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And of course the US embargo is to be blamed for all misfortunes .... What a tired bad sad joke 😞 --------------------- The Habanos company is doing well while Cuban tobacco producers are broke The company obtained last year 507 million dollars of benefits Luz Escobar, Havana | May 05, 2021 https://www.14ymedio.com/cuba/empresa-Habanos-productores-cubanos-tabaco_0_3088491128.html The Spanish-Cuban company Habanos obtained last year 507 million dollars in profits, 4% less than in 2019. The figure was given by the company itself this Tuesday, at the inauguration of the virtual event Habanos World Days, which replaces the Festival del Habano, whose twenty-third edition was canceled due to the covid pandemic, and with which the official press has turned. For state media, the company "consolidated its international leadership of premium cigars (made entirely by hand)" and the 2020 revenues are quite an achievement "despite the circumstances of the pandemic and the ban on selling its products in the US by the laws of the economic blockade ". It is not the first time that the authorities use the United States embargo as the cause of the decline in production. They already did it a few days ago, at a time when dire forecasts are looming for the 2020-2021 tobacco campaign, which began last October. José Liván Font Bravo, first vice president of the Tabacuba Business Group, assured then that a part of the plantations will not receive fertilizer "due to the brakes imposed by the fence", in clear reference to the embargo. However, far from the foci of the propaganda provided by the festival, in which the state media assure that more than 5,000 companies from more than 120 countries around the world participate, and the justifications of the authorities, the peasants are clear that the main problems of tobacco production are rather the consequence of economic "mismanagement" and the implementation of the so-called Ordering Task. So thinks Nestor Pérez, from the La Isleña farm, founded at the end of the 19th century in San Juan y Martínez, in Vueltabajo (Pinar del Río). In conversation with 14ymedio, Pérez explains that in his territory they have not had problems with fertilizer, and that the doses they have bought have allowed them and many producers to "develop the campaign." But in addition, the producer, who is 37 years old and has been working in the fields since he was 15, specifies: "The United States is not the supplier of fertilizers." On his farm, for example, they use fertilizers from other countries, such as China or the Netherlands. The producer concedes that the covid and the weather had "adverse effects" on the campaign. "In Río Seco, which is part of the tobacco massif that was in quarantine for a long time," he says, "entire plantations were lost." Also, in November, "there was high rainfall" when the seeds were planted. However, they were not the primary pitfalls. "In Vueltabajo there is a growing number of cooperatives that have been contracting, due to their mismanagement or due to company demands, debts from past eras, something that affects the management of the same cooperatives with resources and supplies," he explains to this diary. Added to the debts, he says, "the bad management of the seedbeds by the State", a task that although they have been assuming "the producers is still in the hands of the State for the most part." In those, he continues, the Ordering Task arrived, for him, "the most important point": "For the peasants, the so-called Day Zero was not Day Zero; we had not prepared a price, and a price was decreed without having the token cost "(the model where the data necessary to calculate the planned unit cost of a product or service provision is collected). Pérez says that they were assured that prices would be established in about two months, but January and February, when the harvest peak occurs, they were thrown at them "without a cost token, without a credit extension." The main consequence was that the producers could not pay the workers "because they did not have the credit extension until the beginning of April." When they had the cost card, they saw that the credits were increased, but that the prices of dry tobacco doubled, from 2,560 to 5,700 per quintal. The generalized increase in prices from the Ordering Task, he assures him, had a great impact on the peasants. "There are the inputs, which increased 10 and 15 times their value, that cost was like a shock for the producer. They said they were going to make a new price proposal, but still nothing, it continues the same as they put at the beginning of the year" , the Mint. "In my opinion and that of many in this area", he summarizes, the Ordering Task has been "disastrous" and "catastrophic", since "it has led us to face the peak of the campaign with credit based on a previous price and deficient in 70% ". "It left people without money," he concludes, "that is the biggest obstacle, it is not the blockade."