Hard-Currency Incentive Promised to Cuban Coal Producers
of Pinar Del Río, Cuba
This new incentive aims to increase Cuba’s charcoal exports to 250 tons, which barely reached 36 tons in 2024.
HAVANA TIMES – The Pinar del Río Agroforestry Company only exported 36 tons of charcoal out of the 400 tons it produced last year, but it promises very different results for 2025. According to its director, Leduhan Menéndez Cardentey, it will produce less than in 2024, about 300 tons, but 250 of them will be for export.
That is, if last year only 9% of the production was destined for sales abroad, this would represent more than 83%. How will they make up that difference? Menéndez Cardentey’s explanations to the provincial press seem more voluntarism [the principle of relying on voluntary action] than reality and refer to the approval of a “financing scheme” in dollars.
Of the sales of charcoal, the official assures, most, 54%, will go “directly to the producer” (30% to the State budget and the rest to be “negotiated with the producing company and exporters”). “This can multiply the volumes of production from which the producer would have a profit in hard currency,” says Menéndez Cardentey. It is not clear, however, how and to what extent they will be able to achieve this.
At the end of last year, charcoal producers in Sancti Spíritus were complaining that they received 20 per cent of the revenue compared to 80 per cent for the State, and about the difficulties of dealing with the government. “The company takes up to seven months to pay. They do not pay until the charcoal is sold outside the country,” a producer told this newspaper.
On the other hand, the explanation for the drop in exports in 2024 is found, for the director of the Agroforestry Company, in the US embargo of the Island. “Production has never been stopped, but the volumes that were previously made are not being produced,” he explains to Guerrillero. “In 2024, we had a complex situation with the shipping companies because of the blockade.”
The Government made another statement to the National Assembly last July, exposing the country’s economic collapse and the fall in production in almost all areas. At that time, the Minister of Economy and Planning, Joaquín Alonso Vázquez, acknowledged that although the export figures for tobacco, lobster and other fishery products had recovered, “these increases were not sufficient to compensate for the decline in nickel and other mining products, honey, charcoal, farmed shrimp and sea shrimp, and biopharmaceuticals.”
The reasons, listed by the minister himself, included not just the “blockade” but also the lack of inputs, energy and fuel, in addition to “logistical problems and the decrease of some prices on the international market.”
In the same place, Alonso Vázquez stated that of the entire plan for exports of goods in the first months of the year had been fulfilled by only 62%, compared to 78% in the same period of the previous year. This makes it more difficult to comply with the prediction of the Pinar del Río Agroforestry Company.
Marabou vegetal charcoal was black gold for the Cuban state. The Government, until now, has been awarded 50 per cent of $340 per ton for export. An article published in Granma last year reported that for each ton of charcoal the Matanzas Agroforestal paid around 200 MLC (freely convertible currency), equivalent then to 172 dollars. This same product is sold in the US for about 400 dollars and, in the case of premium, almost 490 in Spain, where a newly created company–Entre Brasas–imports it from the port of Santiago de Cuba to Vigo, in Galicia.
The difference between the price paid to the Cuban producer and the cost to the foreign consumer is $228 per ton or, in the case of premium, $318. This includes the Cuban State’s share, transportation and the profit of the final vendor. Granma’s data showed that the Cuban State kept 168 dollars per ton, since it gave 172 to the producer, which has traditionally received better treatment than those in other agricultural sectors.
Translated by Regina Anavy for Translating Cuba