May Day

On the eve of this May Day, Fidel Castro published some further reflections on energy, biofuels and sugar cane. In the text the dictator refers to his historic plan to produce “Ten Million Tons of Sugar” by 1970, to sell it to the USSR in exchange for… oil. Fidel Castro’s first deal with the Soviets was a sugar-for-fuel agreement, implemented immediately after the economic embargo was launched by the US in 1960. The embargo cut off Cuba’s access to energy, so the revolutionary island state became entirely dependent on the Soviet Union which had to supply all of its fuels.
In 1968, reminiscent of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” steel-making fantasy, Castro launched the “Ten by Seventy” program and gave each Cuban a machete to cut sugar cane. The collective effort achieved a production of 8 million tons. Below target, for sure, but a huge increase in output compared to previous years. The project showed that tropical communists will not hesitate to bet on sugar to lift their economy out of misery. The question is: if, back then, it was a good plan to barter Socialist sugar for Soviet fuel, then why it is a bad idea to make ideology-neutral biofuels out of sugar cane today, in this era of Peak Oil?

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