Baraguá, Ciego de Avila.- With 2,378 hectares of land planted with banana, its flagship crop, Empresa Agropecuaria La Cuba continues to confirm how an entity can make a 180-degree turnaround, no matter how unfavorable its outlook has been, even in the midst of serious material and financial limitations such as those that characterize the current context.
A year ago, the statistics barely registered some 300 hectares planted with bananas, as a consequence of a sharp decline conditioned by several reasons, among them the exodus of the labor force to the private sector in search of better remuneration.
Therefore, as Ariel Nieves Concepción, General Director of the Company, affirms, the most important thing to rescue the productive splendor that always distinguished La Cuba has been the gradual return of workers, a figure that so far exceeds 900.
This return is not a coincidence. The concern and occupation to improve the state of the housing in the most needy cases, more favorable conditions for the feeding of those who sweat their skin at the foot of the plantations (today it costs 18 pesos for lunch, before 70), weekly open space for dialogue to listen, suggest, promote as a whole, or the greater availability of transportation in function of emergencies, are factors that have been opening ground.
In fact, at present there are some thirty labor collectives among whose workers there is a greater sense of belonging and defense of their patrimony against forms of crime or diversion of production, with the consequent increase in production volumes.
This increase continues to have repercussions on salary incomes which, although they normally oscillate between 20,000 and 30,000 pesos per month, can be much higher, as is the case of the irrigation machine collective located in Higinio, in the town of Lango.
Cuba becomes, in turn, an expression of how, in the same scenario, state and non-state forms of production can interact in an integrated manner, with final benefit for the territorial and national economy, in an effort to respond, to a greater extent, to food needs.
An indisputable strength is that 100% of the production, regardless of the production form, has a state destination, it goes through the Company.
At this time last year, the Company's sales amounted to 162 million pesos. Today they are around 390 million pesos.
The balance in something as sensitive as beans is noteworthy, with the delivery of 415 tons to Domestic Trade by the production sector, and 272 tons to the Company, an all-time record for this item.
In the meantime, diversification is recovering momentum. There is land, there is water, there is experience in the men who manage and directly carry out the work, but, above all, there is such an accumulated need for food that everything that is produced and reaches the markets will seem little, especially if the behavior of prices (hopefully with a tendency to decrease) allows a greater and fairer access to the products on offer.
