In Ciego de Ávila there is a meat company that works and will end the year with profits. In the ten months of the year, the Turiguanó Genetic Company has achieved 1,330,000 pesos in profits and sales reach 614,000 in freely convertible currency, a feat in the current context.
However, its success does not even touch the table of Cubans: its meat has gone to tourism and it is expected that from now on it will serve to completely supply the hotels in the Jardines del Rey area, completely substituting imports.
The company, founded in 1976 and located in Morón, has been an example for the authorities in the area for several years. Just before the pandemic, in 2019, the state press devoted much of its attention to it. Miguel Díaz-Canel, then recently appointed President of the Republic, took a special interest in the center. That year around these same dates the entity broke the historical record for total sales in one month, with 4,720,000 pesos, and a sum of 42 million pesos so far this year.
Its success is based on the elaboration of meat products from the 132 types of cuts that are made in its plant, 55 traditional, 62 special, 10 viscera and five artistic. Sales to all hotel facilities allow “saving the country four million dollars each year”, indicated then the newspaper Invasive, imbued with the national logic that everything is bought outside the home and, therefore, what is produced inside is “savings”.
Foreign investment has set its sights on Genética de Turiguanó, which this October signed a “business letter of intent” with the German PuU of which not many details have been announced, except that it will work on the export of pork and res. Last year it also emerged that they were negotiating with Treew Inc., a Canadian company established 15 years ago in Cuba and dedicated to international trade.
The visitors urged the company to import directly and do without intermediaries, because there is a risk of losing the benefits it has been providing.
However, even a seemingly solid company in the midst of a storm is at risk. According to an article published this Saturday in the provincial press, Yoan Sarduy Alonso, president of the Livestock Business Group (Gegan) visited the Genética de Turiguanó facilities on his way through Ciego de Ávila and, at that precise moment, a blackout “returned to put in check the industry where five freezers and two maintenance refrigerators preserve the meat”. In addition, the company lacks a generator set.
Visitors urged the company to import directly and cut out middlemen, because it risks losing the benefits it has been providing. For example, according to the note, if there were belts in operation, more cuts could be made faster, so that 40 instead of 20 cattle would be slaughtered daily.
The accounts, in any case, could be less simple. The newspaper warns that the 4,200 head of cattle owned by the company “are not guaranteed all the food for the year”, since the drought has withered the pastures and, although the fields could be fertilized, there are no machines to harvest the hay.
The number of animals has decreased since 2019, and that the prospects were not such. In that report three years ago, there was talk of the 5,300 specimens of the Santa Gertrudis breed in which this company is specialized and that the forecast was to gradually increase that population to 11,000 by 2030. For now, the reduction is 1,100.
In 2020, the area where Turiguanó Genetics is located was quarantined for 74 days due to covid-19, although the plan was 98% fulfilled. However, in 2021 the company also started working on diversification and exporting charcoal.
The livestock authorities, in view of what they found during their visit this weekend, urged to “transform reality, because the protein has to reach the table”, although the table, of course, is not that of the Cubans .
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