SANTIAGO DE CUBA, Cuba – Cuba’s government hopes to revive the country’s once-thriving coffee industry by offering attractive wages in harvest season and replanting old plantations with low yields.
For each two-kilogramme can of picked coffee cherries, pickers earn 161 Cuban pesos (CUP), or US$6.1, for the arabica variety and 107 CUP ($4) for the robusta, both of which are cultivated in Cuba’s mountainous regions.
“During the harvest, every worker earns an average monthly salary of 6,000 CUP ($226), which contributes to increasing quality and efficiency, and spurs personnel to make a bigger effort to earn more,” said Victor Zaldivar, manager of the Coffee and Cocoa Processing Center in Tercer Frente, in eastern Santiago de Cuba Province, home to the largest production area of coffee in the country.
In 2016, many workers earned over 100,000 CUP ($3,774) annually, which raised living standards and improved housing in the area, and slowed the exodus to the cities, said Zaldivar.
Employees of state-owned companies usually earn only about $20 a month on average, far from enough to deal with the rising living costs, especially in the western provinces.
Since a coffee bush needs four years to mature, renewed plantations should begin to bear fruit this 2017-2018 harvest season.
Yield has grown from 1.66 tonnes per 13.42-hectare parcel of land to 3.91 tonnes, and the goal is to reach 4.6 tonnes by 2020.
Cuba enjoyed international fame for 160 years as a producer and exporter of one of the world’s best coffees, planting as much as 194,000 hectares of the crop.
The plan now is to produce at least 15,000 tonnes a year, still far from the 24,000 tonnes needed to meet domestic demand and forgo the 8,000 tonnes imported annually from Vietnam, but it’s a start.
