After four years “without honoring its commitments,” the fruit exporter of Ciego de Ávila has little success
14ymedio, Havana, 13 April 2024 — It is rare for the official press to retreat in its predictions of success for a state-owned company. But the collapse of the exports of the agro-industrial Ceballos, in Ciego de Ávila, made Invasor admit this Saturday that the entity had not been able to survive the “blow to the chin” that was given to it by the Ordering Task* in 2021.
Since then, when 426 state companies were ruined by the umpteenth recipe for economic salvation for the Island, the provincial newspaper of the Communist Party put its hands in the fire in favor of Ceballos. “But they didn’t just end that period in the red but also in 2022,” it now says, when the managers struggle – with average success – to return to the “path of efficiency.”
The “very adjusted mathematics” with which Ceballos returns to the game is a bad omen
The “very adjusted mathematics” with which Ceballos returns to the game is a bad omen: in 2022 they reported 70 million pesos in losses, and another 75 million were stolen or wasted, information that Invasor hides after a verbal pirouette: they didn’t have the money, and “at the time, the accounting by the country’s management had the consequent impacts.”
The Government was not happy about the waste, judging by the litany of obstacles it imposed on the company in 2023. To this was added the failure to export a shipment of coal that no international buyer wanted, and that was “stalled” in Mariel while Ceballos managers saw a multitude of “competitors with less expensive products” closing deals abroad.
Havana also did not allow them to enter the group of companies that could carry out transactions enjoying an exchange rate of 120 pesos for a dollar, a decision that the managers described as “contradictory,” Ceballos being “a leader of the Avileño exporting pole.” The solution was to cut heads: from 12 floors they went to eight; they fired workers in charge of “indirect work” and “centralized resources” to tackle corruption.
