Cuba’s Rum Industry Is in Crisis Due to a Lack of Sugar

The four foreign companies that dominate the industry on the island will not be able to maintain the production of previous years.

By 14ymedio

HAVANA TIMES – The sugar debacle in Cuba threatens to bring down with it one the few remaining exportable products that remains: rum. Not even a month ago, the official press itself was putting forward the worst portents, talking about the state-owned company Derivados de Amancio in Las Tunas. “The current crisis of the Cuban sugar industry hit them very hard, since the drop in the production of molasses deprived them of an essential input for the manufacture of alcohols and consequently of rum, two products with which they have gained prestige inside and outside the country,” said an article published on May 13 in Periódico 26.

Now, it is a foreign newspaper, The Guardian, that has revealed the extent of the crisis, which, it says, “would have shaken Ernest Hemingway”: “The Cuban communist government has difficulty processing enough sugar to make rum for his beloved mojitos and daiquiris.”

According to the British newspaper, an industry executive who asked for anonymity said “there will be no alcohol” in the fourth quarter of the year, which will be “particularly difficult.” The foreign companies that have formed an alliance with the Cuban government for the production of alcohol – the British Diageo, the Norwegian Island Rum Company and the French Pernod Ricard and LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy) – will not be spared says the extensive report published last Friday, though they “have invested heavily in their respective brands”: Ron Santiago, Black Tears, Havana Club and Eminente.

Luxury firms, the same source claims, are concerned. The text of The Guardian notes that Cuba, in a generalized economic crisis, has had to import sugar in recent years for the population’s consumption. However, says the executive, the rum producers cannot import because “the regulations state that all liquids must come from the island.”

The British newspaper describes the atmosphere at the Enrique Varona sugar mill in Ciego de Ávila on a recent visit: “The workers looked exhausted while turning a heavy piece of metal in the hope of keeping the large mill running.” Then they contrast it with the distillery of Pernod Ricard, south of Havana, which is “modern and elegant.”

The French beverage company was the first of the large foreign companies to arrive, recaps The Guardian, after signing an agreement with the state-owned Cuba Ron Corporation in 1993. “In exchange for an agreement not to allow entry of other competitors for 20 years, it acquired the brand Havana Club, increasing sales from 300,000 boxes to more than four million,” reports the newspaper. Luca Cesarano, former president of Ron Santiago S.A., the joint venture created between the British company Diageo and Cuba Ron to produce Ron Santiago, a competitor of Havana Club, declared: “They made a great investment at a time when nobody dared to invest in Cuba.”

Diageo arrived on the island in 2013, when he signed an agreement with Pernod Ricard. Unlike the French firm, explains the Guardian, the British one did not have its own distillery, but employed rum masters to make the drinks in the state distilleries.

“They also used historical rum collections that the masters had been storing in oak barrels for years all over the country, even as the cellar roofs were filled with holes,” says the report. Thus, “high-end products” – such as LVMH’s Eminente rum or Black Tears from the Norwegian Island Rum Company (which is named after the Lagrimas negras bolero) – have “boosted the international resurgence of rum.” With the shortage of molasses, concludes The Guardian, “all this work is threatened.”

The 2025 sugar harvest is coming to an end these days, and the information published in official newspapers makes us fear for the worst. Of the 56 sugar mills in the country, only 13 are operational, according to a recent report by Azcuba, and only six of them mill cane for sugar production. The rest is devoted to the production of molasses, just to make brandy.

In Sancti Spíritus, the authorities welcomed the fact that the only mill in operation in the territory, the Melanio Hernández, fulfilled the “sugar production plan corresponding to the present harvest, this April 30,” but a very different panorama is offered by the province of Granma. There, reported La Demajagua, just a few days ago, the Governing Council addressed in a meeting the “alarming situation of the sugar sector in the province, marked by a critical failure to comply with the established program and the approach of the hurricane season.”

Granma province produced 5,262 tons of sugar out of the more than 19,000 tons planned; that is, only 26% of what was predicted, “due to lack of fuel and industrial breakdowns.” There was also the loss of almost 150 million pesos from “fires in unharvested fields, loss of fields by invasions of weeds and non-payment to workers in several cooperatives and companies.”

It remains to be seen when the data of the present harvest will be known in the country. Last year’s was jealously guarded by the Cuban government for months and months. Finally, well into 2025, the former Minister of Economy José Luis Rodríguez let it escape in a text published by the official press: the 2023-2024 harvest totaled only 160,000 tons of sugar, an unusual figure.

The island’s once-star product, which reached 8.5 million tons in the 1980s, had fallen dramatically in 2022-2023, when 350,000 tons of sugar were achieved. That figure, which was already the worst harvest in a century, was more than double that of the most recent harvest.

Translated by Regina Anavy for Translating Cuba.

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