Welcome to Hershey, Cuba

Hershey first visited Cuba in January 1916. It is said that he fell in love with the country at first sight. It was a country of eternal spring, where the inhabitants found it hot if the temperature went up over eighty degrees and cold if it dropped to seventy. Hershey was excited by the immense sugar plantations in Cuba. In 1916 the world was embroiled in the first great war and sugar, essential to milk chocolate production, was in short supply. During his first visit to Cuba, Milton Hershey decided to purchase sugar plantations and mills so that he could mill and refine his own sugar for use in his Hershey chocolate factory.

True to style, once he had made the decision, Milton Hershey moved rapidly to carry it out. Within a few weeks of his arrival in Cuba, he had explored the country for sixty miles east of Havana, bought a small sugar mill, Central San Juan Bautista, (central is the Cuban term for a sugar mill and its surrounding town) selected the site on which to build a larger mill, and started to build a railroad to service it. When he returned home to Hershey, Pennsylvania in early April, the Cuban enterprise was already well under way.

The flagship of Hershey's Cuban holdings would be a new mill and town, Central Hershey, located near Santa Cruz. To provide for his workers at Central Hershey, Mr. Hershey constructed a town or "batey." In addition to comfortable homes for rent, there was good health care, a free public school, recreational facilities including a baseball diamond, golf course and sport club, and a general store. As in Hershey, Pennsylvania, the railroad permitted employees to choose where they would live.

Hershey's presence and manner of doing business in Cuba were in sharp contrast to most foreign businessmen who exploited the country and its people and took their profits home with them. Cuba praised and honored Milton Hershey with many awards including the highest honor that the country could bestow: The Grand Cross of the National Order of the Carlos Manuel de Cespedes.

Hershey's Cuban holdings were sold in 1946 to the Cuban Atlantic Sugar Company. At the time of the sale the operations included 60,000 acres of land, 5 raw sugar mills, a peanut oil plant, a henequen plant, 4 electric plants, and 251 miles of railroad track with sufficient locomotives and cars.
_____________________________________________________________________________

Fast forward to 2002:

Why are you taking pictures?” a local woman asks me in Spanish. “There’s no history here.”

Five minutes later, a young man walks up and says: “Cuba is a museum.”

Such are the ironies of this small town near Havana, officially known as Camilo Cienfuegos, unofficially referred to by its original name, Hershey.

In 1917 Milton Hershey built a mill here to process sugar cane for his chocolate factory in Pennsylvania. Around the mill, he built a town featuring American-style bungalows and sprawling fieldstone mansions.

There was a golf course, a cinema and a hotel. Six years later, the Hershey Electric Train journeyed from Havana to Matanzas, stopping in the town of Hershey.

Fast forward to the present: I wait, with a growing crowd of Cubans at the train stop outside Guanabo, in the countryside just east of Havana. We’re surrounded by towering royal palms and a distant ridge of hills. Every few minutes a beat-up car putts past, or a horse and buggy, or a clunker bicycle.

The Electric Train pulls up only half an hour late. Rust has turned its roof reddish brown. On top is a transformer that looks older than electricity. Four bent poles reach for the sagging cables that miraculously manage to deliver power to the engine.

Slowly, we sway through miles of overgrown fields, some seats swaying considerably more than others. I feel like I’m inside the skeleton of a double-jointed contortionist. We stop in one-shack hamlets to pick up peasants dressed in their business best for a trip to the city of Matanzas. Several riders get off with me at the clay-roof Hershey station.

The first thing I notice is the mill, now a jumble of twisted frames and patchy sheet metal. Fidel Castro’s government took it over after the 1959 revolution and sold sugar to the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, when the Cuba’s Russian lifeline fell away, there were few markets and fewer spare parts to keep the industry afloat. Efficiency went down and sugar prices dropped.

In 2002 Cuba shut down half its sugar mills, including this one. Hershey became a one-industry town without an industry, hollow at the core. Today, the mill is still being dismantled. Ancient Russian trucks rumble around the un-building site, preparing to ship any useable parts to other functioning mills. Behind many homes I see storage sheds made of scrap metal.

Cheerful billboards pop up all over town, with messages like, “The Electric Railway will be rejuvenated,” “Sports are the right of the people” and “This revolution was made with the humble, for the humble, and by the humble,” a quote from Camilo Cienfuegos, a comandante who played a major role in the overthrow of Batista.

The paint is peeling on the tiny bungalows surrounding the mill, but they still look like they were transplanted directly from the post-war suburbs of America. Each has its own porch and wee lawn outlined in pebbles. I feel like I’m in a Communist Pleasantville, twice-frozen in time, evoking two opposing dreams.

I meet one believer, the man who described Cuba as a museum. He’s a mechanic in one of the post-mill industries, fixing ailing trains dragged here at all hours from all over Havana Province. His workshop could pass for a museum, crammed with turn-of-the-century trains from Russia, Romania, the U.S., France and Spain.

He poses for a photo beside a massive cast-iron funnel spray-painted green. The letters embossed on its surface read, “New Doty Mfg Co, Janesville, Wis.”

“I love my job!” he exclaims. “I love trains! I love Che!” I believe him, even though his boss is standing right there.

I keep believing when I see what the other laid-off mill workers are doing. Many have gone back to school, continuing to receive their government salaries. One man repairs umbrellas on the front porch of a house. Others work on an organic farm in the middle of town, where I buy two shining eggplants for one Cuban Peso.

My optimism deflates in a dingy snack bar near the train station, when I bite into my long-awaited sandwich. A closer examination reveals a mystery meat like bologna decorated with large chunks of fat. Poor fuel for a revolution.

I can’t wait to get back to Guanabo and cook my eggplants. As the vegetables sizzle on the frying pan, my host asks me why I spent the whole afternoon in such an obscure place with no tourist attractions.

My answer comes in pieces. It was the surrealism, the wild juxtapositions, the way the town made me believe, if only for a moment, against all odds.
_____________________________________________________________________________

In the video, see the old timers of Hershey, Cuba reminisce about the past. Not everywhere does the future signal progress. In some places it means regression. Welcome to Hershey, Cuba and to the story of hundreds of towns across Cuba.

[See pictures of the town of Hershey I added on the comments section, as it was before the Revolution]

Check it out folks. The film is called "Model Town"...