for selling to private businesses amid State nonpayment
The Baracoa Agroforestry Company sold tons of product stored for years to small businesses at double the price paid by the state company.
HAVANA TIMES – Today’s scapegoat is the cacao producers. In the first part of a report published by Granma on this industry in Baracoa, Guantánamo. The private businesses (known as mipymes) were accused of having taken advantage of the hundreds of tons stockpiled in state warehouses during the prolonged repair of the chocolate factory. Now it’s the farmers’ turn to be blamed. In the official newspaper’s public trial, cacao growers are declared guilty of selling to those who actually paid them — and at better prices.
Rau Matos Perez, director of the State’s Agroforestry and Coconut Company in Baracoa, inadvertently admits that the State’s debts, both in pesos and in the magnetic MLC, which had been promised as an incentive, drove the farmers to seek alternatives. “A private sector group dedicated to processing small quantities of cacao began offering tempting payments for the raw material and competing — dangerously — with what the state enterprise pays. Naturally, deliveries to the State started to decline,” he reveals.
The authorization that the mipymes obtained to produce cacao, the director says, “set off a domino effect among a group of cacao growers who still hadn’t been fully paid for their previous harvests.”
The Communist Party daily reproaches the producers for not fulfilling “their commitments to supply cacao to the Agroforestry and Coconut Company” and for putting it “in private hands” — while glossing over the far more blatant breach: the State’s failure to pay cacao growers on time and in full.
To reach this pivotal point, Granma rehashes the story told in the first part of its report: in short, that the chocolate factory should have been completed in under a year but took five; and that the harvests accumulated in company warehouses; and that while exporting the cacao was considered, authorities instead chose to sell it to six authorized private businesses. The conclusion drawn by the Granma on Wednesday was that private businesses ended up with more than 100 tons of cacao which, had it been exported, could have brought in much-needed foreign currency.
New details emerge from this account. One is that the Agroforestry Company sold the cacao to private businesses for no less than twice the price offered by the State’s Derivados del Cacao enterprise. Granma identifies one of the small business owners, Neiser Machado Matos, who admits to paying such a sum for a product that “was going to waste in warehouses and had no buyers.” His mipyme, located in Paso de Cuba, reportedly acquired the bulk of the cacao: 45,000 of the 101,000 tons.
According to Ogli Perez, financial director of the state-run company, these businesses paid 100,000 pesos per ton — meaning Machado Matos would have paid 4.5 million pesos (about $187,500 at the official exchange rate). Derivados del Cacao, if operational, would have paid 55,000 pesos per ton and a small portion in MLC.
Now that the numbers are known, Granma no longer judges the alternative so harshly. “The customer, a newly established and properly licensed economic actor, had a contract with the supplier — a condition that enabled legal buying and selling,” the article states. Still, it does not hesitate to suggest that this was where inflation began to surge — not in the act of doubling the price for private buyers. “The inflation ‘snowball’ grew as it rolled, multiplying profits for the handlers, while — as the ‘magic’ of prices would have it — the final and harshest blow fell on consumers,” the outlet comments.
The State’s Agroforestry Company, which thought it had made a smart deal by selling the product, was apparently surprised when authorities called it to account and ordered it to stop selling cacao to private businesses. Mayelin Frometa, Baracoa’s municipal administrator, takes responsibility for the measure, which came after complaints from the State’s Derivados del Cacao. She also says she warned the labor authority that it couldn’t allow self-employed workers to make chocolate — something she considers “illegal trade.” “We shut down that process; we knew what it meant,” she claims.
That justification doesn’t entirely work for Granma, which still views the response as delayed and the result of poor decisions, suddenly absolving the private businesses that were properly authorized. “The inexplicable and irrational began much earlier, with the managerial inertia that allowed the cacao to deteriorate, age, become encumbered, and lose its properties for timely export — just as its international market value was soaring… All of that could have been avoided and wasn’t. Why?” the paper asks.
Matos Perez defends himself, claiming decisions were made with short-term thinking, since the cacao was decaying in storage — for up to eight years, he says. And it is at this point that Granma shifts back to discrediting the producers.
“At that stage, it was no longer just about raw material that had been waiting years. Privates producing cacao-based products began receiving freshly harvested cacao that had left the plantations through a back door. With the chain reaction, the diversion of from the State company has now reached the cacao groves, starting a clandestine journey that damages the local [state-centered] economy,” the article concludes — warning that the issue will not be left alone.
First published in Spanish by 14ymedio and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.