CAMAGÜEY.- Alexei Carmenates Llanes, born, raised and settled in the area, knows every inch of the ground around him and the dry farming land that displays a neat bright green. The farming culture passes from one generation to the next. He is something like a state-farmer leader for the triple “crown” of duty: deputy to the Cuban Parliament, agricultural manager of the key production base in the area and delegate of the independent circumscription No.22 in Sibanicú.
The Cooperative Production Basic Unit (UBPC) The Crossroad is reached through a rough pavement tongue in the People’s Council Alfredo Álvarez Mola that is divided into a dusty slope, 12 and a half miles south of the municipal capital in Sibanicú. This time the rain was even and as almost never, the road and the dry farming lands were flooded. Passed the hamlet Santa Marta, dense cane fields work as credentials and its bushy and clean canes cause confusion because they are not new nor blooms from a cut or two reaping, but vines over five years old that seem to rejuvenate thanks to the dedication of the systematic tilling.
Alexei shows the neatness of the swine development with agricultural food in substitution of the industrial feed.
A COUNTRY-LIKE WELCOME
Without opening an office or carrying papers, the administrator, Alexei, and the secretary of the cell of the Cuban People’s Party in “The Crossroad”, Deisy Acedo Sánchez, welcomed us with an invitation to the flooded plantations of several crops. And there we went in a cart pulled by a horse, since it was impossible that the automobile transportation could overcome the cane fields and the muddy grounds.
A productive splendor opened the way, there where 16 experienced producers have corn and banana fields, crops of sweet potato, pumpkin… and sesame, from which they extract over 5 gallons of sesame oil for every quintal of the seed that they storage.
“Except from rice, which is very difficult to harvest in these dry farming lands, every food of the agriculture and the animal breeding is produced here for the people of the UBPC, their families and the community that is associate to the peak of the harvest. In vegetables and viands, there are months that we overcome 34 pounds per each and every of the 820 inhabitants, including the children in the elementary school 30 de Noviembre.
“The more than 22 retired people associated to the union receive also monetary benefits when we distribute utilities among the staff”.
Alexei shows enthusiasm when asked about the animal protein: “We have a porcine agreement, the pigs get here very small and they grow as you can see with the feed elaborated with waste from the cassava, banana and other agricultural residues”.
And he shows us a clean pigpen, with fat and clean specimens. In front of it, they fatten bulls with the protein plants that Fidel oriented to the then Secretary of the Party in the province, Jorge Luis Tapia Fonseca. This diet makes possible to go from 2.9 liters per cow during the milking to 7.2 liters per animal today, which allows the self-consumption and the delivery of between 300 and 600 liters a day to the industry.
The proof is clear; behind the cow pen, the plantations of yacaré, titonia, and king grass, moringa, cane and its derived products (honey), show that the blockade on the industrial feed can be mocked with agricultural productions, including corn.
“In recent visit to our UBPC, the second secretary of the Party’s Central Committee, José Ramón Machado Ventura, was interested in the plantation of corn, crop that produced 2.2 tons per hectare in dry farming land, an accomplishment he called to perfecting in order to increase those performances. He recommended, also, to have a greater link with the science and the technique to increase the food harvest”.
The recuperation of the agricultural equipment, especially the cane combines KTP-2, for the next harvest is carried out in the workshop of the UBPC.
The administrator of “The Crossroad”, however, is concerned because, in the livestock farming, he faces two material obstacles: the mechanical milking equipment has been broken a while and the electric fence is also defective. But they cannot solve both problems on their own. Meanwhile, the breeding of rams is moving forward and soon they will develop the breeding of rabbits to assure the five kilograms of meat for the people of the cooperative and locals, regardless of the self-consumption in the cane lots.
AND THE ESSENCE OF YOUR WORK?
In the last cane harvest, the main cane producing base, supplier of raw materials for the sugar industry Siboney, exceeded enormously the 44 900 tons plan, and in the coming harvest the people in “The Crossroad” hope to repeat the over-fulfillment. Alexei assures that with the current plantations they average a 95% of vegetable population close to the 50 tons per hectare.
“With recollection brigades after the cutting machines, we were able to collect over 1200 tons of cane that were transformed into sugar in the next stage”
--And the planting this year, how is it going?
--We accomplished 106 hectares planted in the spring plan, and we are only short in 4.8 ha to complete the 206.6 ha that we aimed for this year. We are affected by the fuel cuts, but we stretch it for the preparation of the soil and we sow with yokes of oxen.
The other “secret” lies in not having empty areas, which added to the increase in hectare performance will assure to fulfill the delivery plans; these will depend on the quality of the repairs of the three combines KTP-2 that the operators and mechanicals in the cooperative rehabilitate during each non-harvest period with the pieces and accessories supplied by AzCuba.
In the state cooperative, that increases its incomes with sweat and stimulates its agricultural workers with the harvest final results and the sale of animals, it is very difficult to differentiate the Sugar Union National Vanguard, Juglar Estrada Carrasco, the brothers Alejandro and Ricardo Márquez Águila; the outstanding comrades Yadier Álvarez Martín, Rafael Carmenates, José Verges, Bruno Rojas, the retired Mayda González Melo, or the group of women and men working equally in the fields, directed by Ricardo Sánchez Llanes, two decades at the head of the self-consumption.
The success strategy in “The Crossroad” is simple. There is no productive or social problem that is not discussed with the participation of the cane farmers and the locals. It is something like the collusion between the local economy that settles the bases of human subsistence and the people that breathes through this life open window since October 20, 1993, date of the foundation of this agrarian unit in the middle of the American blockade. Back then such “winds” were lashing out furiously from the north to destroy the Revolution. Back then, the farmers were starting from nothing and they could not do it; much less now that the cane fields and the agricultural production rise vigorously to resist any storm from the obsolete Helms-Burton Law.
- Translated by Elianna Diaz Mendieta
- Revised by Linet Acuña Quilez