MIAMI, United States. – The passage of Hurricane Ian through western Cuba meant a “devastating blow” for the island’s tobacco sector, according to a report from the official newspaper Granma.
According to the island’s regime, Ian caused massive damage “both in tons and in quality of a crop that brings in hundreds of millions of dollars each year for exports.”
Other official media Cubadebatehas reported on the destruction of much of the infrastructure of the tobacco sector in Pinar del Río, the province where most Cuban tobacco is grown.
“This is the biggest blow that the tobacco infrastructure has suffered throughout its history,” he told Granma the delegate of Agriculture of Pinar del Río, Víctor Fidel Hernández.
In that province, 90% of the around 12,000 natural healing houses were damaged, where tobacco leaves are stored for drying. In addition, “about 11,000 tons of tobacco will get wet” that were in the process of being cured.
After Ian’s visit to Western Cuba transcended that Only in the Pinar del Río municipality of San Luis, one of the most affected by the meteor, “all the tobacco” presented “affectations”.
In accordance with a report on facebook from the official channel Tele Pinar, it is estimated that some 220 tons of tobacco are affected only in the chosen V 13-26.
On a tour of San Luis, one of the meccas of Cuban tobacco along with San Juan and Martínez, the president of the Tabacuba Group, Marino Murillo Jorge, said that there was “not one natural cure house left standing in the province.”
Although the damage to the leaf plantations was not the worst possible because the leaf planting season has not yet started, the tobacco houses were devastated, which will probably be an obstacle for the harvest next April.
One of the largest tobacco picks in the municipality of San Luis was left unusable after Ian passed, according to the photos published on social networks by the official journalist Lázaro Manuel Alonso.
Ian’s step too caused “a real disaster” at the El Pinar farm (San Luis), where Alejandro Robaina cultivated for decades the tobacco used to roll the famous Cuban cigar.
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