Alcides López Labrada, director of the Cítricos Ceiba Company, stated this week on the television program Mesa Redonda that "one cannot talk about agriculture in Cuba without mentioning Fidel Castro."
The agricultural leader described the deceased dictator with fervor: "For the Cuban agricultural workers, Fidel is in our minds, in our hearts, in our souls. Fidel made a profound impact on the workers in the sector, and I would say he left indelible marks."
López Labrada added that it is difficult to find a company, cooperative, or community related to agriculture that has not been visited by Castro: "Fidel was everywhere, and he didn't just go; he engaged, talked with the people, and got his boots dirty with mud."
The journalist José Raúl Gallego responded with irony on social media, agreeing with the official for radically different reasons: “One cannot discuss how Cuba went from being a sugar powerhouse and a productive country to a wasteland of marabou that has to import more than 80% of the little it eats, without mentioning the main culprit: Fidel Castro Ruz.”
The statements come amid one of the worst agricultural crises in the history of the island. Between 2018 and 2023, pork production fell by 95%, rice by 87%, beans by 70%, and milk by 58%, according to official statistics. The 2024-2025 sugar harvest produced less than 150,000 metric tons, below the levels of 1899.
The great agricultural failures of Fidel Castro
The Ten Million Harvest (1970) is the most emblematic failure of the dictator's agricultural policies. Castro set the goal of producing 10 million tons of sugar, mobilized the entire country, and diverted resources from across the economy.
The harvest totaled around 8.5 million tons. The campaign led to the logging of thousands of hectares of timber trees. In 2002, Castro closed 71 out of 156 Cuban sugar mills during the "Álvaro Reynoso Task," hastening the collapse of the sugar sector.
The Cordón of Havana (1968) was another disaster planned from above. Castro ordered the capital to be surrounded with Caturra coffee plantations to self-supply the city. More than 39 million plants were eventually planted, but the project failed due to inadequate soils and a lack of technical planning.
The livestock plan and the cow Ubre Blanca complete the most famous trio of failures. Castro promised eight million cows and 30 million liters of milk per day by 1970.
The cow Ubre Blanca was introduced in 1981 as a world record with 89.9 liters of milk in a day and was guarded by security forces, but the genetic plan ultimately turned out to be one of the great failures of the Revolution. Cuban livestock has lost more than 900,000 heads of cattle since 2019.
This is not the first time that officials from the regime attribute merits in the food sector to the dictator. In October 2023, the Ministry of Food Industry published that "thanks to Fidel Castro's thinking, we have a Food Industry with sufficient capacity", a statement that generated widespread outrage among Cubans.
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