A Cuban sugar producer bluntly told Vice President Salvador Valdés Mesa and leader Miguel Díaz-Canel during a meeting at the Palace of Conventions in Havana that it will take at least five years to recover the sugarcane sector.
"La sugarcane needs at least five years for one to be able to recover the sector. But we are making progress," stated Flores Betancourt, as reported by the official Canal Caribe.
The same producer raised a question that summarizes the seriousness of the situation: “Do we not have to produce the 500,000 tons needed for our basic basket? We cannot give up on that; these measures are very close to the people, very grounded.”
The intervention during the meeting with sugar industry executives and workers was one of the most blunt moments of a day in which the regime attempted to project optimism in front of a crumbling industry.
The meeting also brought together the Secretary of the Council of Ministers, Division General José Amado Ricardo Guerra, the head of the Agro-Food Department of the Communist Party, José Ramón Monteagudo Ruiz, and the president of the Azcuba Business Group, Julio Andrés García Pérez, who reported that the 2026-2027 campaign will be conducted without a centralized balance, based on linkages of each company with various economic actors.
The meeting took place in the context of the collapse of the Cuban sugar industry. The 2024-2025 harvest concluded with less than 150,000 tons, compared to a plan of 265,000, and only six of the 14 mills planned managed to operate.
The following season was even more disastrous: practically only the central Tuinucú, in Sancti Spíritus, processed sugarcane, producing about 5,600 tons before shutting down in March 2026 due to a lack of fuel. In that same month, economists warned that Cuba produces less sugar today than in 1899.
Díaz-Canel acknowledged to those present that the sector is "one of the most affected" in the national economy, although he attributed part of the crisis to the U.S. embargo and what he referred to as an "energy blockade."
The leader emphasized that the approved transformations must promote a reconversion, not the abandonment of the sector, and established a new metric for its evaluation: "The sugar sector will be measured by the energy it generates, the molasses it produces, the debt it pays, and the wages it delivers."
The roadmap presented by the leader aims to turn energy-consuming facilities into generators through cogeneration, biomass, and renewable energies.
"We must get as many mills up and running as possible, even if it's not for grinding," he said, prioritizing electricity generation over sugar production. He also urged the leadership to ensure that "every agreement has a name, surname, and deadline," and warned that "transformation is measured by results, not documents."
A concrete example of what the regime presents as a possible path is the Enidio Díaz Machado sugar mill, in Granma, which produced 5,000 tons with financial and logistical support from a private micro, small, and medium-sized enterprise, as part of the 176 economic transformations approved by the National Assembly in June 2026.
The most honest statement of the meeting, however, did not come from the president or any official, but from the producer who laid out figures and real-time data on the table.
With a sector that creates jobs in 50 municipalities across the country and has historically been the backbone of the Cuban economy, the warning that recovery will take at least five years stands in stark contrast to Díaz-Canel's call to act "now, not tomorrow, not when conditions are better."
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