The Fall of Sugar and the Management of Misery In Cuba

 

In 1969 Fidel Castro called on Cubans to join in bringing in the sugar harvest. The harvest was measured in the millions of tons--much of it slated for export to the Soviet Union at premium prices. Americans, some now prominent, engaged in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution by going to Cuba to help with the harvests. It was a heady time for youngsters and ideologues committed to a vision of an idealized communist state , something that many sought to export, along with sugar, back to the heart of what Mr Castro referred to as the Empire. 

But for decades, the industry has been in decline. While the island regularly produced more than 7 million tonnes in the 1980s, last season — squeezed by new “maximum pressure” United States sanctions — it yielded only 480,000 tonnes. This year, the target is even lower as Cuba heads for its worst sugar harvest in more than a century.  Once we were the country that exported the most sugar,” Dionis Perez, director of communications at Azcuba, the state agency that regulates sugar production, told Al Jazeera.  But “this is the first year that Cuba doesn’t plan to export more sugar than it consumes”. (here)

That was 2023.  It turns out that 2024 is going to be worse. Marc Frank now reports a sugar harvest so small that there may not be enough sugar to produce Cuban Rum, among the few reliable money making exports for a state whose economic system has entombed Cuba's productive forces. 

Pix credit here

The Cuban sugar harvest is winding down at the lowest tonnage since 1900, forcing the government to import and putting more pressure on its domestic rum, soft drink and pharmaceutical industries, according to official reports, two economists and a rum industry source. President Miguel Diaz-Canel said at the end of April that the state-run industry had produced 71% of the 412,000 metric tons planned, or just shy of 300,000 metric tons, and would mill into May. Cuba produced 350,000 metric tons in the last harvest and while some sugar mills remain open, yields drop sharply in May as hot, humid weather sets in, accompanied by summer rains. “This means we will have to import and, of course, less sugar means there is less syrup and alcohol for various industries and, of course, rum,” said Cuban economist Omar Everleny. The communist-run Caribbean island nation was once the world’s top sugar exporter, and produced 8 million metric tons of raw sugar in 1989, before the collapse of its former benefactor, the Soviet Union, sparked a steady decline. (Cuba may import sugar, rum industry pressed amid disastrous harvest)

It may well be time to call on the current generation of American youth to volunteer their labor. But there is no sugarcane to harvest. And soon, there may be no rum to drink. The only thing that is left are the ideals of a political economic model, reaffirmed less than a decade ago, that is increasingly detached from the realities of Cuban life. What is left is a political economic model that continues to exist at the sufferance of those states with an interest in its preservation , and is fueled by the extraordinary success of a pragmatic policy of controlled misery (here, here, and here).