[LINK] The End of Cuba's Sugar Economy?

[rfmcdonald]

The most recent issue of the Epoch Times carries an interesting Reuters article by Mark Frank, "Cuba's painful transition from sugar economy", describing how modern Cuba's sugar industry is collapsing for want of investment and markets, leaving the Cubans who once worked here bereft.

More than a decade after the collapse of Soviet communism and the loss of a subsidized market for its sugar, Cuba is still coping with the effects. It is closing down obsolete sugar mills that cannot compete given today's low world prices. In 2002 the island nation shut half its sugar refineries and this year decided to close down more.

Sugar was Cuba's most important export for more than a century, but it has slipped to third place after nickel and tobacco products. It also trails tourism and family remittances from Cubans living in the United States as a source of hard currency.

Some 500,000 workers and their families -- 2 million of Cuba's 11 million inhabitants-- depended on the sugar industry, living in mill towns that dotted the countryside.

Worse still is the impact on towns once heavily dependent on sugar, which seem to be about as viable without sugar as Newfoundland outports without cod.

Some of Jobabo's 50,000 residents have left for the provincial capital or gone westward toward Havana or north to the United States, a local doctor said, adding that cases of alcoholism and hypertension had increased.

"The problem is this place is becoming just another depressed agricultural village when it was a bustling industrial town. We are treading water, stagnating at full pay," she said.

Down the road at the still open Colombia mill the pedestrian hustle and bustle and truck and tractor traffic confirmed the doctor's diagnosis.

"A suitably dimensioned industry will eventually have to be built from the ground up with massive injections of capital, Until then I see only more of the same," Hagelberg said.