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Seven years after the revolution, Cuba has hardly any industry to speak of. At the start, Castro opted to diversify Cuba's sugar-based economy and ordered a vast program of industrialization at the expense of agriculture. Within 39 months, practically every food was rationed. Meantime the sugar crop, representing 90% of the country's foreign exchange, dropped from 6,800,000 tons in 1961 to 3,800,000 in 1963.
But the Russians and other Cuba traders were either unwilling or unable to supply machines for industry without a better barter deal, so back to sugar it was. This year the crop is up to 6,000,000 tons—but Castro is still hurting.
So many other countries have found it so easy to grow cane that world sugar prices tumbled from 10½¢per lb. last year to a mere 2¢ last week. With more than half his crop committed to the Soviets under their barter arrangement, Castro will realize at most $130 million on open-market sugar sales this year.
Love Those Mangoes. Sugar is no longer rationed, as it was in 1963. Just about everything else still is—either that, or it appears on a feast-or-famine basis. "Right now," says one resident, "they've got so much corn they can't unload it. They keep saying: 'Eat corn, eat corn.'" Before that, it was eggs, then avocados, then mangoes. "We must find a way to use our mangoes—every single one," pleaded the Communist daily Hoy. Wrote one Cuban to a friend in Miami: "We substitute mangoes for squash, eat fried mangoes, mango fritters, mango omelets, and if you have rice, then rice with mangoes."
There is no genuine forward-planning except that forced on the reluctant Cubans by the Russians. With cane-planting time almost upon them, Castro officials were frantically scouring world markets last week for nitrate fertilizers that should have been ordered six months ago. Castro faces the problem of a physical plant that is disintegrating with no way to replace it. Last year a Castro official described the state of the country's railroad system as "desperate," noting that 75% of the locomotives operating in 1959 were out of commission. Havana Radio recently criticized a pulp and paper plant for an "interminable list" of breakdowns that put the plant out of action for more than seven hours on the sample day.
To get replacement parts, engineers and mechanics cannibalize pieces of old farm and industrial equipment, trucks, and anything else they can find, and graft them onto other machines. Cubana Airlines has three four-engined Bristol Britannias at Havana airport. Often just one flies; the other two supply the spare parts. The few cars on Havana streets are rolling junk heaps — but precious junkheaps. "I could sell this thing for $1,400," boasts the proud owner of a broken-down 1948 Kaiser. When Havana's old General Motors buses finally began to give out, Castro imported a flashy new fleet from Czechoslovakia and Hungary. They could not take the heat. Early this year Castro bought 400 British buses from Leyland Motors, which do better in the heat but suffer from Cuban drivers and Russia's low-octane fuel.