The Mangoes Bloom in Cuba and the Nightmare Begins
By Aurelio Pedroso (Progreso Semanal)
HAVANA TIMES – Each year, the mango trees begin that beautiful process of blooming to give life to the fruit as coveted as it is nutritious. You can already see those trees in peoples’ patios with dozens of ochre-colored bouquets hanging from their branches. They encourage the arrival of bees and the tiny bee hummingbirds (zunzunes) in search of the raw material for honey and vital food.
It is a beautiful spectacle of our mother nature. Despite the upheavals of climate change, she fulfills her duty to announce a good harvest at the start.
Perhaps some mathematician, agronomist or a simple peasant can tell us how many boxes of the fruit could be obtained without major meteorological problems like those winds that will soon attack the tiny fruits. And if a farmer had them for sale or marketing, how much would go to the industry or the consumer’s table.
But if he/she already has experiences from other seasons, it could also be like other years when much of the harvest is lost because no one came for it at the right time.
And that, precisely, is the unknown factor in this year’s mango season. Will the routine that repeats year after year happen again? Fruit rotting and going to the happy pigs in the best of cases, and those survivors that reach the market going for inaccessible and incomprehensible prices.
Optimists like those who invented the airplane, hope it will be different under more flexible, practical, and less restrictive rules in free trade. Pessimists like those who devised the parachute, believe we will collide again with the same stone. Such as the owner of the mangoes taking it out on the road to sell and being fined or sent to jail.
Let’s follow the route. We will have enough time to determine which virus we blame for a new failure. Be it to Covid-19 or to that of economic or ideological bureaucracy.
The mangoes don’t go to waste because the people cannot eat them all and cannot preserve them–rather they lie on the ground and rot because there is no gasoline to transport them to the market. The same is happening with other produce and milk–the state is incapable of bringing it from campo to market, making what little does appear extremely expensive.
With the abundance of mangoes last year, it was tragic to see most of them rot and go to waste. It will happen again this year too because the state owns and (mis)manages everything. Cubans on the island know this but what can they do?
Lo que pasa es que no hay una industria que sepa aprovechar, ni hay incentivos para el agricultor de producir. Los mangos en Cuba tienen una superstición, si es temporada de muchos mangos es porque el hambre va a ser mucha.
Command economy / socialist madness at its best , try something new like a bit of the free market, you might be surprised, save the mangoes and you might just save your beautiful cuba .Viva Cuba.
The mangos in Cuba are delicious. I know many Cubans who would love to “can” mangos so that they could be enjoyed all year long but the lack of canning jars and lids in Cuban limits their ability to do so. So, as a result, the demand for mangos is limited to what could be consumed while the fruit is in season. The rest of the harvest, as Aurelio writes, simply goes to waste.