Cienfuegos is a relatively new province. It was created in 1976 when the old province of Las Villas was split to form three new jurisdictions, including the neighboring provin-ces of Villa Clara and Sancti Spíritus.

Cienfuegos is the smallest province in Cuba, with an area of 4,188.6 sq kms (1,618 sq miles), or 3.8% of Cuba’s land area. The territory is made up of fertile, flat and cultivated plains occupying 73% of the area, and by sparsely populated mountains covered with forests and coffee plantations in the remaining 27%.

The mountains of Escambray rise in southeastern Cienfuegos province to an altitude of 1,140 meters (3,740 feet) at Pico San Juan (also known as Pico La Cuca), which is the highest point west of the Sierra Maestra mountain range in eastern Cuba.

POPULATION

Cienfuegos currently has 408,824 inhabitants, or 3.6% of Cuba’s total population. With annual growth of 0.3% between 2001 and 2011, the province’s population is virtually stagnating. That’s in contrast to the 1980s, when rapid industrialization attracted workers from other parts of Cuba, pushing up the province’s population by 1.4% a year. Demographers expect the population of Cienfuegos to reach 418,000 by 2020.

The provincial capital, also called Cienfuegos, is Cuba’s 10th-largest city, with 144,850 people, or 35% of the province’s inhabitants. Other towns include Cumanayagua (25,000), Cruces (20,000 each); Aguada de Pasajeros (16,000); Palmira (13,000); Lajas (12,000) and Rodas (11,000).

ECONOMY

The local economy is a combination of farming, manufacturing and port activities. The province’s development is closely tied to the bay and port that share its name.

Cienfuegos has around 307,000 hectares (758,600 acres) of agricultural land. Of that, 43.4% or 133,300 ha (329,400 acres) are croplands and 84,600 ha (209,000) are unused farmland. After successive downsizings of the sugar industry, sugarcane now accounts for 43,000 ha (106,000 acres), down from 127,000 ha in 2002.

Sugar production and shipping no longer form the economic backbone of Cienfuegos following that downsizing and the emergence of oil refining and cement production as the leading economic engines.

Cienfuegos now has four active sugar mills, compared to 12 before 2002. These four are Cinco de Septiembre (see page 10 for a detailed report), Antonio Sánchez, 14 de Julio and Caracas. The inactive G. Moncada, Elpidio Gómez and Mal Tiempo mills might be mothballed as the government waits for better conditions to restart them. The remaining mills — Ramón Balboa, Primero de Mayo, Martha Abreu, Espartaco and Pepito Tey — were all dismantled after 2002.

Cienfuegos produced 133,000 tons of sugar in the 2011-12 harvest, up from 110,000 tons a year earlier but still a far cry from the average output of 500,000 tons in the late 1980s. This year, the industry expects a yield of 150 tons of raw sugar per hectare, a yield that should keep rising as the Cinco de Septiembre mill — now managed by Brazil’s Odebrecht — boosts the mill’s efficiency.

Compared to Cuban standards, the sugar mills of Cienfuegos are typically small, except for the Cinco de Septiembre mill — built in the 1980s — with a nominal grinding capacity of 7,400 tons a day, or 25% of the province’s capacity.

Pasture lands, mainly spontaneous and generally infested with thorny bushes and weeds, cover 105,000 hectares. At their peak, dairy farms along the Arimao River Valley near the town of Cumanayagua produced 40 million liters of fresh milk per year, thanks to a quality Holstein herd and mixed breeds, but this has decreased considerably in the last decades as result of the economic crisis.

Coffee covers around 5,300 hectares in the mountains. Although output is modest, Cienfuegos produces the high-priced Crystal Mountain brand, which has been exported to Japan, Taiwan and Western Europe. Coffee yields are generally poor. Growers left the mountains — sometimes against their will in the 1960s, as the armed uprising against Castro’s government strengthened in the Escambray mountains — and the worker shortage here is now critical.

A plan to attract farmers back to the coffee zones in the mid-’90s succeeded in luring only a few hundred settlers, but was not enough to restore the lost plantations. Coffee growing is blamed for causing considerable damage to the environment, but the same lack of resources that dramatically cut output in the last decade has forced the government to restore some environmentally friendly — and cheaper — growing methods used over 50 years ago.

INDUSTRY

Major investments in the 1970s and ‘80s turned Cienfuegos into one of Cuba’s leading industrial hubs, but the economic hardships at the end of the 1990s has paralyzed the province’s industrialization.

Even so, the industrial expansion has had severe environmental consequences. Uncontrolled waste disposal, oil spills and untreated runoff from the sugar industry have ruined marine ecosystems in the bay.

The Juraguá nuclear power plant, easily the most notorious industrial investment in Cienfuegos, was begun in 1983, halted when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and officially abandoned in 2000 — even though its first reactor was 75% to 80% finished and just two years away from completion. The project roused deep safety concerns in the United States from the very beginning, because the heart of the facility would have been a Soviet-built 440-megawatt reactor similar to the one responsible for the April 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl.

Less controversial is the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes thermal power plant, which began operations in 1978 with a generating capacity of 398 megawatts, equivalent to 12% of Cuba’s total generating capacity. It has two 34 year-old Czech-made units and two 24-year-old Japanese units.

The government invested to refurbish the plant so that it can burn Cuban crude oil and natural gas to save money on imported fuel. That power plant is linked to the backbone of Cuba’s national power transmission grid through a double-extension line of 220 and 110 kilovolts running 60 km (37 miles) to Santa Clara, in the center of the island.

Fabrica de Cementos Carlos Marx, opened in 1980, is Cuba’s second-largest cement plant, and one of the biggest of its kind in Latin America. Its original East German technology enabled the plant to produce 1.65 million tons of cement a year, or over 20% of Cuba’s production, but the fuel-wasting factory drastically slowed production after the onset of the economic crisis.

With help from foreign investors, two of the three production lines at Carlos Marx were refurbished in a bid to boost efficiency. The plant is currently producing 530,000 tons of gray cement annually.

The Camilo Cienfuegos refinery is the province’s largest industrial facility and one of the most advanced in Cuba. It was refurbished with Venezuelan assistance and came onstream in 2008. It currently refines 60,000 barrels a day, or three million tons per year. The refinery is connected to the supertanker piers and oil storage facilities in Matanzas Bay through the 186-km-long Friendship Pipeline, which is capable of moving 134,000 b/d (upgradeable to 200,000 b/d).

INFRASTRUCTURE

Although all settlements and economic hubs are reachable through paved roads and railroads, Cienfuegos lies relatively far from Cuba’s primary land routes — the National Expressway, the old Central Highway and the Central Railroad — and is instead connected to all three by narrow roads.

An international airport located close to the capital city has limited, irregular links with the rest of the country and the United States, while the Port of Cienfuegos is the second-busiest in Cuba after Havana. Cienfuegos boasts the leading terminal for Cuban sugar, capable of handling over two million tons a year. At its heyday, the bulk sugar terminal handled 30% of all Cuba’s sugar exports. The port also exports citrus, cement and fuel.