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The agroindustrial sugar company Quintín Bandera, located in the municipality of Corralillo, in the province of Villa Clara, was unable to complete the 2025-2026 harvest and is currently fighting for its survival by utilizing oxen and solar panels, reported this Friday on its website by the official broadcaster CMHW.
The collapse is the result of a series of accumulated failures. The mill started grinding on February 2, after multiple failed attempts and weeks of delays, with the goal of producing 11,000 metric tons of raw sugar in 75 days and supplying energy to the National Electroenergetic System (SEN). That goal was never achieved.
The shortage of fuel and agricultural supplies forced the company to reinvent itself. According to the report, they are already advancing in the installation of solar panels to change their energy matrix, while resorting to animal traction, a practice that the workers themselves acknowledge has lost its cultural significance.
"Following the blow to the so-called 'sweet gold,' due to the inability to carry out the 2025-2026 harvest, the situation becomes more challenging and innovative solutions, some of them ancestral, as well as the implementation of creative measures, become crucial," the text stated.
The start of the harvest had been postponed several times. The director of the mill, Onel Pérez González, acknowledged in December that the delay was due to "the current energy situation and the lack of some essential resources to complete the preparation work."
The energy crisis forced the delay of the start of the sugar harvest from December 14, 2025, to December 26, and then to February.
The failure of Quintín Bandera is not an isolated case. Villa Clara has not met its sugar production targets since 2019, as acknowledged by the first secretary of the Party in the province, Susely Morfa González. "The production plan has not been satisfied since 2019," she admitted weeks ago.
In the 2024-2025 sugar harvest, the Héctor Rodríguez and Quintín Bandera mills reported yields below 50% of what was planned. On a national level, sugar production in Cuba has fallen below 150,000 metric tons, the lowest level in over a century, compared to a state plan of 265,000 tons.
The collapse of the 2025-2026 sugar harvest also impacted the production of derivatives: the sugar collapse affected alcohol production and the Paraíso distillery, located in Tuinicú, Sancti Spíritus, was halted just 22 days after the harvest began.
The official media describes the situation in Quintín Bandera as a "battle for survival" and notes that the struggle goes beyond just economic factors.
"The battle is not just for sugar, cane, and food, but also for the identity of a part of the Villa Clara geography," stated CMHW.
Cuba, which was the world's largest producer of sugar for much of the 20th century with harvests of seven and eight million tons in the 1980s, has seen its industry collapse to levels not seen since before 1900, a direct consequence, among other factors, of 67 years of centralized management and failed planning.
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