Cuba began draining tens of thousands of hectares of sugar cane and repairing thousands of kilometres of roadway and rails over the weekend to limit damage to the coming sugar harvest in the wake of Tropical Storm Noel.
Official reports had 50,000 hectares of cane flooded or otherwise damaged or destroyed in the eastern half of the island, accountable for more than half the crop.
Rainfall continued in the area from another weather system, making recovery work difficult. Most rural roads and rails used to access plantations and mills, and the paths and dirt roads within the plantations, were damaged by the storm, which meandered through six provinces last week and caused five days of torrential rains and flooding in an area already saturated from previous precipitation.
"Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage said ... around 50 percent of the road system throughout most of eastern Cuba had collapsed, most of all in the mountains, agriculture and cane growing areas," the trade union newspaper Trabajadores said on Monday.
"From what I saw we have to evaluate the impact on winter planting in the eastern part of the country and implications for roads related to sugar and the start of the harvest," Economy and Planning Minister Jose Luis Rodrigues told the press after touring the area.
Plans for some mills to open in late November or early December were cancelled in various provinces, according to local reports, with hopes the harvest could now begin in January and run through April.
It was still unclear how much of the flooded cane, about 10 percent of the area due to be harvested throughout the country, could be salvaged, while thousands of hectares of recently planted cane and land prepared for sowing were lost. "Holguin hasn't had a dry month since the previous harvest ended and for that reason there is a great deal of damage to cane plantations," the province's top sugar official, Violete Mesa, said in a interview on state-run radio.
"Right now we have 11,025 hectares of cane flooded and 1172 hectares of recently planted cane lost," she said at the weekend, adding in some areas it would be impossible to drain the water "as it has no where to go".
The other five provinces in the area reported similar situations. Unseasonal rainfall and heat combined with industrial and organisational problems to make the 2007 harvest one of the worst on record. Output was estimated at between 1.1 million tonnes and 1.2 million tonnes of raw sugar, based on provincial reports, compared with the 1.5 million to 1.6 million tonnes that had been planned.
Through September, sugar officials had waxed optimistic the harvest would begin early in November and run through April and that there was far more cane than the previous few years.
Poor harvests in recent years have forced Cuba to import between 200,000 and 300,000 tonnes of low grade whites annually from Colombia and Brazil. Postponement of the harvest may force additional imports to meet domestic demand. Cuba consumes a minimum 700,000 tonnes of sugar per year and 400,000 tonnes are destined for a toll agreement with China.