Cuban tobacco industry moving forward

[Professor Twain]

A news article I came across. I thought this would be of interest and I'm curious about what people think.

http://en.granma.cu/tourism/2016-06-28/cuban-tobacco-industry-moving-forward

[NSXCIGAR]

Repost: 

 

[maxcjs0101]

Its good to see what the industry is achieving but what use will it be if more places are banning smoking plus the ridiculous excise taxes most nations have on tobacco? Who and what is and can be done to the latter?

[MrGlass]

Quote

Cuba's tobacco industry currently produces almost 300 million hand-rolled cigars, of which some 100 million are destined for export, plus about 130 million machine made cigars, 90% for export, as well as some 15 billion cigarettes.

This is the bit that surprised me the most in that article - I would have never suspected that two thirds of their production is kept/sold within Cuba.

[planetary]

47 minutes ago, MrGlass said:

This is the bit that surprised me the most in that article - I would have never suspected that two thirds of their production is kept/sold within Cuba.

Agreed. Without confirmation, I doubt this claim. 

[anacostiakat]

Good interesting read.  Sounds like they are trying to position themselves for the future.  And yea, some of the stats are surprising.

[avaldes]

IMO, in the context of that paragraph, timely delivery of inputs refers to the seedlings that are planted in the fields. Normal part of the process of tobacco growing.

[MrGlass]

They also mentioned that they introduced new varieties.  He could be referring to the timely input of these, which would have been planted in preparation for the adverse conditions.

[Fugu]

9 hours ago, Morgan said:

I believe one can certainly glean from this article is that Cuba will be importing tobacco to meet the expected USA market demands or more accurately increasing their importation of tobacco. 

The article goes on and on the new investment to vastly increase the annual output of cigars and cigarettes through investment and modernization of the factories. But not a word about where Cuba is going to get all the tobacco needed for the vast increase of cigar and cigarette production.

There's one very telling word in this article "Inputs" When Rodriguez is stating how after such a disastrous weather pattern destroying the harvest they still prevailed stating "the timely delivery of inputs were decisive".

Inputs must be importation of tobacco, These inputs helped save the 2015-2016 harvest thus we can expect over the next several years a new blending of Cuban and non-Cuban tobacco in the cigars

It also seems this is Cubas plan going forward on how to ramp up their production with the im pending US market opening up.

 

I had always suspected you are a , Morgan.

As a side note, who whispered you export value figures of 5 $ per hand-rolled and 2 $ per machine-made?!

[Fugu]

5 hours ago, Morgan said:

I highly doubt he's referring to seedlings as Rodriguez is pointing out all the new action Cuba took to mitigate the problems incurred so how could planting seedlings in that context be timely delivery of inputs? Planting seedlings is a normal operation

The timing of planting seedlings is crucial and highly weather dependent. Also following "inputs" of fertilizer and other treatments are highly time-critical. When not available at the right time, harvests are at risk.