If you fertilize your fields, your costs skyrocket and your income diminishes. Moreover, if you do not fertilize them, then their productions and profits drop. In La Cuba Agricultural Company, they do not have a way to take zeros from the more than 70 million pesos of losses that they registered at the end of November.

Survival becomes too expensive because to obtain one peso they must spend more than four. It is a HUGE imbalance, which forces them to rethink almost everything and "we will have to see which productions are financially healthy and that is where to focus their economy, but they cannot continue producing to lose", Susivey Márquez Toledo, coordinator of Objectives and Programs for the Economy, at the head of a commission that scrutinized La Cuba to pave a better path for it, commented.

A month ago, when Invasor visited one of the cooperatives associated with that company and the economic specialist of the October Revolution Agricultural Production Cooperative (CPA) admitted that they spent 0.98 cents to produce one peso, we believed that such proportion was unsustainable in the long term. We did not know then that the deterioration could translate into worse figures.

“It is that they lose, even, in the fruit bananas sold to Tourism and we have to review the cost records because two things happen there. Either there are costs that they have not contemplated, and they then have to adjust the sale price, or Tourism imposed a purchase price ignoring the real value of what happens in the field", the "truism" Victor Limia de la Rosa, specialist of the Provincial Directorate of Finance and Prices, added.

Laura María de Quesada Uli, deputy director of the Directorate of Economy and Planning, rounded off those numbers and showed how their accounts became more expensive, in such a way that they forecasted closing the year with an expense of more than 20 million pesos above what was planned.

From the aerial irrigation to the ton of fertilizer, almost everything conspired against his financial statements.

Even so, they honored their commitments and paid in 30 days; however, the value of his productions returned every 108 and such external factors added salt to his wound. Healing is being a painful process for the pockets that remain in the field with low advances.

The change in structure ─the creation of labor collectives directly linked to the results─ was supposed to boost its economy, but of the 17 created, only five have realized it.

On a tour of their areas, the member of the Central Committee of the Party and first secretary in the province, Liván Izquierdo Alonso, verified it. According to his calculations, judging by the hard work in the fields and the high cost of life, "the workers there are earning very little."

The rows of beans that Armelio Díaz Sánchez had, at 59 years old, were 700 meters long and he was already going for five at 10:00 in the morning. His fortnight had stayed below 4000 pesos. "Nah, you have to earn more, because a hoe is very strong since dawn of the day," the secretary told him.

For Armelio, the dawn of the day had also been marked by scarcity. “I didn't even drink coffee, with what sugar? and lunch is at home because there is none at the company”, he added, attributing greater hardness to his day.

Jorge Virella Figueredo, another of the workers linked to a collective, also fell short of what was forecast. "The bananas are stunted and the theft of bunches makes things worse, the bandits come in carts and eat you clean, last night they almost killed me."

—Yes, but we caught those two sooner, Ricardo Varona Pestana, director of La Cuba, who has had to deal with all the ills at once, answered.

His forecasts are still reserved —he has barely been in office for three months— and, although Invasor will give him course, at least last Friday some twenty specialists came there so that the company's crossroads would not simulate the four paths that anticipate its great extensions. It is not the same not knowing where to take it, than having the possible destination indicated.