Getting up after great falls, overcoming difficulties, diversifying, growing, contracting, aspiring to more, winning: they are words sewn by hand and tailored to the sugar sector in Cuba. There is a history of struggle that, like the reeds, is sometimes sweet and sometimes not so much. The 2022-2023 harvest in the province has to look for all the sweetness possible.

The challenges, it has been said, are enormous. After several campaigns of sustained and marked decreases, until reaching the last one, in which the country showed the worst production indexes in more than a century, the debts have been accumulating. Reversing them is possible, but it will not be an easy task, nor will it be quick or instant solutions. We prefer to believe that, after hitting bottom, there is no alternative but to rise, by ourselves.

In the challenging effort to carry out an efficient harvest with three plants and the available grass, we would have to admit that the adverse national and international economic context does not help. That is the beauty of the challenge. If after a couple of months we can count the planned tons one over the other, we will be absolutely certain that the impossible does not exist.

We are called to develop a harvest with smaller amounts of sugar than usual, barely 54,562 tons, and even then it will be challenging to honor the commitments; a harvest in which efficiency in the use of resources prevails, the dedication of each and every one of the workers in the sector, from the field to the industry. We are called to the constant search for excellence in the smallest aspect. The demand for discipline will also be vital.

Nevertheless, the harvest is not exclusively a matter for the harvesters. It would be a mistake to think that sugar production can be confined to Ciro Redondo, Baraguá or Primero de Enero just because the sugar mills are located there. In fact, the harvest does not begin in the factories, but in the fields, where you have to go to sow and harvest all the grass, correctly using the machinery at our disposal, doubling shifts, squeezing the Case, taking out the extra.

Each Ciego de Ávila citizen should feel under their feet the new sprout of the cane, the heat of the boilers, the grinding of the mallets, the whistle in the grind. Neither this country nor the province can be understood without the sugar agro-industry; we do not exist without it. In addition, what it touches is to honor it.

Grind 777,211 tons of cane to produce 54,562 tons of sugar: thus, with that watchmaker's precision, the plans for the Ciego de Ávila milling that could whistle next week are conceived if other synchronizations are not delayed further in time. That of the Bioelectric and the Ciro Redondo power plant, for example.

We are summoned from society as a whole to provide the most decisive support in such an important task. Don't miss the snack for the worker, the improvement of their working conditions, the recognition of an effort that knows no schedules in order to sweeten our coffee, of a socioeconomic activity that is patriotic pride and patrimony, and that decides in the income of the territory.

The insistence on returning to the path of improvement and the preponderance of the sugar growers in the concert of the Cuban and Ciego de Ávila economy is not a nostalgic whim. Tradition not only supports the reason for saving the strategic sector, favorable prices for sugar in foreign markets ─not counting those of its innumerable derivatives─, highlight its potential as a source of foreign currency and productive chains.

We still need to get rid of many voluntarism, face the solutions from an economic and sociological vision of the causes of the decrease in its workforce, among others that have led us here.

For now, the challenge in our province is already set: carry out a harvest in the midst of the current circumstances that borders on perfection, without losing sight of the importance of pouring the people from large mobilizations to the furrows to sow more than 12 crops this year. 000 hectares of the sweet grass, which will be the base on which we will build future growth.

You have to do it yes or yes, as in the pastures of Lázaro López, without wasting a day.