Chapter 41

Thirty-nine months later, Raúl stood next to me at the remodeled, upgraded, and enlarged refinery in Cienfuegos. It’s now twice the size of the Havana refinery. As he and I both reached for the valve wheel, a hush fell over the huge crowd gathered to witness the opening of the refinery. I had to jerk the wheel on the valve slightly to get it to move, but once it began turning, Raul joined me, and the crowd began applauding and cheering. Oil from the first “official” tanker to dock here began flowing through the large pipe and into the refinery.

It took a good half-minute for us to finish turning the wheel on the valve until it was completely open, partly because our hands kept getting in each other’s way, and partly because we were laughing about getting in each other’s way. The volume of cheering doubled when we finished and stood back up.

For nearly three years, engineers, workers, and supervisors from Venezuela had worked feverishly on the plant, along with more than four hundred local workers who learned on the job. While my original plan had been to ship the products from this refinery back to the states to sell, I changed my mind. The other two refineries here were in dire need of upgrades just to bring them in line with current U.S. standards for safety and pollution. I refused to build or work with anything less, even though Cuban law didn’t require such strict standards. In fact, this refinery was now cleaner, safer, and more modern than American refineries.

In anticipation of this opening, six months ago we began preliminary work at the Havana refinery that will allow us to expand and upgrade it. When Havana is eventually complete, the refinery in Santiago will receive the same expansion and upgrade. When all three are complete, Cuban production would be more than ten times what it was, giving me plenty to ship to the states to sell, as well as to Venezuela to begin repaying the mountain of debt Cuba owes them.

Once the cheering finally died down, Raúl made the obligatory speech, pointing out the now marked increase in the supply of fuel and food available in Cuba. When the cheering died down again, he cracked open the first official bottle of Cienfuegos Rum. With it, he and I toasted the refinery’s opening and Cuba’s future, eliciting yet another round of cheering.

In the beginning, as Raúl released more prisoners to us, several men who were old enough or injured enough that they couldn’t do the heavy physical labor, suggested that I let them make cigars. I knew (and still know) almost nothing about cigars but insisted that our cigars be the best ever if I let them do it. The man who made the suggestion shook his head sadly. “Not possible without Cienfuegos Rum,” he lamented, receiving nods of agreement from other nearby men.

Cienfuegos Rum had been a brand of rum distilled in a family distillery in Cienfuegos. When the government nationalized the distillery, the family managed to escape to the U.S. Without the recipe or a family member who knew how to make it, the nationalized refinery switched to making Havana Club rum, currently the national rum.

When I got permission to begin distilling Cienfuegos Rum again, I tracked down several family members and convinced three of the older ones to return to Cuba as partners. The first batch of rum went into barrels thirteen months ago to age. Fortunately, I still had all the seventy-year-old bourbon barrels Keegan had emptied and managed to buy additional used barrels from two more distilleries. We filled those barrels with Cienfuegos Rum and allowed it to age for a year. After nine months, we replaced what had evaporated while the rum was aging, adding a mixture of new rum and fermented mash made from the dwarf guava that used to grow prolifically on the island.

We have begun our own dwarf guava plantation to provide enough for future use, transplanting any unattended saplings that we found. We also started our own trees from seed and bought more than four thousand three-gallon trees from garden centers in Florida, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, and the Dominican Republic.

We then sealed the barrels again and allowed the rum to age for three more months. After the extra three months, we bottled the rum. This was the first official bottle opened, complete with a special golden label to commemorate the event.

The first few barrels of Cienfuegos that we produced were only 90% filled with rum. We immediately filled the other ten percent with the guava/rum mixture. The handcrafted cigars our men had made prior to that were soaked in the un-aged rum until they were saturated. Then they drained the excess from each cigar and allowed the cigars to dry thoroughly before individually sealing them in cellophane to keep them fresher.

The cigars were an instant hit in Cuba. The availability of the cigars once again, along with the slowly increasing supplies of fuel and food, and the knowledge that Cienfuegos Rum was again being produced seemed to energize everyone as they waited to see how much more Raúl would allow.

My master cigar maker, the man who had commented on Cienfuegos Rum, was allowed to travel the island to buy tobacco, although I had to send two guards with him for the sake of appearances, “to keep him from escaping.” Since his family lived on our farm with him, I wasn’t too worried about him escaping. Once the first two groups of prisoners realized that their imprisonment was barely that, each succeeding group came around faster. I decided against growing tobacco and concentrated on growing food since there was already a plentiful supply of high-quality tobacco available.

As I did in Mississippi, I used heavy-duty plastic panels for the greenhouses instead of glass. In both cases, I was thinking about storm damage. The plastic panels are far more resistant to shattering than glass. We only had to replace twenty-two when a weak hurricane hugged the north coast of Cuba last year, the edge of the eye passing less than forty miles from us.

The crops grew like crazy. Surprisingly, we grew the same varieties of corn and tomatoes here that we did in Mississippi. The ones grown here tasted better, probably due to the extremely rich soil. Like in Mississippi, all our fields of tomatoes are now in greenhouses. Part of the reason is to keep harmful insects away. Another is to cool the greenhouses when it gets too hot for tomato blossoms to set properly, and part is to help prevent disease when the plants got wet from the rain. It rains from three to ten days a month, providing two to seven inches of rain a month, especially during the summer months.

When it rains, the runoff from the greenhouses fills underground cisterns that we use to irrigate the crops, supplementing well water, something we’ve since added in Mississippi.

The yields from our corn crops were and continue to be monstrous. Most of the plants produced three ears, and more than a third produced four. We were able to plant two crops a year due to the year-round growing season. The marshy part of the farm has yielded seven spectacular rice harvests so far. Before the first rice planting, we sprayed the area with BTI, or Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis. BTI is an altered bacterium that is harmless to humans but kills mosquito larvae.

We continued to spray every two weeks and didn’t see a single adult mosquito. I hoped it would help reduce the spread of malaria and other diseases to people, birds, and livestock in the area.

Our first rice crop yielded 10,000 tons of rice, seriously helping to alleviate the food shortage here. That’s one hell of a lot of rice. Each subsequent planting has been bigger than the previous one, and the yields have risen to reflect our increasing expertise. Our last crop was 49,000 tons.

Cuba gave us even more swamp and marshland along the coast, and we continued to convert it into productive rice paddies. A new production method developed in India coupled with six thousand heavily composted acres planted strictly in rice skyrocketed our yields per acre. The Cuban government filmed a one-hour video of Carlos explaining the new method and showing how to do it. They must have listened, as the Cuban rice harvest, not including ours, has increased nearly ten percent each year.

Aside from the additional land for rice, we doubled the original size of our ranch, but used the first ten-thousand-acre addition for farming. We grew alfalfa on several fields between other crops to help rejuvenate the soil and to feed livestock. The extra acreage lets us produce more sweet corn, field corn, summer squash, winter squash, black beans, tomatoes, lettuce, okra, eggplant, onions, garlic, bell peppers, potatoes, and sweet potatoes, all staples in Cuban diets.

Our plantings of tomatoes have increased markedly, now up to eight fields. Three fields are strictly for shipment to the U.S. With what I earned selling those to Kroger, I bought and shipped flour to Cuba. I’d have grown wheat in Cuba, but the weather here is too wet and I didn’t want to use greenhouses to grow wheat.

We tried something new to us with the potatoes. Once again using information from my various farming subscriptions, we tried a way to get more potatoes per acre. We used three-foot tall and three-foot diameter sections of precast concrete pipe to grow them in. Standing the pipes side by side in a field, we put drip irrigation and six inches of worm castings in the bottom of each pipe and planted five seed potatoes in it.

As the potato plants grew, we filled in around them with used and sterilized sawdust from our Mississippi mushroom growing operation. When that was gone, we used sawdust that we imported and aged in large piles wherever we had room. By the time the potatoes were ready to harvest, the pipes were filled with far more large potatoes than we could have grown in the ground. They were easier to harvest, too, no digging necessary. We just lifted the pipes up and rummaged through the sawdust. Once we removed the sawdust, we started again, mixed new sawdust with some of the aged sawdust from the piles and started the next batch of potatoes growing.

We added sweet potatoes that we grew in a similar manner. We grew them in straw bales. The drawback was that we had to use chemical fertilizers to prepare the straw. Growing them this way, we grow four plants in each bale and manage three crops each year, making the ground much more productive. We stacked the bales side by side in rows two deep. Our harvest for each crop yields four times the usual amount per acre, and we get three crops each year.

Aside from what we grow commercially, we have a monstrous garden where we grow much of the food we eat. The garden is in three separate greenhouses, providing us with fresh produce year-round. What we don’t eat, families of our workers take into the local towns to sell. We have a permanent stall in each of the three nearest marketplaces. They drive two pickup trucks to each town. One is filled with produce and pulls a large trailer also filled with produce.

The other pickup has a generator and a large commercial refrigerator. Half of the refrigerator is filled with milk and eggs, the other with chicken and pork. The women are ready to open at 6 a.m., selling produce picked the previous afternoon. Before noon, they call the farm on their truck radios to let them know what they need more of and get a refill delivered to them that was picked that morning.

Cubans love fish, so I bought a small, confiscated fishing boat from the U.S. Coast Guard and outfitted it with nets and poles. It goes out into the shallow water between the nearby Cuban coast and the Sabana-Camagüey Archipelago twice a week. Three days a week, it sails out into the deep water north of the archipelago to fish. Occasionally it will rendezvous with the Pickup Truck to get any excess fish that their guests have caught. When I feel stressed, which now happens at least once a week despite working on the farm, I go out with them and enjoy a day of fishing.

Ramón did an excellent job of crisscrossing neighboring island nations and Central America to buy livestock. It took us longer to prepare the areas for the livestock than to collect them, but the first livestock arrived before the fourth group of prisoners. What we ended up with was a supersized copy of our livestock operation in Mississippi. After adding ten thousand acres to the farm, we added five thousand acres of another old sugar cane plantation to the ranch, increasing livestock operations there.

The chickens multiplied like rabbits. In three years, we’ve put nearly 300,000 chickens into Cuban cooking pots, and we now sell a thousand dozen eggs a day to Cuban families. We have three separate slaughterhouses, one for chickens, one for pigs, and one for cattle.

Our latest addition to the ranch is in greenhouses--and aquariums. I hired Troy Ross away from a commercial crab raising operation in the States and he hired a handful of college graduates with a marine biology background. We started a large operation here, raising blue crabs, which is rather technical. Several types of tanks are required.

The first tank has brackish water and mud from our marshes in the bottom of the tank. This is the tank where the crabs breed. For this tank, we carefully select female crabs right before their final molt (shedding their old shell because they’ve outgrown it). They breed right after their final molt.

Once the females breed, we separate them from the males and put them in another tank, one with brackish water with sand in the bottom instead of mud. When the egg mass carried by the female appears ready to hatch (I let the marine biologists determine that), they put the females in yet another tank with brackish water and sand.

Once the eggs hatch, they transfer the larvae to other tanks so the hungry female crabs don’t eat them. We have six tanks filled with the larvae by the time all the eggs hatch. We raise live plankton that we feed them until the juvenile crabs are big enough to switch to algae. The crabs grow in these tanks for about three to four months before they are ready to sell. We pick out female crabs to breed right before their final molt and start the cycle all over again. We have a new batch of crabs ready to sell every month. And we’re expanding the operation.

Oh, the oil, wow! Four months and six days after I called Leonard about finding more drilling rigs, Leonard guided the drill from Lucky J rig #1 into a pocket of oil along the west edge of the donut. When Leonard and company finished the eighth producing well from the same pocket, each well produced nearly ten thousand barrels a day.

The next two drilling rigs to arrive started drilling along the north edge of the donut. We were ten for ten on the wells they drilled there, all abundantly producing crude oil. Each of the ten wells is producing nearly eleven thousand barrels a day, almost double what each of my original wells produces. Considering how much we’d been producing and our potential production in the future, I bought my own oil tanker to make the deliveries from the Cuban wells to the Havana refinery or to the Cienfuegos refinery.

The two tracts in the North Cuba Basin also yielded oil each time we drilled. Two drilling rigs operated near each other in each tract of the North Cuba Basin. Being close together allowed us to collect the oil from the eight wells in each tract into one FSO. At one point, I thought I had more ships holding or delivering oil than tractors at the Lucky J in Mississippi. Not really, but the ships were gaining on the tractors fast. Considering how much each ship cost, I’m amazed that I still had a cash flow, although I still owe the government a big chunk. After the initial investments, I paid cash from the oil money for everything we bought.

I guess I’ve become a big fish in the oil business, as I frequently have companies offering to sell me their excess equipment. I have fourteen rigs drilling with two more drilling rigs expected to arrive in days, and two more arriving within the month. The last four will start drilling in the former Chinese and Russian tracts in the North Cuba Basin.

As news of our new tracts spread through the oil industry, Leonard had dozens of drilling supervisors apply to work for us. Knowing Leonard’s attitude towards safety, they wanted to work for him. Several brought key people with them when we hired them.

I remodeled a ship that had previously been used by another company to transport natural gas. When the remodel was complete, it processed the natural gas at sea instead of ashore so the pollution would be away from populated areas. The ship has all the latest equipment to minimize pollution, but there is always some.

Leonard’s theory about natural gas in the donut was correct. Two rigs found the natural gas right where he predicted and one of the big oil companies bought it from us until my refinery ship was ready.

When I investigated building an oil or natural gas refinery in the U.S., I ran into the “not in my back yard” syndrome in each place I looked. Even if I got approval, which I didn’t, it would be years before construction could begin. First, we had to complete environmental impact reports. If I got approval after that, environmentalist groups trying to block construction would tie me up in court for a decade.

I still haven’t seen any of those environmentalists who walk or ride a bike everywhere. It’s a shame that they don’t have the courage of their conviction. They want a “green” world, but still want all the luxuries that we currently have; ain’t gonna happen.

Rather than deal with that crap, I’m converting an old supertanker into a floating refinery, just like the floating natural gas refinery I had retrofitted. Think of all the jobs and taxes they are going to miss in the good old U.S. of A. I’m sure I can find plenty of Cuban workers anxious to work for the exorbitant rates I pay American workers, not that the American workers don’t deserve what they get paid. Working on a drilling rig is a hard and dangerous job.

I’m still splitting my time between Mississippi, Cuba, and helping federal agencies with cases, which is why I feel stressed enough that I go fishing every week. Fortunately, I haven’t had to help with any special sales or purchases for the government since we got the third man.

My Mississippi and North Carolina contractors and their workers supervised and helped with the construction of both the original phase and second phase of the Lucky J Cuba, although more than half the construction workers of their expanded crews are now Cuban. All the Cuban construction workers asked me to let them stay and work on the farm once the construction was complete. My Cuban intermediary gave me permission to hire them. I hired a Cuban general contractor to oversee everything and he’s supervised all the farm and ranch construction since the second addition.