Summer is almost here. It’s not too late to make plans. There is time to pack your suitcase. There are fewer opportunities to arrange accommodation and then enjoy the provision of services in recreational centres at less abusive and speculative prices.

This is well known by those who, by not diving into the depths of the problems in search of better solutions, let a long-standing custom die on the shore, today coveted by workers: having a good time with loved ones, friends and co-workers, especially during the holiday season.

Perhaps some readers will consider the matter at hand to be the essence of a forgotten story. To recall fond experiences and compare them with those of today, we dug through the archive to find a publication from 24 August 2014, entitled One of sugar and one of salt.

The summer season was beginning to feel saltier for the workers of the Ciro Redondo and Enrique Varona plants – just to mention two groups and a strategic sector of the economy – who complained about the closure of the recreational villas on the beach of Punta Alegre, in the municipality of Chambas.

«They took away our holiday plan, the only thing we had to enjoy with our children,» said a mechanic. «Our shelters on the beach were always taken away before the holidays, now they are abandoned to their fate», commented an innovator. A founder of the centre, for example: «The water and sewage pipes need to be improved, seven cabins need new blinds. The dormitories have been in need of repair for a long time and have only been tidied up.

Loneliness and silence conspired to provide a home for inertia and illegality.

On our recent return to the place (11 years later) we learned that deterioration, and then Hurricane Irma in 2017, took over those buildings for the recreation of the sugar workers.

However, neighbours felt that the quintessential culprits were the lack of interest in recovering them and the conformism of closing them because they were vulnerable to weather phenomena near the sea. What the cyclone did not take, then, was taken over by people who occupied them because they were left without homes.

Thus died a tradition and what today is called La Favela was born.

On the other hand, the destruction and the rubbish were lodged in the ruinous suburb that has become the motel La Arboleda, of the former Minaz, then belonging to the Empresa Provincial de Alojamiento, with a management that started well in 2016 and began to go awry, and today it becomes the host of hell, in the Ciudad de los Portales.

After the change of «owners», there was a warning of the involution when the management was going downhill in 2019: An element that also attempts against the visits to these sites is the considerable deterioration of their infrastructure conditions. This is not an isolated opinion among those who saw the before and now.

One of those regular visitors, who enjoyed the comfort, the varied offers and the good treatment, recently watched in amazement as La Arboleda is falling apart. The swimming pool, its main attraction, is as dry as the dismantled restaurant, the rooms, the meeting room, the rancho bar El Criollo… Everything has collapsed.

I dare, then, to suggest that, if there is ever the possibility of putting it back in the hands of the former Minaz, today Grupo Azcuba, a cooperative rehabilitation action could be carried out by the Ciro Redondo, Primero de Enero, Ecuador and Enrique Varona Agroindustrial Sugar Companies, with the support of logistic and service entities from the sector itself.

Of course, it is not a question of investing, fixing and then «taking back what has been danced» from the saviours. Nor is it a matter of a hasty infrastructural metamorphosis, when a new summer period is almost upon us.

What is certain is that the Heroes of Labour of the Republic of Cuba, millionaire operators of sugar cane mills and prominent workers in the sugar agro-industry have never been able to enjoy themselves and their families as they did in those villages, victims of the processes of resizing, reorganisation and the like.

Nor have they been able to reactivate their exclusive invention, due to the vicissitudes of everyday life, the collective of the Ferroazuc Ciro Redondo unit, where, based on efficiency in the rational use of energy carriers, they stimulated their workers by means of a mobile motel that they parked near a beach in the summer months.

The recreational option known as Sugar Night, with a view to stimulating effort and results in industries and sugar cane fields, is like the reeds from previous harvests that dried up and became foreign matter.

It remains on the labour scene to make use of the drop of fuel saved for trips to the sugar cane fields.