Danilo Fernández Madrigal, director of the Ciro Redondo Agro-industrial Sugar Company, took the well-known phrase “tie your pants” as a synonym for acting with firmness, energy and determination. "With the belt in the last hole" the engineer said.
How he spoke in front of an audience of sugar producers and managers of the sector, chaired by the highest authorities of the province, it can be understood that it is a mantra facing the enormous challenge of the industry: to grind some 435,000 tons (t) of cane before May 4.
The bulk of Ciego de Ávila's sugar plan rests on the masses and the tandem of the Colossus of the Center, but the mill has not been able to demonstrate its milling capacity in this harvest, mainly due to the shutdowns of the bioelectric plant, its energy center. At the time of the meeting where Danilo ordered them to roll up their sleeves to their elbows and tighten their belts to carry out the proposed goals, Bioelectric plant was a sleeping giant waiting for a piece.
Increasing the cane cutting rates in the units linked to the Ciro Redondo sugar mill is the first step of efficiency demanded to make a better sugar harvest.
It is called a piece and anyone would believe it is a cyclopean component: a box of balls, a rotor, an electronic board, sailing in a boat in the middle of the Atlantic. However, what they were waiting for this Tuesday, coming from China, was a sheet of lead barely one millimeter thick to make a fuse-joint, essential protection for boilers. A sheet that almost fit in a suitcase.
The previous one "went" in one of the shots of the National Electro-energy System (SEN) at the beginning of the month and, since then, the Ciro Redondo looks like an impetuous horse tied to a trunk; The impatience of his workers is noticeable, the desire to go out and look for all the cane possible. However, “each thing has its own thing”, Gabriel Curbeira Cordero, Head of Operations at the Bioelectric, would say arguing not to violate the times, no matter how great the need.
Almost 100 perforations must be made to the very thin sheet of lead, by hand, with millimeter precision and the patience of a Chinese watchmaker. A process that admits no rush or voluntarism, because what is at stake is not only the ability to fulfill a plan, but the future of the two factories and the million-dollar investment made there.
While the coach draws up the meeting and the center-back awaits the moment to go out in a frenzy after his commitments, other things can be done: continue collecting marabou, for example. With 46 days of coverage ─some 33,000 t of biomass─, the imperative is to continue cutting the thorny plant and guarantee another twenty days, to complete the approximately 60 days of milling that remain for the province.
Stabilize to cut arrears to the sugar plan in Ciego de Ávila
A decisive boost in stabilization, after leaving behind industrial failures and achieving a greater contribution from the cane harvest, is what the sugar harvest in Ciego de Ávila requires to cut its arrears gradually.
Based on the proportion of 70 percent bagasse and 30 percent marabou, the bioelectric plant needs the cutting brigades and the plant to advance two days in their work to ensure one day of generation. If the board is fine and nothing else fails - four marabou cutting machines remain operational and three broken due to electrical faults - it is possible to fulfill the plans and continue providing electricity to the SEN.
That's what Liván Izquierdo Alonso, a member of the Central Committee of the Party and first secretary in the province, and Governor Tomás Alexis Martín Venegas went to Ciro Redondo: to tighten the screws on the system, especially the agricultural part of the company, in charge of cut and sow the cane for the next harvests.
Plantations scattered both in the North and in the South of the province pay tribute to the Pinense mill. Cane is brought from Venezuela and from the productive bases associated with the Enrique Varona sugar company. Some 45,000 t of cane remain to be cut in Venezuela and 25,000 in Chambas, the latter remaining for more than 13 months, which would allow current yields to rise to 10.69 t of cane for each t of sugar.
In Ciro Redondo, planting is going well, with the plans for January and February exceeded, an objective to which the popular mobilizations promoted by the highest leadership of the Party in the province have contributed. "From now on, when the Bioelectric starts, you have to cut 4,800 t per day, and continue sowing at the rate shown," Izquierdo Alonso insisted, and that was when Danilo Fernández opened another hole for him in the belt.
It is not exactly the scenario of the sugar company Primero de Enero, which has problems with the electrical transformers of the irrigation machines, at least in two production bases, and the fact that it does not have Komatsu-brand equipment for land preparation, have prevented him from advancing further in the sowing of the grass. On the day of the exchange with the leaders of the Party and the Government, the plan had barely been executed at 41 percent. “You cannot plant without guaranteed water, because the dry season is rough and we would be throwing away the seed,” the presidents of the 8 de Marzo and 21 de Septiembre cooperative companies said. An argument that would also be heard in the analyzes of Ecuador.
After a couple of phone calls and decisions made “on the fly”, which will allow the central pivot irrigation machines to be registered with alternatives, Izquierdo Alonso indicated organizing massive mobilizations to sow as soon as possible and guarantee the raw material for the next harvests. "Here you have to achieve grinds of more than 100 days," he stressed, although it will not be possible to achieve this goal before 2025, taking into account the cane planted and to be planted.
Finally, the First of January, which was not expected to grind in this campaign, already has a sugar plan, which must be honored at the height of the 1st. April, if it manages to maintain 13 daily hours of grinding and some 179 t produced of the sweet grain per day. For this, it will receive cane from neighboring central Brazil (at least one train each day) and its cutting squads will have to knock down and raise 2,600 t each day, even of non-contracted cane, for which the first secretary of the Party reiterated a indication left to the sugar producers of Pino: “negotiate favorable prices, both for you and for the producers, and cut as much as possible”.
"Save the plant and defend it, because the autonomy of this municipality depends on it," he concluded.
Besides, 50 kilometers to the South the realities are different and the same, at the same time. Visibly upset, Ernesto Blanco López, administrator of the Ecuador power plant-refinery, did not cut a knot to insist that, grinding cane burnt for more than seven days, mixed with fresh, "there is no worthwhile efficiency." It is one of the causes of the low indicators that do not give enough "juice" in Baraguá.
Before the fires in the cane fields, little can be done after the fire starts; everything must be done before. Nevertheless, Izquierdo Alonso reasoned with the experienced sugar collector, at the foot of the sooty carts, that if the cane burns they use it to make molasses and not sugar. They had been doing that for 48 hours and Blanco, who knows a world about the secrets of the industry, assured that it was the way.
Ecuador must be active until mid-March and produce just over 14,100 t of the sweetener, of which some 7,600 are already ready. It will have to grind at least 60 percent of the potential standard, and produce 200 t per day.
At the tip of a pencil and a calculator, the highest authorities of the province drew up the accounts: complying with the territory's plan is not a chimera, although a day cannot be lost. The current harvest is far from perfect, a call that was repeated as the gears were being prepared more as a war chant than as a possible reality. Perfection does not exist, it has become clear, but you can try to touch it.