Holguin/There is no official statement, but the Lázaro Peña cigarette factory in Holguín has been closed for five days. The reasons, tell 14ymedio two employees of the state company – one of them a manager – are the same reasons why many other operations are being put on hold in Cuba in recent weeks: the lack of fuel. “Raw material is coming in, but without fuel the boilers and machines don’t move,” explains one of the workers, who requests anonymity.
“We closed on the 12th and it is an indefinite closure,” reports the other employee, who continues: “They have told us about job relocation, but they still don’t tell us anything.” According to this source, the company is in talks with the Municipal Labor Directorate of Holguín. “Because a worker is supposed to be paid 100% of his salary in the first month and 60% in the second month.” Why are you negotiating this issue with that organization from the beginning? The man answers: “Because it seems that they do not expect a restoration of work activities in the short term.”
Until they decide what to do, he continues, the management of the state company will try to reorganize the two shifts that work in the factory. “Let’s see how they give us work on both shifts,” the first employee sums up skeptically.
The factory, which turned 25 last year, has not reported the suspension of its activities, although after the 12th it has continued publishing on its networks
The factory, which turned 25 last year, has not reported the suspension of its activities, although after the 12th it has continued posting on your social networks. one of those post was the reproduction of the statement from Habanos SA through which the state cigar monopoly informed of the suspension of the Habano Festivalwhich was scheduled between February 24 and 27.
The cancellation of the event, the great international showcase of Cuban tobacco, represents a considerable loss for state coffers, which have seen year after year how the festival set fundraising records. Last year, a commemorative humidor from the Behike Line set a historical record by selling for 4.6 million euros, and the seven pieces auctioned totaled more than 16 million, destined, according to the regime, to the public health system.
Far from that luxury, however, the Lázaro Peña Cigar Company has not been characterized in recent times by offering a quality product. On the contrary. Last January, the newspaper Now! reported that the factory was determined to “diversify productions and reduce costs”, a formulation that, translated into smoker’s language, is equivalent to making more cigarettes with less tobacco.
The article explained that, under the umbrella of the “circular economy”, the use of dust and the central vein of the leaf would increase, the waste that the text itself admits was considered “industrial waste”, to “provide weight and volume”.
With the news of the stoppage of their activities, the production of these “ropechos” is stopped. For the majority of smokers on the Island, this only translates into less product and higher prices. “We are going to have to stop smoking,” explains a retiree from Holguín, “because the cigarettes she was buying at a wholesale MSME, at 4,400 per wheel, first rose to 4,600 and now to 5,000 and are expected to continue rising, the employee told us.”
