Cuba has officially kicked off the 2012-2013 sugarcane harvest season, hoping to boost output by 20 percent over the previous year, Cuban official daily Granma reported Wednesday.

The first sugar mill put to work on Tuesday is Jesus Rabi, located in the town of Calimete in the western province of Matanzas, said Granma.

Liobel Hernandez, a member of state-run sugar company Azcuba, said that in the following three months, all the 50 sugar mills will be put into operation.

For more than 200 years, the sugar industry had served as the engine of the Cuban economy, but production gradually fell to only 1.1 million tons in the 2009-2010 harvest season, the worst in 105 years.

The 2011-2012 sugarcane harvest was the best in the last eight years, though the output was still lower than expectations.