The company will include a bakers' school that will produce the assortment in different formats.

Oxygenating the business economy, achieving openings for foreign trade, and increasing and diversifying production are some of the benefits that have arisen for the Las Tunas Integral Provincial Food Industry Company, with the opening, on 5 July, of the Alimentaria Sur Integral Subsidiary Group (InTalSur).

The company is the first of its kind to be created in connection with a provincial entity in the sector, and the current one is the first of three stages in the realization of an ambitious and comprehensive project that could change the face of the food industry in the territory.

Granma Daily spoke with some of the protagonists and managers of this significant step to learn more about it.

INTALSUR, THE FRUIT OF A COLLECTIVE EFFORT

Official Gazette number 51, dated 7 May 2021, published Decree-Law 34 of the Cuban State Business System, in which the figure of the subsidiary company appears.

Among its particularities is the fact that it is subordinate to the company that creates it, and the latter assigns part of its assets to it. This subordinate relationship is also expressed in the fact that it adopts the legal organizational form of the parent company, provides the latter with the return on the state investment, distributes profits, and creates the established reserves, subject to the approval of the company that created it.

In keeping with these principles, work has been carried out for several years to set up IntAl-Sur, based on a strategic alliance with a foreign entity, the Uruguayan cooperative Urucuba, with which commercial relations linked to e-commerce were agreed in the first phase of the project.

At the incorporation ceremony, Gerardo Adrián Fascini Acosta, UruCuba's representative, said: "We are very excited to have come this far, after four years of hard work. We are eager to do, to show all that we can achieve with the joint work of the two peoples."

Alberto Fonseca Rodríguez, director of the Las Tunas Integral Provincial Food Industry Company (EPIA by its acronym in Spanish), explained that "it is a great challenge, there is no previous experience, so we have been making progress thanks to teamwork, collective intelligence, commitment and the support of many people. This is a great leap forward, an ambitious, very broad project, which should transform the reality of the provincial food sector."

THE SUBSIDIARY IS THE FIRST STEP ALONG THE WAY

In the first stage, all the products to be offered will be destined for the national market, but with payments from abroad, meaning an injection into the economy of the country and of the parent company itself, said Osmany Cortés Hernández, director of the subsidiary company.

He also pointed out that the entity will initially have five units. The "Crackers and Bread Manufacturer" located in the main municipality, is now in the process of investment to start working with a capacity of 1.2 tonnes per day, although within six months a technological renovation is planned for this factory. Also subordinated to the company is the Bakers' School, which will produce bread in different formats; the sweet shop La Crema, and the Liberación canning factory," he said.

This last unit was built on a local development project that now goes beyond Cuba's borders. There has been an investment process that triples the production capacity. This unit will produce preserves for the whole province of Las Tunas. Juices will also be made and a line of mayonnaise sauce is to be set up, the specialists argued.

The Liberación canning factory received an investment that will triple its capacity to produce canned food and juices for the whole province of Las Tunas; a mayonnaise sauce line is also to be assembled.

"To sustain production, it is planned to use not only local raw materials but also imported ones, in different formats," concluded Cortés Hernández.

For his part, Alberto Fonseca Rodríguez, director of the EPIA, explained that in the initial stage, there are fundamental elements.

"The first is that we have managed to materialize an opening to foreign trade, commercializing a service, because the products are acquired from abroad, but they are aimed primarily at the whole province of Las Tunas."

"Anywhere in the world, a person can make purchases, and we, within the timeframe agreed in the contract, deliver them to the customers' homes. This will allow us to oxygenate the company from a financial point of view, and to guarantee raw materials, which are one of the main limitations we have."

One might imagine that the fact that we only trade abroad online does not imply a collective benefit. However, this is not the case, as the manager asserted.

"In this first stage, we are not going to be able to incorporate sales to the population through normal channels, and what we need the population to understand is that the foreign currency income that we will obtain in this way will be used to buy raw materials to get them to all our production centers. For example, today we have 14 bakeries paralyzed. The goal is to increase and diversify production. We are not only talking about those made from flour."

But the birth of IntAl-South goes much further. The next few months will be defining, said Fonseca Rodríguez. "The second stage, in the conception of this project, is for this alliance to become an International Economic Partnership Contract, which will imply an expansion of the company, with the inclusion of new establishments within the province; the Ministry is even considering including some from other territories, such as confectionery, for example. These are projects that should materialize in the coming months, intending to export."

"In a third stage, we will expand into wholesale trade for export and import, both of products and goods, linked to the creation of a Joint Enterprise S.A. We will have warehouses for raw materials and finished products to supply the state sector, non-state management, and, in addition, to export."

All of this will undoubtedly have a wide-ranging impact and considerable significance also in terms of the subjectivity of the labor collectives, as the interviewee pointed out. "It means a change of mentality, an incentive for the workers, after years in which we have been practically asleep because our company's economic indicators have deteriorated a lot."

Undertakings like this show, without a doubt, that the socialist state enterprise can do a lot for itself, for its recovery, and for the strengthening of the country's economy. That is the shared goal, the possible goal.