Villa Clara Coffee Roaster Adapts by Turning to Alternative Grains

In Villa Clara, the Manuel Ascunce Domenech Roasting Facility, once dedicated to processing and selling coffee, has had to pivot to survive. With coffee supplies dwindling to a trickle, the plant now roasts, grinds, and packages corn, sorghum, and rice to keep operations afloat.

The Cuban News Agency (ACN) framed this shift as a testament to "business resilience" and "innovation" in a report released Sunday. However, the official narrative conveniently sidesteps a glaring question: Why does a coffee roaster lack coffee?

Yenis Leidy Cabrera Hayes, head of the Human Capital Management Group at the plant, provided the official line to ACN, attributing the shortfall to the "negative impact of the U.S. oil blockade," which she claims has forced the plant to reinvent itself amid the sharp decline of its primary aromatic bean.

This explanation is as broad as it is convenient. What goes unmentioned is that in 1961, Cuba achieved a historical peak of approximately 60,326 tons of coffee, as documented in academic reconstructions of the country's production series. Since then, Cuban coffee farming has been on a long-term decline, a trend that began decades before the current energy supply constraints.

In July 2025, the Minister of the Food Industry, Alberto López Díaz, announced that only 2,887 tons of coffee had been produced in the first half of the year—just 23.7% of the planned target. This shortfall is stark against a national demand that, according to official Cuban sources, hovers around 24,000 tons annually.

The Villa Clara roaster is no stranger to this chronic scarcity. It was idled for months in June 2023 due to a coffee shortage, and by February 2024, it had coffee but lacked the peas necessary for the regulated blend. The coffee distributed in Cuban stores is not pure coffee; it's a 50-50 mix of coffee and peas, sold in 115-gram packages. By January 2025, consumers were already complaining that the product "tastes like gofio."

The irony is palpable: the roaster now produces gofio because it lacks coffee, and the coffee previously reaching stores already resembled gofio before the plant stopped processing it.

José Raúl Arias Díaz, the entity's director, explained the new operational approach to ACN with a pragmatism that inadvertently encapsulates decades of improvisation: "We roast, grind, and package; that's the basic systemic process, and we can do it with corn, with sorghum, and almost any seed."

Currently, the plant is producing corn and sorghum flour and gofio, as well as initiating rice flour production. The raw materials are sourced through contracts with organizations like Acopio and the Seed Company, alongside small businesses and cooperatives. According to the director, they utilize grains that "have lost their value as seeds but can still be used as food," after evaluation in the facility's laboratory.

The picture that emerges is not of an innovative company but of a plant processing whatever it can find because what it should be processing simply isn't available. Villa Clara reflects a province, and indeed a nation, in a state of widespread food crisis. In February 2026, it was reported that the rationed bread would only be distributed to those under 13 and over 65 years old due to a fuel shortage. The 2024-2025 potato harvest was a failure, yielding only 11 tons per hectare compared to the standard 22.5. On top of this, the province lost around 181,000 cattle over a decade.

The ACN concludes its piece with a statement that begs to be framed: "The entity has shown that, with discipline and innovation, a socialist state enterprise can be profitable even when its traditional social objective is compromised." In simpler terms: when there’s no coffee, make gofio, and call it success.