Cuban carpenters help recovery tobacco industry in most affected province by hurricane Ian

HAVANA, Cuba, Dec 20 (ACN) More than 930 brigades of carpenters from all over Cuba are working on the construction of tobacco houses in the province of Pinar del Rio(westernmost region), to help replace the infrastructure damaged by Hurricane Ian.

According to a report in the Granma newspaper, some 640 of these groups are made up of brigades from other provinces, which have arrived in solidarity, with the goal of recovering 5,076 of these constructions before February 28, in time to be able to dry the leaves of the ongoing campaign.

Osvaldo Santana, coordinator of the Tabacuba Business Group in this western territory, explained that this amount of tobacco houses are not all those destroyed by the storm, only those necessary to face the current harvest, which had a reduction in the planting plan of 44 %.

He pointed out that the rest, around another 5,000, will be raised in a second stage starting in March, in order to be able to aspire again to the areas that were traditionally planted.

For a territory forced to carry out the cultivation of 6,390 hectares of tobacco and the recovery of the cure houses necessary to store the production, it is a race against time, the coordinator concluded.