14ymedio, Madrid, 14 June 2024 — Two weeks ago, Cuba’s 2023-2024 sugar harvest officially concluded, and it is not yet known what the amount projected for this year will be beyond the fact that it would be “higher than the previous one,” according to Julio García Pérez, director of Azcuba, in December. With 350,000 tons of sugar, the record was again negative, but the well has no bottom, and judging by the data of Sancti Spíritus, a new shipwreck is expected. The province harvested around 16,000 tons this week, approximately 75% of what was planned, the Escambray newspaper said on Thursday.
Many provinces prolonged the harvest beyond the formal calendar this year, in the words of the media, “given the interest of raising the inventory of crude oil for national distribution,” so the results are not final, and those of the rest of the Island remain to be known, but the partial data speak for themselves. In May the cane was only ground for 13 days, and there are many factors that contribute to the disaster, including that the mill grinds at 30% of its capacity, half of what was expected, and that there is still “an appreciable amount” of cane to be cut, almost six months after the beginning of the process.
“The mill is not working, and the sugar plan is small, synonymous with a simple harvest,” the newspaper says, returning to the words of the president of Azcuba, who advanced a new, modest but efficient, plan – something that already happened in 2022-2023, with the same result. The newspaper maintains that there is a lack of resources and the sugar is made “in drips,” while the grinding is reduced to a few hours “every two or three days,” sometimes only twice a week.
A great human job has been done “for organizing a harvest that had lost the match before it even began and will end in the middle of spring with the lowest production in provincial history”
The article praises the workers for making do with little fuel to grind the cane, which shows “decent indicators, some of which are registered as the best at the country level.” The phrase, devastating, warns of how the harvest is going on a national scale, since, the media insists, a great human job