Industrial Integration and the Impact of the US Blockade: Vida Café Economic Circuit (Part 3)

In the mountainous coffee-growing region of Morán municipality, in Lara state, generations of campesino families have built their lives growing coffee. Steep slopes, misty mornings, and hard physical labor are part of daily life in this territory, where coffee is not only a crop but a way of organizing time, work, and community. In recent years, this long history of cooperation has taken a new form through the Vida Café Communal Economic Circuit, an initiative that brings together seven coffee-growing communes in a joint effort to sustain production, life, and collective organization under adverse conditions.

Communal economic circuits are initiatives promoted by the Bolivarian government to organize production, processing, commercialization, and reinvestment at the territorial level, seeking to operate outside the logic of the capitalist market. Vida Café is one such circuit: a relatively recent but robust project that brings together freely-associated producers organized within their communes, while also addressing broader community needs such as infrastructure, communications, and access to healthcare and services.

This testimonial work explores the origins, functioning, and meaning of Vida Café through the voices of the people who built it. The first and second installments focused on the history of the region, its long-standing cooperative practices, and how the Vida Café communal economic circuit was made. This installment looks at the effort to scale up the project through coffee processing, along with the impact of the U.S. blockade on daily life and production.

The Alliance with Café Cardenal
As Vida Café consolidated the Communal Economic Circuit, it advanced to the next link in the productive chain—coffee processing—bringing the municipal roasting plant Café Cardenal in nearby El Tocuyo into the communal project.

From the private to the communal economy
Jesús Silva: Café Cardenal has passed through different hands—private, cooperative, and public. The plant was founded in 1974 as Industrias Alimenticias Cardenal. In 2004, the municipality of Morán acquired it through a direct purchase.

Two years later, the administration of the plant passed to a cooperative structure called Organismo de Integración La Voz de los Caficultores de Morán, a second-degree cooperative that brought together eight base-level cooperatives. They received the plant in comodato (free usufruct agreement).

Over time, however, that governing structure separated itself from the base. Accountability weakened as the second-degree cooperative distanced itself from the primary cooperatives. Eventually, the producers themselves asked the mayor of Tocuyo to revoke the agreement.

In 2010, EPSAM C.A. (Empresa de Propiedad Social Alimentos Morán) was created, and it has administered the plant ever since. The company is municipally-owned but founded under principles of social property. I took part in its creation.

Social property is not simply state ownership. A public enterprise can end up operating under private logic, while social property directly involves the people. Ultimately, the real question is who controls the surplus.

When I returned to manage the plant in 2021 with a few comrades, the country was under the harshest phase of the U.S. blockade. Private companies approached us. They proposed “strategic alliances” in which ninety percent of the surplus would be for them, ten percent for the plant, with management under their control.

We refused. We did not recover this plant to become spectators while others extracted the value generated here. Shortly afterward, in 2022, we entered into a mutually beneficial partnership with Vida Café, integrating the plant into an initiative aimed at strengthening the communal economy.

Mauro Jiménez: When our comrades at Café Cardenal were regaining control of the plant and debating how to put it at the service of the people, that was precisely when we were building the architecture of the Communal Economic Circuit. We understood that producing green coffee was not enough. The only solution was to advance toward control over the entire production process.

We asked ourselves: how do we prevent coffee from leaving the territory without leaving value behind? Café Cardenal was here, in the municipality. If the plant exists in our own territory, and particularly if it’s run by comrades committed to the communal project, why should we producers remain only suppliers of a primary material?

Silva: After Vida Café took shape, there were objective conditions for integrating Café Cardenal into the project’s broader economic strategy. The producers were organizing with the Communal Economic Circuit, and the plant was in municipal hands. The question was whether Café Cardenal would operate under market logic or whether it would align itself with the communal project.

For us, the answer was clear. We are committed to Chávez’s strategy, which is the commune—not as a slogan, but as a concrete form of organizing production and power in the territory. That’s how the alliance between Vida Café and Café Cardenal came about.

Rafael Sequera: The commune cannot remain something that is only political. It has to sustain life materially. The agreement with Café Cardenal gave Vida Café industrial grounding to advance in this direction.

Silva: Today, we manage the plant democratically. The surplus is reinvested. We have a strategic alliance with the communes, which are themselves the highest expression of revolutionary democracy. The aim is not profit maximization, but strengthening the communal economy.

Expanding processing capacity with the communes
Silva: When we returned to Café Cardenal, the plant was operating far below capacity—it had practically ground to a halt. There were problems that were technical, but others that were managerial and political. The blockade made everything more difficult: spare parts were hard to get, fuel was scarce, and prices went up constantly, while workers were demoralized because the wages were very low. At the same time, private interests were circling the plant like vultures.

El Tocuyo [site of Café Cardenal] has a strong metalworking tradition, so we turned to local workshops to repair what we had. The machines are not high-tech, which in this case helped us. That’s how we reactivated the first production line.

Later, with support from the Communal Economic Circuit, we were able to reactivate the second production line and upgrade the roasting oven, increasing capacity from two sacks per batch to five.

Before these improvements, we were producing between twenty-five and thirty sacks per day. After reactivating both lines and expanding oven capacity, we reached between 100 and 120 sacks daily—around 4,500 kilograms.

There was also a bottleneck in packaging. However, with the incorporation of a new packaging machine through the Economic Circuit, that constraint was resolved.

What we achieved was not a minor adjustment. It meant multiplying productive capacity roughly fourfold! In the midst of the blockade, with local labor and communal cooperation, we stabilized the plant and brought both lines back into operation.

We still have pending issues. The emission system is obsolete and requires investment. But production today is stable. We have advanced shoulder to shoulder with Vida Café. The progress is not only productive: the plant is no longer an isolated enterprise but linked to the territory. Its books are open to communal oversight, and industrial work aligned with decisions made in assemblies.

Jiménez: Collaborating with Café Cardenal did not mean a loss of control for the commune. On the contrary, it meant advancing in our control of the productive chain. Before, it was green coffee that left the mountains. Now, it’s roasted, packaged, and distributed—with direct participation from the communes, hand in hand with our comrades at Café Cardenal.

https://OrinocoTribune.com/the-making-of-vida-cafe-organization-and-economy-part-2/

‘Hecho en comuna’
Norkys Ramos: The producers of the Economic Circuit bring their green coffee to Café Cardenal. The plant processes it. Then, it is commercialized as “Café Cardenal: Hecho en Comuna.” Hecho en Comuna, I should add, is a brand launched by President Maduro and is not exclusive to Vida Café: all communal economic circuits are entitled to use it.

Silva: There are two Café Cardenal presentations. One is EPSAM’s regular commercialization, and the other is “Hecho en Comuna,” which is linked to Vida Café.

This is how “Hecho en Comuna” operates here: the Economic Circuit provides the green coffee; we roast, grind, and package it. Once operational costs are covered, the surplus is distributed: seventy-five percent returns to the communes through the Economic Circuit, and twenty-five percent remains with Café Cardenal.

The portion that remains with the plant is not private profit. It supports logistics for public food distribution programs, including Pueblo a Pueblo [grassroots food distributor delivering to schools], and other municipal responsibilities.

Jiménez: Before, green coffee left the mountain, and that was the end of our participation in the cycle. Now, through Vida Café and our partnership with Café Cardenal, we are part of the entire production and distribution chain—from production to processing, from packaging to distribution. This is no small step!

Joint planning and debates
Ramos: We have a space for coordination and oversight where representatives of the communes and the plant review production, costs, and commercialization. Transparency is fundamental, so that producers trust the process.

Silva: In the debates, there are sometimes tensions between the interests of the individual producers and communal principles. Some producers think in strictly economic terms. The commune introduces another perspective: collective planning, collective responsibility, and collective wellbeing. This results in tensions that are typical of a transition.

The challenge has been to show that the communes must not be separate from production. Production happens in any territory, and linking it to the communes is the only true mechanism to solve the many problems we face.

Ramos: With Café Cardenal, economic decisions are no longer considered something that is external to communal self-government. They are discussed collectively. I think this is what Chávez was thinking when he talked about participative and protagonic democracy.

The impact of the U.S. blockade
The unilateral coercive measures imposed by the United States have harmed both the daily life of working-class Venezuelans and the country’s productive apparatus. Here, the people who built Vida Café reflect on how sanctions have shaped life and work in their territory.

Life under siege
Kennedy Linares: Washington said that it was aiming to topple our democratically elected government, but the truth is that every Venezuelan directly felt the effects of the sanctions. Fuel disappeared. Inputs became inaccessible. Whatever had been difficult before, became almost impossible.

When they block a country that depends on imported goods, including inputs and machinery, they are seeking to produce paralysis and despair.

Jiménez: People sometimes speak of “the crisis” as if it had fallen from the sky. But what we experienced was economic warfare. The objective was clear: to suffocate the country so that production would collapse and people would turn against the revolution. They did not succeed.

Ramos: Sanctions cut financial channels, blocked basic imports, and created uncertainty. Prices changed constantly, and planning became extremely difficult. Everything was unstable in the beginning, but little by little, we were able to find our way. For us, Vida Café is the path out of the crisis that the U.S. brought here.

Fuel and production
Jiménez: They may declare sanctions from Washington, but coffee still grows in these mountains. We could not abandon our production, even if yields declined!

Linares: The first thing that hit us was fuel. Without diesel, nothing moves. You can harvest good coffee, but if there is no transport, the coffee stays in the mountains. There were weeks when fuel simply didn’t arrive. Trucks stopped. Producers waited, but the harvest doesn’t wait for logistics.

Jiménez: At one point, a barrel of diesel could cost 150 or even 200 dollars. For a small producer, that is unbearable. When fuel becomes that expensive, it affects every stage of production. Transport eats into your profit margin, and you think twice before moving coffee.

Johnny Valera: If coffee accumulates, its quality drops. Drying becomes harder. Sometimes you lose part of the harvest. It’s not that people stopped working, but the conditions became harsher.

Now things are quite different: there has been an economic recovery throughout the country. However, more importantly for us, Vida Café has developed the mechanisms to overcome the blockade and to do it in a new way.

Linares: Machinery also depends on fuel. Road maintenance slowed down. If roads deteriorate in these mountains, coffee simply doesn’t get out. Everything is connected here.

Production fell, that’s the truth, but not because we abandoned the land, but because the blockade altered the material conditions for work.

Blockade-induced inflation and barter
Jiménez: During the worst period of hyperinflation, prices changed constantly. You could sell something one day, but by the next morning, the money you got had lost value.

Valera: Up here in the mountains, it was normal to exchange green coffee for other goods. Barter has always existed. But in the worst years, it became more common.

Ramos: Coffee has value, and people know what a sack of green coffee represents. In a context where the currency was devaluing so quickly, coffee became more stable than money.

Linares: Still today, you can trade coffee for inputs, services, and even food.

Jiménez: The blockade created instability at the national level, and hyperinflation followed. In that situation, green coffee was something stable and reliable.

Strains on health and education
Rosimar Vargas: The sanctions had a very quick impact on the health center. There were periods when medicines were extremely difficult to obtain, and transportation was unstable; therefore, even when supplies could be found elsewhere, bringing them here was extremely challenging.

Diana Higuera: In the pharmacy, we saw it clearly. People came looking for basic treatments that the public health system normally supplied, and sometimes we simply didn’t have them. Transport was the hardest part. When a patient had to go to the hospital in El Tocuyo, fuel shortages meant that every transfer was an ordeal.

Linares: The crisis also hit the schools. Some teachers migrated because their salaries lost purchasing power. Families felt it. And the children were the ones hit the hardest. It was cruel.

Vargas: Even so, the medical center never closed. The pressure was constant, but the community resisted. In those years, we understood very clearly what the blockade meant: a policy designed to suffocate the country. But we also came to understand who in the country really was on our side.

Through communal organization and the Economic Circuit, we began solving problems collectively. The ambulance was recovered, infrastructure improved, and services stabilized. Today, the situation is much better. We did not collapse—we organized.

 

 

Chris Gilbert is professor of political science in the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela.

(MRonline) by Cira Pascual Marquina and Chris Gilbert