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The Chamber of Commerce of the Republic of Cuba launched a public call on social media this week to attract foreign investment to the Agroindustrial Grain Company of Los Palacios, located in Pinar del Río, with the stated goal of "maximizing productive capacities to nourish the people."
The announcement was made during a Business Exchange Day organized by the agro-food cluster of the Chamber of Commerce, and it is accompanied by a nearly twenty-minute institutional video that outlines the company's potential.
The Agroindustrial Grain Company Los Palacios (EAIG) is one of the largest rice producers in the country. Founded on December 30, 1986, by resolution 532 of the Ministry of Agriculture, it has a total of 47,338 hectares, of which 21,577 are dedicated to rice cultivation.
Its installed capacity includes drying 1,177 tons of wet rice daily and storing over 15,000 tons of dry paddy rice, distributed across four agricultural business units, four industrial units, and one agro-industrial unit in Mantua.
In addition to rice, the company diversifies its production with marabou charcoal under the Marabucubá brand —exported to Portugal, Spain, Germany, and Saudi Arabia— and pork and its derivatives under the Santa Bárbara brand, with a packing capacity of 1.5 tons per day.
The regime already has a history with this model. In January 2025, it granted 1,000 hectares in usufruct to the Vietnamese company Agri VMA at the Cubanacán farm of the EAIG, marking the first transfer of Cuban agricultural land to a foreign company.
This project achieved yields of between 6.5 and seven tons per hectare, compared to the historical provincial average of between one and 2.5 tons, but soon encountered the regime's bureaucracy. In July 2025, Agri VMA reported to three Cuban ministers that it had 300,000 dollars frozen in the International Financial Bank, which reduced its production to 10% due to a lack of supplies.
The new call comes amid a food crisis that the institutional video subtly acknowledges: "despite the investments made by the country, the fleet of harvesters is insufficient," the material admits.
National rice production fell between 59% and 87% from 2018 to 2023, covering less than 6% of national consumption in that last year, with imports totaling 484,222 tons according to the Statistical Yearbook of Cuba 2023.
By 2026, the regime plans to cultivate 200,000 hectares of rice and aims to meet 85% of the demand for the regulated basket before 2030, according to the institutional video of the EAIG.
In parallel, the regime has intensified its formal opening to foreign investment in the agricultural sector. In March, it allowed Cubans residing abroad to access land in usufruct, and in April, the Minister of Foreign Trade confirmed that they would be able to participate as partners in private companies under Law 118 on Foreign Investment.
The experience with Agri VMA, however, illustrates the main obstacle faced by any investor willing to bet on Cuban agriculture: an opaque financial system, frozen funds, and a state bureaucracy that can paralyze operations even when production results are positive.
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