The agricultural panorama of Pinar del Río is bleak after the passage of Hurricane Ian. A helicopter tour over the fields of the western province has led Félix Duarte Ortega, a member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC), to express himself with unusual frankness: “We don’t see any food” in those lands.
Duarte, who is the head of the Party’s Agrifood Department, assured in a meeting with local producers that Pinar del Río “has more than 12,000 hectares affected.” After asking himself: “What are we going to eat in the next few days?”, He answered himself: “We will eat what we ourselves are able to get out of. [sic] now with a commitment to grow food”.
The official opted “above all” for “short cycle crops”, which include vegetables, legumes and other species that can be harvested in a short period of time. “We have to come out with a commitment to reverse this situation,” Duarte stressed. Among the peasants who attended the meeting with the official, some raised the different problems to receive land in usufruct and the limitations for rice cultivation.
At the meeting, in which the deputy prime minister, Jorge Luis Tapia Fonseca, was also present, it was reported that the state-owned company Frutas Selectas he has breached the contract with the peasants of San Juan and Martínez and “has not paid them for the production of beans that they were sold in February,” the journalist explained. Lázaro Manuel Alonso in a report for the National News.
“My house suffered damage to the roof, but the worst is happening with the crops, which are totally destroyed”
The situation is especially tense in Pinar del Río, where there are 63,133 damaged homes, of which 7,107 are total collapses. Many of those residents have been left without food supplies due to the deterioration of their stocks, the loss of crops, the closure of roads and the damage suffered in more than 429 rationed market warehouses.
“All our plantations of bananas, papaya and tobacco have been destroyed,” he told 14ymedio Norges Valenzuela, producer from San Juan and Martínez. “My house suffered damage to the roof, but the worst is happening with the crops, which are totally destroyed.” Valenzuela’s family still does not have electricity and has moved to the city of Pinar del Río.
“The worst is coming now, which is robbery and looting,” fears the farmer. “My two brothers stayed on the farm to watch the house, the water pump and what little we had left, but I had to come with my father to Pinar, because he has Alzheimer’s and he couldn’t keep it in those conditions in which the hurricane left us.
The Valenzuela family also lost “animals because several fences fell down with the winds and because, despite the hurricane, there are always those who take advantage of these situations to steal what does not belong to them.” In the list of what disappeared there are chickens, rams, at least two pigs and a calf. “If we take account, there are thousands and thousands of pesos that we are no longer going to recover, but the worst is coming now because my family basically eats what is produced on the farm and I don’t think we will be able to harvest anything quickly.”
Farmers like Valenzuela are “annoyed” by the arrival of numerous government officials. “We have been demanding payments for our products for years, because the State pays us badly and late, but a cyclone had to pass through this area and destroy everything so that now the high leaders come to meet with the peasants,” adds Luis González, a tobacco producer from San Juan y Martínez who recently classified the situation as a “total disaster zone.”
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