The Cuban vice president Salvador Valdés Mesa visited agricultural entities in the province of Mayabeque this Friday to assess the impact of the fuel shortage on farming and urged farmers to adopt biomass, firewood, and photovoltaic energy as urgent alternatives.
Accompanied by the First Secretary of the Party in the province, Edelso Antonio Ramos Linares, and the governor Manuel Aguiar Lamas, the member of the Political Bureau visited the state micro, small, and medium-sized enterprise (mipyme) SemBiot in San José de las Lajas, which focuses on the production of in vitro plants and the genetic improvement of agricultural varieties; the Guadalupe farm and the Miguel Soneira company in Güines, reported the Canal Caribe of official television.
In Melena del Sur, Valdés Mesa openly addressed the need for the agricultural sector to move away from its dependence on fossil fuels and embraced a discourse of "energy transformation" that the regime presents as a structural solution.
"Business systems have to generate their own fuel; they have to purchase fuel. And we will start the energy transformation ourselves. This means we have biomass, how much firewood we are going to use, water is fundamental and essential for the population as well as for crops. So, how can we make the machines independent, how can we then use photovoltaics, which is something we are fully committed to," stated the vice president during the tour.
The official discourse attributed the worsening of the crisis to the "escalation of the American blockade," referring to the sanctions from the United States, although the Cuban energy debacle has structural roots and was exacerbated by the interruption of oil shipments from Venezuela at the end of 2025.
The gravity of the situation in the countryside is extreme: 96.4% of Cuban agricultural microenterprises cannot operate due to a lack of fuel, and diesel on the black market reaches between 1,500 and 3,000 pesos per liter.
In the face of collapse, Cuban agriculture has returned to the use of oxen and windmills, while the FAO declared a humanitarian emergency in the countryside in March 2026. In May, the government itself acknowledged that it had exhausted absolutely all its fuel reserves.
The visit this Friday follows a pattern that repeats itself without concrete results. In November 2025, Valdés Mesa promised that Pinar del Río would achieve rice self-sufficiency in 2026, a promise that was not fulfilled.
In August of that same year, he demanded that the municipalities be self-sufficient in root vegetables and greens.
In March, the vice president acknowledged the magnitude of the failure with a phrase that summarizes the situation: "If inflation is fought by supplying the market, we need to produce enough to ensure availability in the market, but we can't achieve that in the short term."
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