Zafra, a magic word in Cuba. During the zafra the sugar cane is harvested and processed in the sugar mills. As there is no region where sugar cane is not grown, the whole country is busy then. People and machines in the fields, lorries and traisn transporting the harvest and old sugar mills with thick black smoke coming from their chimneys. The harvest normally starts in December and by May most sugar mills have already stopped working. The peak of the activities is in February - March.
In the first half of the 1900s sugar mills were erected by American sugar barons. The majority of the sugar mills is found in the central part of the island, roughly between Havanna and Santa Clara. In the mills the sugar is pressed out of the core of the cane. This gives a thick liquid substance, called molasses or mieles in Spanish. Basically it is liquid sugar. The next step is to turn this into dry sugar. But also other products such as industral honey or cattle feed are made out of sugar cane.
After Fidel Castro had taken over power in 1958, the sugar industry became even more important that before. Because Fidel's communist regime was isolated and boycotted by the USA, Fidel turned to the Soviet Union for help. It was agreed that Cuba would supply sugar in exchange for oil from the Soviet Union. Cuba became the key producer of sugar for the USSR and the other, maily East-European countries, united in the COMECON (Communist Economies).
Cuba pushed its sugar industry to the limit, increasing the sugar production to volumes which had never been rechead before. This was of course prefect propaganda for the communist regime. In 1970 Fidel wanted a 10 million tonnes harvest. To achieve this goal all the country's resources had to be mobilised. The super harvest turned out to be a disaster, because all energy resources, equipment and manpower went to the sugar industry, leaving nothing for other sectors of the Cuban economy.
Following the 1970 super harvest catastrophy it was decided to modernise and reorganise the sugar sector. During the 1972-1976 and 1976-1980 4-year economical periods Cuba invested heavily in the sugar industry. The milling capacity was increased from 500,000 tons per day in 1970 to 680,000 tons in 1989.
Cuba relied completely on technical support from Soviet engineers as well as on machines, locomotives and lorries delivered by the USSR. In this time the
TU7E diesel locomotives
were supplied to Cuba.
In 1990 a total of 156 sugar mills existed in Cuba, producing 7.6 tons of sugar. About 4 million tons of sugar was exported to the USSR, in exchange for 10 million tons of oil. But after the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia decreased the oil flow to a volume more in proportion to the world market price of the sugar supplied by Cuba. So Cuba was forced to find new ways to obtain oil. Due to the low sugar price on the world market, the sugar industry could not bring in enough hard currency to buy oil. Due to an accute energy shortage Cuba went into a deep economical crisis.
In April 2002 Cuba announced that it will no longer specialise in the production of sugar. Instead future investements will go to other sectors, especially to the tourist industry, which brings in the hard currency which is so desperately needed. Also this makes a vist to Cuba very easy. After the 2002-zafra 71 mills (about 50%) closed permanently and many areas where cane previously was grown have been turned into citric fruit plantations. After the reorganisation the sugar production has decreased to 2.2 - 2.5 million tonnes annually.
