Cuba’s Railways: No Tracks to Get Anywhere
HAVANA TIMES – The day they decide to put the Santa Cruz del Sur train back into service, they will probably have to lay a new track: “because the one that’s there now, if they can even find it beneath the overgrowth and garbage, I seriously doubt it will still be good for anything.”
That is the view of Elio Benito Otmaro, a resident of the El Modelo neighborhood, through which the railway enters the city of Camagüey after crossing nearly 120 kilometers of plains and small towns for which it represents the main — if not the only — means of transportation. Until the beginning of this year, the Santa Cruz train made several trips a week between that coastal municipality and the provincial capital.
However, in January, the government decided to cancel it, along with the rest of the country’s short- and medium-distance rail services, in response to the fuel shortage. Some people apparently took the suspension as a kind of authorization to turn stretches of the route into garbage dumps. The dumping of waste compounded the lack of maintenance, which had already forced trains to reduce their speed and carrying capacity.
Over the past several months, weeds have covered most of the track, taking advantage of the absence of the track and maintenance crews that traditionally kept it clear. The deterioration did not begin in January, but it has worsened since then, reaching today’s critical situation.
“There are sections of that line that would have to be completely torn up and new sections of track installed, or at the very least the roadbed would have to be realigned with ballast and a significant percentage of the railroad ties replaced. But an investment that large is unthinkable under current conditions, given the lack of resources and manpower to carry it out,” said an official with the Central-Eastern Railway Company, based in Camagüey, which manages rail operations in that province and the neighboring provinces of Ciego de Ávila and Las Tunas.
On average, a track maintenance worker earns around 5,000 pesos ($7.50 USD) a month, an amount that is not enough to cover even the most basic needs. In addition, it is manual labor that is always performed under difficult conditions and takes an extreme physical toll. Transport Minister Eduardo Rodríguez Davila acknowledged this in the middle of last year during a visit to the work being carried out on the Havana-Expocuba branch line. According to his statements, the government intended to raise the wages of this group of workers, but more than a year later, nothing has changed for them.
“We don’t even have fuel for the ‘chispitas’ [small rail vehicles used by maintenance crews to get around]. This is very grueling work, where everything is done by hand, with brute force. It’s no wonder young people want nothing to do with it, and the crews have fewer workers every day. Positions left vacant by workers who retire, or leave are rarely filled again,” explained Juan Carlos, a worker on a maintenance crew in the municipality of Vertientes, one of the areas crossed by the Santa Cruz railway.
In the past, track maintenance was handled not only by the Cuban Railway Union but also by other institutions such as the Youth Labor Army (EJT) — a division of the Revolutionary Armed Forces — and the Azcuba business group, which also contributed resources, sometimes informally. In sugar-producing municipalities such as Vertientes and Santa Cruz del Sur, that cooperation took the form of providing fuel, tools, and even provisions to railway workers. “After all, it benefited them [the sugar mills], because they were the first ones to use the line to transport sugarcane and sugar,” Juan Carlos reasoned.
But the decline in the number of young men called up for military service has virtually eliminated the EJT’s railway battalions, while the closure of most sugar mills and the shutdown of the few that remain have deprived the maintenance crews of their main “sponsors.” The government also pays far less attention to branch lines such as the one to Santa Cruz, and the cancellation of passenger services has placed them in an even more difficult situation.
50 Kilometers per Hour… and Less
In March 2024, the last time official figures were provided on the condition of Cuba’s railway network, 67% of the tracks and 40% of the infrastructure required urgent maintenance. The situation was particularly dire on branch lines and secondary routes such as the northern and southern lines, running between Santa Clara and Nuevitas, and Havana and Cienfuegos, respectively.
Reversing the deterioration will not be possible, at least in the short term, admitted Lisvany Fernandez Rivero, director general of the Railway Transportation Administration, during an appearance on the television program Mesa Redonda. “Maintaining the railway tracks requires between 60,000 and 80,000 concrete ties annually. But last year, financing was secured for only about 15,000.”
And those were the numbers from a good fiscal year. In subsequent years, the figure has continued to fall because of shortages of the cement, steel, and aggregates needed to manufacture railroad ties and repair bridges, culverts, and other infrastructure. As for rails, the situation is even more complicated: the country does not manufacture them and importing them would require an outlay of foreign currency that is difficult to estimate.
“We’re talking about a situation in which not even the main line meets the specifications for which it was designed. The original project envisioned speeds of up to 120 kilometers per hour, but today, along most of the route, trains must travel at less than 50. This means longer travel times and greater fuel consumption, as well as increased wear and tear on equipment and greater fatigue for passengers and crews,” explained the Central-Eastern Railways official consulted for this article.
Within the territory served by that company, three segments of the main line face even greater speed and load restrictions. They are the Piedrecitas-Florida section, the western approach to the city of Camagüey, and the Martí-Bayamo route, on the border between Las Tunas and Granma provinces. The first two are affected by track damage caused by derailments; the last by flooding from Hurricane Melissa last year, which eroded several kilometers of roadbed that was only partially rebuilt.
The most recent incident occurred in Piedrecitas. In mid-August, a container train derailed there. Fourteen of its 27 cars left the tracks, and although no damage to the cargo was reported, dozens of railroad ties and nearly half a kilometer of track were damaged. To repair it, “Cuban Railway Union crews used resources set aside to deal with such emergencies, as well as materials salvaged from nearby abandoned branch lines, such as the one serving the dismantled República Dominicana sugar mill,” according to a report issued by Radio Florida, the regional station.
The possibility of using old branch lines as a source of construction materials, however, is limited. Every day there are fewer branch lines in good enough condition to be used for that purpose. And other secondary routes, such as the northern line, would be better left intact. The derailment in Piedrecitas demonstrated precisely the need for an alternative to the main line. When the accident interrupted rail traffic, passengers on two national-route trains had to be transferred to buses and transported by road, resulting in greater fuel consumption and inconvenience for those involved. Had the northern line been operational, both trains could simply have been diverted onto that alternative route, as was done decades ago.
But the northern line has gone more than a decade without regular traffic, and along much of its route it is in a state of abandonment as bad as — or worse than — the railway to Santa Cruz del Sur.
“That’s what happens with everything that isn’t used. It deteriorates to the point where, when you need it again, there’s no way to make use of it,” reflected Elio, who remembers how the arrival of the Santa Cruz train used to draw crowds of people, electric tricycles, and horse-drawn carts to the station on Palomino Street. Hundreds of passengers would get off the train, along with sacks of charcoal and rice, boxes of fruit, and fish. A nearby market depended to a large extent on those shipments. But even if the fuel and equipment needed to restore the route were available tomorrow, the track would first have to be rehabilitated — at who knows what cost.