Vol. 73/No. 4 February 2, 2009
This is how Odalys Balcacel summed up what she considered the biggest change among workers at the former Camilo Cienfuegos sugar complex here, 30 miles east of Havana. Balcacel is one of the leaders at the agricultural enterprise that was established with the closure of the sugar mill in 2002.
In April of that year the Cuban government initiated a radical cutback and reorganization of the sugar industry, which had been the cornerstone of Cuba’s economy for more than 150 years. Ninety of the island’s 155 sugar mills have been closed, 50 having been idled even prior to April 2002. Some 3.4 million acres of farmland were taken out of sugarcane cultivation and allocated to more diversified agriculture and forestry in order to increase both the quantity and quality of food production and reduce dependence on imports. The jobs of half the workers employed directly in sugar production were eliminated, with all workers guaranteed employment with no cut in pay.
The need to take such steps had been posed sharply by the economic crisis in Cuba that exploded in the early 1990s with the abrupt end of aid and trade on preferential terms with the former Soviet bloc countries, which had long-term contracts for purchasing the bulk of Cuban sugar exports. The crisis was deepened by the simultaneous tightening of the U.S. trade embargo, which has now lasted for nearly 50 years.
It was only with the beginning of a recovery from the most desperate years of what Cubans know as the Special Period, however, that it became possible—and unpostponable—to address the challenge of restructuring the sugar industry.
The consequences of the loss of Cuba’s primary export market; falling productivity due to obsolete plants, equipment, and lack of spare parts; rising prices for fuel and other imported inputs; and the declining price of sugar on the world market—all these combined to make the restructuring unavoidable and urgent.
The steps toward agricultural diversification and increased food self-sufficiency that have been taken as part of this process also corresponded to a stated goal of the revolutionary struggle in Cuba since its inception in the early 1950s.
For workers in capitalist countries, industrial “restructuring” inevitably means unemployment for many, combined with speed-up and longer hours for those who remain, union busting, pay cuts, and often loss of health-care insurance and pensions for both current and retired employees.
The reorganization in Cuba has been carried out by a government of working people acting to advance their class interests and to defend the alliance of workers and farmers on which the socialist revolution depends. It shows what becomes possible when workers and farmers take state power through a revolutionary struggle to overturn the rule of the capitalist lords of industry, land, and banking—those who today are in panic mode throughout the world trying to protect their wealth and privileges.
The sugar industry reorganization was presented in a 2002 “Programmatic Document” prepared by the Ministry of Agriculture and the National Union of Sugar Workers (SNTA), and discussed nationwide in multiple rounds of workplace assemblies that hammered out the changes. It guaranteed the “inviolable principles” that no one would be left to fend for himself or herself, that the wage of each and every worker would be guaranteed and each would be assured employment, schooling, or both. (See accompanying excerpt from the Programmatic Document.)
Study-as-work program
The restructuring plan offers sugar workers whose jobs have been eliminated the opportunity to study while continuing to be paid their average monthly wages. Since most sugar workers receive production bonuses during the roughly four-month harvest season, the average monthly wage, workers explained to us, is higher than the base wage.
Militant reporters visited the Camilo Cienfuegos complex in February 2003, after the sugar mill had closed and this study-as-work program was just beginning. (See “Radical reorganization and cutback of Cuba’s sugar industry” and “Cutback, restructuring of sugar industry: Cuban workers explain how it affects them” in the February 9 and 16, 2004, issues on www.themilitant.com.) On return visits in 2007 and February 2008, we were able to follow the progress made, and in January 2009 leaders of the SNTA gave us a further update.
The sugar workers’ study-as-work program launched in 2002 offered full- or part-time education for an indefinite period to all those affected by the reorganization. This was one of a number of initiatives by Cuba’s revolutionary leadership to expand access to education and culture on a broad scale, part of a program known here as the Battle of Ideas.
Within months of its launch, more than 120,000 sugar workers across the island signed up for the study-as-work program.
“At the Camilo Cienfuegos complex you can see the results,” said Miguel Toledo, general secretary of the SNTA, who arranged the visits and accompanied us. “There have been graduations from the initial courses, but a number of workers continue to study full time, until an opportune moment arrives for a shift to a new job, inside or outside of the sugar sector.
“Others are taking courses part time and putting their newly acquired skills to work in industry or agriculture,” he noted. Still others, who were working full time when we visited in 2003, “were inspired by those who became students to start studying part time themselves.”
While going back to school was a major change for workers at the outset, now “it’s become a normal part of life,” Toledo said.
At Santa Cruz del Norte, 139 workers graduated at high school level in 2005. Some of the students have gone on to university studies, facilitated by the expansion of the university system to every one of the 169 municipalities in the country.
At the time of our 2007 visit, the Camilo Cienfuegos School for Further Education had an enrollment of 666 students, roughly the same number as when the program started in 2003. One hundred fifty-seven were full time. Some 93 were in classes up to sixth grade and 573 studying at levels between seventh and ninth grades.
Of the school’s 40 teachers, 27 used to work at the mill. One of these is former electrician Joaquín Almaguer, whom we first met and talked with in 2003. “When I started studying, I continued to work six or seven hours a day. But now I’ve graduated to become a full-time teacher,” Almaguer said with evident pride. He teaches technical drawing, Spanish, and literature.
As an incentive, former workers like Almaguer now receive the average income of those currently employed in the enterprise plus an additional 20 percent.
Expanded production
During 2007 about half of the 50,000 workers still engaged full time in the study-as-work program returned to at least part-time jobs in the sugar agro-industry, Toledo told us in February 2008.
The union leader had just returned from a visit to the Antonio Guiteras sugar complex in the eastern province of Las Tunas, the largest mill in the country. Like other mills in the east, where sugar production is concentrated today, it had suffered greatly as a result of a five-year-long drought. “The drought was so bad that in 2006 we had only enough cane to run just over 40 of the 61 mills that should have been operating,” he said. Production was less than 1.3 million tons in 2005-2006 and fell further the next year.
The 2007-2008 harvest, with 54 mills operating, yielded the first increase since the reorganization—24 percent over the previous year. While Cuba was able to meet its international contracts, with this level of production it had to import white refined sugar from other countries to meet domestic consumption.
Last year hurricanes Gustav, Ike, and Paloma hit the island in August, September, and November, bringing an estimated $10 billion in destruction. Major sugar mills such as the Antonio Guiteras in Las Tunas and the November 30 mill in Pinar del Río suffered particularly severe damage.
Until the hurricanes, Cuban agricultural and mill workers had been on course to raise production in 2009 by 20-30 percent over the 2007-2008 harvest, according to an October report by then-sugar minister Ulises Rosales del Toro. Output is now expected to be 1.5 million tons, the same as the last season.
Moreover, the sugarcane itself was badly hit. “This is unusual,” Miguel Toledo told Militant reporters in January of this year. “Normally, because the cane is so pliable, it rightens itself soon after the heavy winds. This year the winds were so intense, and flooding so widespread, that up to 20 percent of this year’s crop has been destroyed. The quality is inevitably down too, which means the yield per ton of sugarcane will be less. And next year’s harvest will also be affected, although to a lesser degree.”
In addition, some 40,000 tons of warehoused sugar was saturated and had to be reprocessed.
When the restructuring of the industry began in 2002, Toledo noted, the spot market price of sugar on the world commodity exchanges had dropped to six cents per pound—just above the cost of production in Cuba at that time. As of January 2009 it had risen to 11.5 cents per pound.
Cuba doesn’t sell on the spot market, Toledo explained. Its sugar is contracted for, long ahead of time, by China and other governments at prices higher than those on the world market. Cuba exports 400,000 tons to China, for example. This benefits both parties—China can count on a guaranteed supply and Cuba on a stable market. When spot market prices rise on world commodity exchanges, however, that strengthens Cuba’s hand in negotiating futures contracts. And the reverse when the price drops.
A significant factor in the rise in world sugar prices over the last half decade has been increased demand for ethanol, a gasoline substitute that can be produced from sugarcane. Cuba’s sugar ministry has taken steps to expand production in response.
Luis Gálvez, director of the sugar ministry’s Sugarcane Derivatives Research Institute, reported in August 2008 that Cuba’s annual ethanol output was 100 million liters a year “and, with the modernization, we are going to double production.” The Cuban government has also taken steps to make the industry less reliant on oil imports through the burning of bagasse, a residue from the sugar manufacturing process.
In 2005 the sugar industry contributed 4.5 percent of total electricity generation on the island, said Bárbara Hernández, head of the sugar ministry’s energy management department. In 2008 the contribution was slightly higher.
As a result of the reorganization, workers on many former sugar cooperatives are now farming vegetables and fruit, raising livestock, and growing trees. These are part of broader efforts to diversify and increase agricultural production.
Over the last year, the Cuban government has initiated a number of measures to increase agricultural production. Idle land is being made available to individuals and cooperatives able to farm it. Much agricultural decision-making has been moved from the ministry to local councils. Local stores are being established where much-needed farm equipment can be purchased. In November, Rosales del Toro was reassigned as minister of agriculture.
A second article will look at these new developments.
The social and proletarian character of the reorganization is expressed in the summary from the “Programmatic Document” prepared by the Ministry of Sugar and the sugar workers union in 2002 for distribution to sugar workers. It served as a basis for discussion in the multiple rounds of workers’ assemblies that molded the changes. The document states:
“With regard to the excess personnel resulting from the reduction in size of the work force, there are inviolable principles:
“The number of those taking advantage of the option of requalification and advancement—which will include the university level—is not limited by any quotas. The enormous and noble goal we aspire to is incorporating 100,000 agro-industrial workers into these requalification and advancement programs, and the facilities to accommodate them will not be lacking.
“It is possible to offer this exceptional opportunity today to our agro-industrial workers, and it’s already been done with tens of thousands of young people who were neither working nor attending school.”
—Reprinted from the Feb. 9, 2004, Militant
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