Someone made a mistake. Either the state-run media or the Habanos S.A. Corporation, but the "record figure" for sales achieved in 2024 by this company exactly matches that reported in 2023. In any case, the regime celebrated it like a long-awaited event amidst the currency drought it is experiencing.
At the end of February, during the opening of the XXIV International Havana Festival, Habanos S.A. Corporation announced a historic revenue of 721 million dollars in 2023, surpassing the results of the previous year.
The 31% increase in revenue compared to 2022 reflected, according to the company, the continuous growth and strength of the brand at a global level.
In 2022, the revenue of the Corporation, a subsidiary of the Tabacuba Business Group led by the former czar of the regime's economic reforms, Marino Alberto Murillo Jorge, reached approximately 497 million.
It is striking that on the occasion of its 30th anniversary, Habanos S.A. granted an interview to the Cuban News Agency (ACN) in which it highlighted that it achieved a record revenue of 721 million dollars in 2024, the same figure they announced at the XXIV International Habanos Festival as reached in 2023.
Someone has made a mistake in this "good news" that the entire official press is echoing at a time of extreme severity in the economic crisis. It is not a record if it has already been achieved before; or it is, but not for the current year.
In any case, the financial statements of Corporación Habanos S.A. suffer from the same flaw as all financial information of companies under the control of the communist State, especially those that generate foreign currency and, despite their public participation, maintain opaque accounting that prevents citizens from tracking the flow of their money.
Because that is what the term "public enterprise," or "public participation," implies: it is funded by the state budgets, that is, by the money that is not then allocated to other public investments, such as hospitals, schools, or transportation.
Murillo Jorge will be happy with the results of the company that controls the promotion, distribution, and export of cigars and other tobacco-derived products globally in the business group he leads.
Except for the 17.8 million euros from the Humidors Auction of the XXIV edition of the Habanos Festival, which the Presidency of Cuba claims are allocated to the National Public Health System, nothing is known about the destination of the remaining 700 million dollars.
The Tabacuba Business Group is made up of around 40 state-owned companies, three joint ventures (Habanos, S.A.; Internacional Cubana de Tabacos, S.A.; and Brascuba Cigarrillos, S.A.), a 100% Cuban commercial company, Tabagest S.A., and a research institute with three experimental stations in three tobacco-growing regions of the country.
In March, the ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel signed the luxurious Cohiba humidor that was sold for nearly five million dollars at the auction that raised 17.8 million euros for Cuban "public health."
A month earlier, in Hoyos de Monterrey, a tobacco grower acknowledged to Televisión Cubana that the farm his father had worked his whole life, and which he continued to work, was "owned by the government."
Tabacuba has a lot to explain, and it's not just about its "profit and loss statements." Abuses, corruption, theft... The best tobacco in the world is produced with unhappy and poorly paid workers, under conditions of semi-slavery that were not seen even in the worst moments of the republican era.
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