According to Castro dictatorship, Cuba is the only place affected by droughts and hurricanes

The list of failures by Cuba’s Castro dictatorship is seemingly endless. So is, apparently, their list of excuses for those failures.

Roberto Alvarez Quiñones in Diario de Cuba:

Do droughts and rain only affect Cuba?

Whenever I read the excuses offered by the Castro regime about hurricanes and rains to justify the country’s paltry sugar production, I recall what in the late 60s the Director of International Organizations at the Ministry of Foreign Trade (MINCEX), Mario García Incháustegui, told me, off the record.

The former ambassador to the UN, who in 1962 made the ridiculous assertion that there were no nuclear weapons in Cuba, confessed to me that at the International Coffee Organization (ICO) in London they no longer believed the excuses given to justify the dearth of exports from Cuba. Said entity assigned export quotas to member countries to prevent a global coffee glut from driving down prices. Incháustegui blamed cyclones and other climatic effects. “I repeat the same arguments, but they don’t believe me anymore,” he told me. The ICO ultimately abolished the quota for Cuba and distributed it among other countries that asked to export more.

We ought to remember in the 40s and 50s Cuba was one of the leading exporters of coffee worldwide. Between 1928 and 1948 the island produced an annual average of 30,000 tons (MT). In fact, in 1960, the last year of capitalism on the island, it produced 60,000 MT. Of course, when Communism was implemented, everything changed. In 2016 5,687 MT were produced, and for 2017 there are still no statistics available, but it seems that the figure was 5,500 MT – ten times less than 58 years ago.

I point this out because if in the International Sugar Organization (ISO), also based in London, had export quotas for sugar, as in the last century, Cuba would have lost its some time ago.

Excuses and pretexts

The 20th century featured International Sugar Agreements between exporting and importing countries, with export quotas to prevent price drops. The last agreement with quotas was in 1987. In 1993 another was put into effect, but without them. Today the ISO functions only as a provider of data.

A few days ago the Government of Raúl Castro reported that the rains in November, December and January had affected 70% of the country’s total sugar cane growing area, and that of the 53 sugar plants available, only 26 are operating, and at half of their capacity.

Juan Carlos Pérez, Director of Assistance to Producers at AZCUBA, spoke to the newspaper Granma of “climatic stress and the “ravages of the drought in the months of June to September of 2017, the greatest growth period for the [sugarcane] crop.”

Dionis Perez, also an official with AZCUBA, blamed the sugar problems on the rain, although he did also recognize some bad industrial handling of the crop. Another State official, Sergio Guillén, stated that the sugar’s sucrose content today is between 15% and 16%, when 18% is required.

Certainly sugar cane needs water to grow, but by November it should stop growing, to mature and accumulate sucrose. If it rains, the cane resumes its green growth and does not develop enough sucrose, and the yield decreases.

Were there no untimely rains before 1959?

All this is understandable, but certain questions arise: Is Cuba the only producer of cane sugar affected by hurricanes, and where it rains during the periods when the cane matures? Were there no cyclones, excessive rains or droughts before 1959? How, then, was Cuba the world’s largest exporter of sugar?

Despite rains, cyclones, cyclical droughts, plagues and other hazards, Cuba was the world’s sugar supplier for more than 160 years, since the revolution in Haiti at the end of the 18th century. In 1894 it reached 1.1 million MT, one third of all the sugar produced in the world. In 1925 it produced 5.1 million MT – triple the amount produced in 2017.

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