A Cuban farmer named Andrés Manuel Sosa Ramírez publicly reported receiving a fine of 200,000 pesos for having his cattle on idle lands, in a video on Facebook that went viral and amassed over 13 million views.
"200,000 pesos fine because my livestock is growing on idle land. Is it bad or is it good? I have no other offense," stated Sosa Ramírez, a phrase that starkly summarizes the logic of the Cuban agricultural system: punishing a producer not for destroying or stealing livestock, but for keeping it alive and growing.
"It's abusive, and there are more than 200 caballerías of land lost where I live," he lamented.
According to him, the intention of the Agriculture Delegation is to take away the livestock. "How long will the injustice in this country last?" he expressed.
This is not the first time that this same producer has faced a sanction of this kind. In May 2026, Sosa Ramírez had already reported a fine of 60,000 pesos imposed by CENCOP (National Center for Livestock Control) for an alleged "age difference" in his animals.
The legal framework enabling these sanctions is Decree 70/2022 of the Council of Ministers, approved in August 2022, which updated the sanctioning regime regarding the control and registration of large livestock.
Under this regulation, failing to declare births, deaths, or missing cattle incurs a fine of 10,000 pesos for each animal; not updating the registration data carries a penalty of 20,000 pesos; and holding unregistered cattle can result in a fine of up to 20,000 pesos per head, along with the confiscation of the animal.
This pressure is compounded by Resolution 20/2025 from the Ministry of Finance and Prices, which establishes a tax on the idleness of agricultural and forest land: if the farmer does not use the land, they pay a tax; if they use it for livestock without perfectly updated records, they also incur a fine.
The paradox becomes more evident when comparing the figures. In March 2026, the government set a maximum price of 75 pesos per kilogram for first-category bulls through Agreement 9845 of the Council of Ministers, which amounts to just 37,500 pesos gross for a 500-kilogram animal—a fraction of the 200,000 pesos fine that Sosa Ramírez faces.
This situation does not occur in a vacuum. Cuba has lost more than 900,000 cattle since 2019, and by the end of 2024, the national herd numbered only about three million animals, nearly 400,000 fewer than the previous year.
In 2024, there were 58,963 cattle deaths and 7,143 clandestine slaughters nationwide. In Villa Clara, more than 15,000 cattle died just in August 2025.
A national audit conducted between March 2024 and January 2025 detected 181,854 irregularities in the management of the Cuban cattle population, highlighting the extent of the structural disarray that the regime itself acknowledges.
In response to that productive collapse, the government's reaction has not been to encourage those who manage to maintain and grow their livestock, but rather to impose more controls, more bureaucracy, and more fines.
Another Cuban farmer summarized the situation in April 2026 with a phrase that also circulated widely: "They steal from me, and they are the owners," referring to the stance of the authorities when a producer loses animals to theft and the State still demands that they account for them.
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