An engineer from Ciego de Ávila recounted a phrase she recently heard in her workplace that she interpreted as a concerning sign about the situation of her company. According to Diana Cecilia Martínez, a person affiliated with the center said, "Anyone who wants to resign, I will understand."
"When you are told that, it's simply because what's coming...", added Diana, leaving the sentence incomplete but the message clear, in an interview with Tania Costa.
The trigger for that insinuation is the chain of unpaid bills that is suffocating the company. The client entity that pays them for the projects lacks funds, and Diana's own bosses have had to resort to pressure tactics to collect payments: "Many times our bosses have said: no, until you give me an invoice, I won't deliver the project to you."
Despite everything, Diana describes her company as one of the few that still endures. "Thank God my company is one of the most effective there is today in Ciego de Ávila. We have very good managers," she stated, adding that those managers "are sought under the hand, they're searched under a stone. Under a stone, underneath all of that. But unfortunately, it has become difficult for everyone."
The lack of fuel forces the staff to work just two days a week. "I go to work on Mondays and Thursdays, for example, because we can't work more due to the fuel problem," explained Diana, whose company requires trips to the field to inspect land.
This limitation is compounded by the electricity crisis in Ciego de Ávila, where outages can extend up to 19 or 20 hours daily in non-prioritized circuits. Diana experienced this firsthand recently on a Monday: "I was at work and the power returned to my house at 10 in the morning. I told my boss: look, you have to let me go, because if you keep delaying, you won't achieve anything."
The electricity window in your home lasts only about an hour or an hour and a half, during which time you have to catch up on work that you can't do at the office. And this is not an individual problem: "Multiply me by 10 or 20, because that's how many workers we have there. Productive ones. I'm talking about the productive department, not human resources, not consumers, not legal. I'm referring to the productive part, the one that contributes capital."
Diana's fear has a specific and close reference: the sugar projects company that belonged to the Ministry of Sugar where her 64-year-old father worked closed after accumulating four months of unpaid salaries. "There, they definitely said, it’s over," she recalled. In her case, the insinuation comes "between the lines," but the message is the same.
This pattern is not isolated. According to data presented by the Cuban government, after reviewing 869 state entities with losses, the partial or total closure of 65 was ordered. Meanwhile, the sugar sector is experiencing a historic crisis: the 2024/2025 harvest did not exceed 150,000 tons of sugar, the worst result in over a century.
The government approved Decree 138/2025 on salary decentralization so that each company can design its own payment system linked to productivity, a measure that Diana mentions with tempered hope: in theory, it allows for salary increases, but the required performance indicators are unattainable without electricity or fuel. Her current salary is 5,200 pesos per month, in a province where a dozen eggs in the small and medium enterprises costs 3,600 pesos.
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