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CUBA: Nostalgia for the Old Sugar Mill

Patricia Grogg

SANTA CLARA, Cuba, Nov 24 2004 (IPS) - The batey, or small town surrounding the sugar mill, is no longer bustling like it used to be, especially at harvest time. The wail of the siren marking the workers’ shifts is missing, as is the noise of the furnaces and the constant coming and going of vehicles and people.

“Just imagine!” 83-year-old José Antonio Fernández repeats over and over, with tears in his eyes, remembering the day he heard that the sugar mill where he worked for over four decades was shutting down.

No one in the old Hermanos Ameijeiras sugar mill, in the central Cuban province of Villa Clara, denies that the change has been tough and has meant a radical shift in the lives of the local residents.

For Antonio Gómez, it was a double blow. “First they told me the sugar mill was closing. Then they said we had to tear up the rails I laid in and took care of for so long, because we had to clear the area in front of the factory to put in an ‘organoponic’ garden,” he comments to IPS.

In “organoponic” or intensive vegetable gardens, organic vegetables and herbs are grown in containers on hard surfaces, to make the most of limited space, often in urban areas.

Gómez and other workers formerly in charge of the sugar mill’s rail transport now grow lettuce, beans, tomatoes, cucumbers and onions in long troughs that line a half-hectare area outside of the factory.

When they are purchased, the fresh vegetables go directly from the garden to the tables of the families living in the batey, which is home to around 3,500 people, and includes the sugar mill, shops and other installations, as well as the homes of the former sugar industry workers.

In a field farther away from the town, where sugar cane once grew, agronomist Julio Margolles is now in charge of greenhouses where flowers, yucca, malanga (a tuber resembling a sweet potato), sunflowers, beans, corn and other plants are grown, to be sold to other companies in this Caribbean island nation.

A few very old wooden houses can still be seen in the batey. “They told me this one was built a century ago,” Josefina Pérez, who owns one of the houses, tells IPS.

The small town has a primary school, a clinic attended by a family doctor, a library with 7,000 books, the ever-present baseball stadium, and the Casa del Azucarero community centre, complete with restaurant and dance hall.

“At the beginning, everyone felt nostalgic, but when we started seeing the result of our new productive activities, we began to cheer up. Last year wasn’t so bad, we turned a profit,” says Margolles.

The Hermanos Ameijeiras sugar mill was turned into a farm after Cuba’s socialist government undertook a restructuring of the sugar industry in 2002 due to the low price of sugar on the international market, a phenomenon that has hit the Cuban economy hard.

Sugar, the mainstay of the Cuban economy for decades, has been surpassed by tourism and foreign remittances as the primary sources of foreign exchange.

“The net profits were small the first year, but we hope they will increase little by little,” Rafael Roche, the director of the company, explains to IPS. “Our main focus now is agricultural production, because we don’t have a lot of space for raising livestock, which brings in higher earnings.”

The 435-hectare farm is run by 214 employees, and has a genetic centre that distributes breeding stock to others part of the country.

“We also breed pigs, poultry, rabbits, sheep and horses, to sell to the local workers as well as to other companies,” explains Roche, who says he studied chemistry, but “should have studied agronomy, because it’s what I really love.”

The reconversion of the sugar industry led to the closure of 70 sugar mills, of a total of more than 150 throughout the country, while around 60 percent of the sugar cane plantation land is now dedicated to forestry, fruit and stockbreeding production. The industry’s capacity was reduced so that it is able to produce no more than four million tons of sugar a year.

Of the sugar mills that continue to operate, 14 make sugar by-products, a sector that is open to foreign investment, while the rest produce sugar. The restructuring entailed a drastic reduction in personnel, but according to the government of President Fidel Castro, no one was left to fend for themselves.

Around half of the employees of the Hermanos Ameijeiras sugar mill lost their jobs. But under the reconversion programme, sugar industry workers left unemployed are now studying, and continue to draw their salaries, which average 400 pesos a month.

As part of the study programme, the former sugar industry workers are either completing their unfinished primary or secondary school studies or undergoing vocational training for new jobs. That is the case of the141 employees of the Hermanos Ameijeiras mill who have stayed on.

Meanwhile, sugar industry employees who had already finished high school or had studied at the university are earning undergraduate or graduate degrees.

More than 100,000 sugar industry workers in this country of 11.2 million are currently studying – 54 percent of them full-time, while the rest study and work part-time.

One of the aims of the study programme is to graduate 10,000 mid-level technical experts and 15,000 professionals with a university degree in specialty areas linked to the sugar industry.

Another objective is to raise the average level of schooling among the former sugar industry workers from the ninth to the 12th grade.

According to government officials, the reforms have made it possible to concentrate efforts and resources in the most efficient sugar mills, lower production costs, and increase the competitiveness of the sugar industry’s by-products.

Sources at the Sugar Ministry estimate that more than one million hectares of land once planted in sugar cane is now dedicated to stockbreeding and the cultivation of fruit trees, vegetables and other crops.

Economists in Cuba say the restructuring of the sugar industry was the only alternative, given the current international price of between six and seven cents per pound of sugar.

Up to 1999, a pound of sugar fetched between 11 and 15 cents (240 to 260 dollars a ton), which covered production costs while generating significant export revenues.

The 2003-2004 sugar harvest amounted to just over 2.5 million tons, slightly higher than the output for the previous (2002-2003) season.