Havana, March 27:

Exactly a year ago president Fidel Castro declared that Cuba’s 300-year history as a sugar-growing island was at an end. But the greying revolutionary leader has been forced to realise that he spoke too soon.

The collapse of the Soviet Union spelled the end of the largest and most reliable market for Cuban sugar, and production on the Caribbean island fell year after year. However, with world sugar prices on the rise, Cuba wants to resume cultivating its cane fields, and quickly.

There is another reason. The lack of sugar has also hit rum production. “This country will never again live off sugar,” were the words Castro used in March 2005 to wake his countrymen up to the new reality.

“This culture belongs to the time of slavery and to the time of a nation of semi-literates,” he declared at the time.

“Cuba’s economic future was in the service sector and in high-value produce, primarily oil.” This is apparently no longer the case, and Cubans face a return to the times so recently damned by their leader. According to figures released by sugar minister Ulises Rosales del Toro, sugar production doubled last week to 14,000 from 7,000 tonnes.

The minister said the expansion had come after a February meeting of the government and the Communist Party of Cuba led by Castro at which the president had called for urgent action.

All available means should be devoted to bringing in the sugar crop, the party newspaper Granma reported.

While Cuba requires some 700,000 tonnes for domestic consumption, the current planning calls for a total sugar production of 1.5 million tonnes in 2006, still well below the 2.5 million tonnes produced in 2003.

Experts, however, have queried whether this goal can be achieved. The sugar factories are obsolete and in some cases in extremely poor condition. As a result of the previous restructuring, half of the plants had been shut down since 2002, with 62 per cent of the area cultivated used for other crops and 120,000 workers retrained for other employment.

In the good old days the sugar industry provided a living for around 500,000 workers. A total of two million people lived from the proceeds. During the 1970s and 1980s annual production reached an average of seven million tonnes of the ‘white gold.’ But in the succeeding decade production fell to four million tonnes, and in 2003 that figure was just 2.5 million tonnes.

The decline of the traditional agricultural sector has had another particularly painful effect. The lack of alcohol produced from sugar has meant a shortage of rum, according to the weekly newspaper of the trade unions, Trabajadores.

In January 2006 only 248,000 litres of the national drink was sold in the capital, around 200,000 litres less than what Havana bought in the same month the previous year.

“Consumers are looking forward to a rapid solution to the problem,” the report said.