{"id":11582,"date":"2013-07-31T20:37:36","date_gmt":"2013-07-31T20:37:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oncubamagazine.com\/?p=11582"},"modified":"2018-11-20T15:42:18","modified_gmt":"2018-11-20T20:42:18","slug":"a-paean-to-sugar-cane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/cuba\/economy\/cuban-economy\/a-paean-to-sugar-cane\/","title":{"rendered":"A paean to sugar cane"},"content":{"rendered":"

…and the green bough in the air, ownerless\u2026
\n<\/i>Nicol\u00e1s Guill\u00e9n<\/p>\n

In 1940, Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz published his colossal Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el az\u00facar<\/i> (Cuba\u2019s Musical Dialogue between Tobacco and Sugar), an ethnographic and sociological portrait of Cuba\u2019s development. \u201cLady Sugar,\u201d the daughter of the green sugar cane, the queen that has reigned in the Cuban countryside for centuries, is one of the protagonists of this unsurpassable treatise on the Cuban identity. That \u201cwhite gold\u201d was such an important part of shaping the nation that some economic sectors worked successfully to propagate the myth that \u201cwithout sugar there would be no country.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, from early on Ortiz warned of the dangers involved in a single export crop economy of sugar cane. \u201cThe Cuban sugar cane grower has not been able to employ all of the productive power of his fields and mills, castrated by a foreign regimen of quotas that restricted his sugar production. He has not been able to produce the many products deriving from the substances extracted from the sweet cane\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ortiz\u2019s lucidness on the subject is an inevitable legacy now, 70 years later: sugar cane is more than sugar, and many other fruits are still to come from those fields.<\/p>\n

\"infografias<\/a><\/p>\n

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\"infografias-Econ-Neg-No18-(3)\"<\/p>\n

\"infografias-Econ-Neg-No18-(6)\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Sugar cane R+D<\/strong><\/p>\n

Many specialists agree that one of the country\u2019s possibilities for overcoming its agriculture crisis, especially in the sugar agro-industry, is the number of engineers and technicians it has in that sector and its accumulation of high-level scientific research. One example of that is the work of the Cuban Institute for the research of Sugar Cane Derivatives (ICIDCA), created in 1963, which is celebrating its 50th<\/sup> anniversary this year. Its objective has been to \u201cprovide scientific support to the development of technologies for comprehensive and diversified use of sugar cane.\u201d Its researchers have developed, assimilated, and adapted technologies from sugar can byproducts that can be applied to various economic sectors:<\/p>\n