The Militarization of Fidelismo
Dumont, René
When Rene Dumont published the book Cuba: Est-Il Socialiste? earlier this year in France, it created a sensation throughout Europe. A distinguished agronomist who occupies a chair at the...
...The Plans, then, lack flexibility...
...When this highway project was being discussed at the Institute of Physical Planning, a major—one must have this rank to permit oneself such license —timidly pointed out that the Revolution wanted no part of private automobiles (they still exist) and that therefore the volume of traffic foreseeable within the next few years (trucks, public buses, official business cars, tractors) would be amply accommodated by two lanes in either direction...
...At any hour of the day or night, Provincial Plan directors could arrive, from 80 kilometers away, or even national directors...
...Another time (on this occasion, during the dry season), a whole area under cultivation is visibly suffering from drought: "You'll build me a micropresa near here"—a small dam...
...Such plans provide for the same intensity of cultivation everywhere, whereas the natively richer or better irrigated areas are economically able to advance further than others...
...Such discipline does not seem incompatible with the participation of all in the working out of decisions, especially when we take into account Fidel Castro's exceptional gifts of persuasion, which he could put to better use than he has done...
...however, his next diagram would have required a hospital to be razed...
...FIDEL CALLED 1969 "the year of the decisive effort...
...He forgot that warm air rises, also that a too prolonged exposure to light retards the maturing of certain rice varieties...
...The observer may leave an overstaffed camp where the machinery is hampered by overcrowding, only to tumble into immense, deserted fields of crops where no one is around to give any instruction or information...
...As I watched my Cuban friends debate this question, I was casting about for a solution more in the direction of decentralization, toward greater local initiative and autonomy—in a word, greater responsibility on the spot...
...he has too many ideas at once—every day, every minute—and he wants to put them to work without clearly envisaging all the problems...
...As for agricultural production, when I was studying the Soviet agrarian situation I attempted to show that, in order to avoid undue injustices, a ground rent was an economic and social necessity...
...Nor, for that matter, does the Brigade's egalitarianism prevail throughout the Army...
...A bit to the north, the Matanzas clay rests on a bed of limestone...
...However, the ladleful of corn cooked in water is predominant in the meals of the young people of the Columna while on the tables of high officials one finds chicken and rice, avocados, cigars, and coffee...
...But Ania Francos would no longer choose the title "Cuban Festival," were she to see sad Bayamo (or any other city) as it was in July 1969, with its empty shops and haggard passersby...
...From the outset of the Cuban agrarian reform, the Army has played a crucial role...
...The supervisor of one section of a rice plantation—a noncommissioned officer—receives instructions covering everything he must do day by day, from J-Day, the germination date of the particular rice that has been sowed, to J-Day + 110 or + 120, the date forecast for the harvesting...
...Each of the remaining fruit trees—and many have been lost—is surrounded by a protective grill, since Fidel now wishes to plant grass and graze sheep there...
...have more money than they can spend...
...With the same basic resources, a more correct distribution of the available money and a better scheme for the distribution of goods would have avoided, or at least much reduced, all the waiting...
...I want to do everything .. . instantly...
...This time, Fidel gave in to the opposing arguments and agreed to let the highways start from the port...
...In Camaguey, some cane had to wait as long as a month between being cut in the fields and ground in the factories, although it is advisable for the interval between cutting and grinding not to exceed 24, at the most 48, hours...
...However, he proposed doing 54 hectares if he could get topographers...
...Yet in the course of the six-and-a-1962, if not more so...
...The Party representative swore on his honor as a revolutionary that he would allow the work to be finished...
...of which Fidel has a great deal, this can quickly be called quadrupling...
...plus ten years of lies," add the people...
...It will be possible to have the visitor first see Havana, once the capital of prostitution and gambling—in a word, of all the vices of the capitalist era...
...therefore, when he announces a mistaken proposal, no one dares oppose it anymore if he wants to keep his job...
...In 1969, he added, Oriente Province would produce 1.3 million liters of milk a day...
...These are no longer true agricultural enterprises that manage their own personnel, equipment, and livestock...
...It had been planned to have everyone who was eating in a canteen turn in his own food card, but this had to be given up because in practice it was too hard to enforce...
...This is not to ignore the British system of alternating temporary meadows and annual crops, which demonstrates how the soil can be refortified with humus...
...To obtain those 525,000 tons, a large number of preconditions would have to be met, first among them improved pasturage...
...Older men have retired, and the young men are not rushing to replace them, preferring instead the technological institutes...
...THE MILITARISM OF FIDELISMO Would His Refirement Be Desirable...
...At the end of the month, the preassigned loca THE MILITARISM OF FIDELISMO tion was shifted 61 kilometers to the east because—I shall come back to this—the future highway must pass through the original site...
...Even if modem changes diminish the value of this dictum—today man is better equipped to master nature—they do not annul it...
...This is a difficult problem: if one supplies too much information, production-unit cadres will be drowned in paper-work, like those of the granjas (state farms), and they will no longer have enough time for productive work...
...I want it to be possible to see rice on both sides of the road" is the RENE DUMONT answer Fidel is reported to have made to the countersuggestion...
...this highway would cost infinitely less there, it would be a better road, and it would pass nearer to inhabited centers...
...If this is so, it is not the reply worthy of a leader who would be careful of the economy—that is, of the wellbeing of his people...
...It was a grandiose spectacle, all those great trees falling like so many straws—unless they were too tough and stalled even powerful Soviet tanks...
...They...
...The foreign guest of the Protocolo has the right to a banquet...
...This was less than one-sixth of what, two years earlier, had been promised for 1969.4 Milk production there, they estimated, was reaching 310,000 liters a day, or less than one-fourth of what had been promised...
...Soon one scraper broke down...
...Fifty-four hectares in pangola for grazing, plus 27 additional hectares in fodder that should, it was decided, feed 288 Fl milch cows...
...Temporary they proved to be, and most of the dying bushes have been pulled up...
...To master nature one must understand it well, that is, study it thoroughly...
...Such organizational capacity was still widely lacking in Cuba in 1969, which was normal, for this is a characteristic of underdeveloped countries...
...Fidel often confounds the conception of a project and its realization...
...On December 10, 1968, after a meeting with Castro, it was decided to prepare 1,340 hectares of level rice fields south of Havana, before the May rains, using 25 scrapers...
...Sometimes melons and oranges are sold on the square...
...Had one mobilized city dwellers, promising them by way of pay 15 or 20 percent, say, of the tubers they dug up, hardly any would have been lost, for the needed supplementary volunteers would have been found...
...Fidel mobilized 200 Party volunteers for a period of one month to build by hand, on some undulating hills (when there is so much level ground in Cuba), 6 hectares of terraced rice fields...
...perhaps it was partly justified by the underdeveloped conditions that prevailed in the early years, but as the average cultural level rises, it loses more and more of its reason for being...
...annual increase in agricultural products, nonetheless, austerity is widespread, and food which was to be spread over a twelve-year shortages are again as severe as they were in period...
...The work proceeded at full speed and with wide-open throttle...
...In Wishing to Manage Every Detail, Castro Sometimes Introduces Disorder ULTIMATELY, FIDEL CASTRO has confidence only in himself, and he is unable to delegate full responsibility...
...11 The Japanese formula is 18 percent nitrogen, 24 percent phosphate, 18 percent potash...
...But as we have shown and as the popular saying reminds us, one must not confound speed and haste...
...The contrast is calculated to please the progressive city dweller, especially if he is won over in advance and is expecting to have a rosy picture of socialist achievement painted for him...
...For a Few Days, 1 Believed...
...Stalin was not alone responsible for the abuses of Stalinism...
...Indeed, he is the universal moving spirit in Cuba, his goals quicken people to make an effort, and his speeches arouse a degree of enthusiasm still, especially among his most faithful followers, the sugarcane workers...
...Even assuming that 10 million tons will be harvested in 1970, the average yield for the 1969 and 1970 harvests would not reach 7.2 million tons...
...His richly detailed portrait of economic mismanagement and militarization is all the more devastating because it comes from a friend of the regime...
...It would be indispensable that he respect the responsibilities he himself has delegated to others and, above all, that he make use of all available abilities instead of extolling people's revolutionism...
...To this point, the quality of work has not been taken sufficiently into account...
...Such participation should assume the setting-up of democratic discussion— the absence of which the best Cubans bitterly regret—first within Party cells and other proceedings of the Party, and then in the various production units...
...4 In Cuba the banana is not a luxury but a basicfood, actually preferred over daily bread...
...Cuba has a high trade deficit, especially vis-a-vis the Soviet Union, and is terribly short of convertible currency...
...This meant that it was too late to start, and everything was snafued...
...Batista wanted power so that he and his clique could profit from it...
...it is essential, in his estimation, that he see everything, rectify everything...
...As early as 1963, I had emphasized how the danger becomes still more grave when clearing very poor soil that rests on a gravelly, completely infertile layer of iron granules...
...The harvesting, or zafra, ra, which traditionally is done almost entirely between January and May, was officially begun for the first time on July 14, 1969, then halted and started again on October 27...
...Responsibilities that would be crushing for thoroughly trained personnel are placed on people who cannot yet carry such weight...
...Their food shortage is due, in large part, to the dogmatism of their managers...
...Yet this is just the moment when personal power by depending upon the military and bureaucratic castes, the Army and the Party, seeks to maintain itself against the majority, which is unable to express itself, Many Army and Party leaders are hard workers, but they also defend their caste privileges and, even more than the material advantages deriving therefrom, their appetite for power...
...In the south of Central America, one recognizes the boss on a plantation, whether he be owner or manager, by the fact that he carries a revolver, whereas his workers have machetes...
...It would be enough if space were reserved for eventual expansion...
...A French technical mission was sent to Cuba in late 1967 to build rice paddies in horizontal terraces, using French equipment—scrapers, scoops, and levelers...
...is published by arrangement with Georges Borchardt, Inc., and reprinted by permission of Editions du Seuil, © Editions du Seuil, 1970...
...One minor instance: the military in charge of the RENA DUMONT work crews carry revolvers, which is understandable (sabotage) but makes me uneasy...
...Control of the workers over the Party, of the Party over the Central Committee, and of this body over Fidel Castro must be restored...
...The battle of economic development in Cuba is far from ended, for all that in 1970 it is already in its eleventh year...
...But for women alone with children, people who are no longer young, and the elderly housewife—what trouble they must go to...
...He has foreign experts come to Cuba, then for a long time keeps their confidential information to himself, in order to boast of being the one "who makes the miracles happen...
...You must write how we lack everything," a housewife of ordinary means said to me...
...On October 20, 1969, he finally did ask that "united with patriotism and conscience, intelligence and ability may prevail...
...The battle of the 10 million tons was 5 In October 1969, many of those mobilized forfuture work in the canefields tried in their medical examinations to persuade the doctors that theycould not work standing up...
...0.60 if you add cheese...
...He does everything within his power for the people, for education, and for public health...
...No one in Cuba is very hungry...
...Salaries range from 85 to 900 pesos monthly, which preserves marked inequalities...
...What a waste of time...
...Tanks yoked in tandem with heavy chains brought all trees toppling down, without regard for those that should have been preserved...
...Since the farm co-operative as a solution was —unjustifiably—rejected, no one, insofar as he belongs to a limited social group, has a direct interest in seeing that state enterprises are more efficient...
...When he throws his beret on the ground and flies into one of his big rages (I sparked only a mild one), everybody quakes and dreads punishment...
...Nonetheless, accidents occur every step of the way— rain, mechanical breakdowns—which the best-planned work schedules do not anticipate...
...Accordingly, everywhere sheds for this number of cows were built, following specifications handed down from above...
...I did continue to register very explicit Andes region, from Columbia and Peru to reservations about the projected 15 percent Bolivia...
...He had grasped the irony of my remark, and was clearly aware of all the difficulties that were going to arise...
...Now that they have been brushed aside, Fidel wants to show the researchers, like Preston and Willis in animal husbandry, and the Plan directors that he is the one most capable—if not the only one capable—of making the synthesis between science and common sense...
...8 This agriculturalist from Dieppe had been able to achieve his checker pattern very economically because he had received heavy war indemnities...
...1 The capitalist manufacturer of these ices is still in Cuba, where he is the object of friendly attentions, and even enjoys some privileges...
...One does not mourn the prostitution, but not everything was negative then...
...in this way, one seeks not to penalize workers in enterprises that have received land with natural conditions (soil, climate, water) and economic conditions (markets, infrastructure) that are highly variable...
...However, no one is really responsible for crops when successive waves of workers, who arrive from different places, and of equipment that is also nomadic, have shared in the cultivation...
...We have always taught that agriculture depends on knowledge of locality...
...he said...
...Slightly concerned,'" Captain Chardan repeated, standing at attention (we were a mixed Army-civilian group), who was responsible for the agricultural Plan...
...How is one to make the people's voice heard in high places...
...WHILE QUESTIONING A JAPANESE RICE GROWER, Fidel Castro learned that an essential secret of Japan's triple yield of rice per hectare, as compared to Cuba's, lies in the use of a potent fertilizer, very rich in potash, which prevents its being beaten down by the rains...
...The prevailing disorder cuts down on the efficiency potential of their equipment, and programs are often late...
...Of an evening in Havana, you can stand in line three hours in order to enjoy a "Coppelia" ice 1—which truly is as delicious as ever...
...To multiply varieties of rice quickly, an expert advised putting the seed beds under a plastic tent...
...Adding this to the current 800,000 tons, one would almost have tripled the output...
...These abound only in an advanced stage of development and are highly remunerated in well-developed countries...
...His orders are successively noted down by his entourage, his slightest word is hung on respectfully, often recorded...
...they no longer believe...
...Where have the others—the real, the good cutters—gone...
...Too many things are decided on paper from above, so that the workers who have been mobilized and organized in brigades have become mere performers carrying out orders, quite like ordinary soldiers...
...As a result, those who have workers or students in the family, all entitled to meals away from home, benefit from what are, in effect, supplements...
...Large-scale work has as its main justification the full exploitation of equipment...
...Today an increasingly militarized agriculture is directed from a national command postpuesto de mando—the headquarters of which I have seen...
...In the end, it was disbanded and absorbed into the DAP, a mechanized Army group especially equipped for agricultural service, which in June 1969 assumed the management of the country's hydraulic resources...
...If one less bulldozer had been bought—so many are underused that it would have sufficed to organize the repair shops better and speed up repairs—it would have been possible, by spending the same amount of for eign exchange, to equip the crews with hundreds of electric saws, with which one man can do the work of 50...
...In July 1969, I studied Oriente, and in the Cauto valley came across nothing except, bordering the island's central road, across some hundreds of hectares of banana trees that were dying because they had been planted in a much too wet locale with very poor drainage.3 Any ordinary peasant would have avoided this gross mistake...
...In April 1968, it arrived at Las Villas, but the column had thinned out considerably and the rearguard still remained in Cauto...
...I welcomed the apparent rationality of the scheme, but pointed out that I was "slightly concerned" about how it would be practically, concretely, worked out on the land...
...However, in dealing with the peasantry, the new leaders disregard most of the peasants' traditions of empirical local knowledge, which would have made it possible to avoid a goodly number of the grosser errors I have mentioned...
...Here, too, a big change mission...
...Criticizing the Institute of Animal Sciences harshly for such tests, Castro used to say scornfully, "Five experiments, five errors...
...For the last four years, no trousers—just one pair a year, with a shirt, at the work centers...
...Some people feel that my reports are not unconnected with this new attitude: he can be influenced...
...At the agricultural command post for the province, they told me that, as of then, there were still 4,350 hectares of banana trees, state-owned, that were in good condition...
...There is much concern, and rightly so, to learn what information will be necessary at this or that level, at what frequency it should be given, and by what means it can most suitably be transmitted...
...To uproot trees, the crews scoop up a significant amount of surface soil, which is rich in organic matter, and push it onto the ranks of felled tree trunks, setting fire to the whole, which burns the soil and disperses nitrogen in the air...
...Within the framework of the revolutionary offensive here outlined occurs the militarization of the whole Cuban economy...
...I PROVOKED ASTONISHED LOOKS when, in talking with foreigners and Cubans, I stressed the fact that concrete, tangible possibilities exist for increasing Cuban agricultural production very rapidly—even if the percentages announced by Fidel are on the face of it unbelievable...
...His theories kept him from taking advantage of peasant experience, which is very valuable if one knows how to interpret it—obviously, not following it to the letter...
...This method would have removed the trees without the bulldozers' destructive scraping...
...What picture could be more idyllic, more Marie-Antoinette...
...In Michel Gutelman's study of socialized agriculture in Cuba, he stresses the fact that all workers, tractor drivers, and officers attached to the Che Guevara Brigade earn the same wage: 160 pesos a month, plus lodging, food, and medical care...
...He is an intuitive man who understands very quickly but who is very susceptible to influences...
...A better structure, one adapted to the real situation (abilities, mentalities) and not to what one wishes were the case, would have permitted the purchase of less equipment, while more work would have been accomplished...
...However, the proportion of milch cows pregnant annually through artificial insemination had not yet reached 70 percent of the total...
...All this has its usefulness and is part of an undeniable will to do the right thing...
...The Brigade was going to"cut to ribbons" Castro's new enemy—nature—by indiscriminately leveling everything that once made for the charm of the island...
...Some are in the Ministry of the Interior, where they are politically safe...
...He comes upon a bridge in bad condition...
...Let us follow him on his tours...
...And why should one install such uniform structures everywhere...
...IF FIDEL HAD THE MENTALITY OF CHE—he is far from it—one could raise the question "If he were voluntarily to give up the country's leadership, would it benefit Cuban development...
...they do not leave enough room for initiative and do not take production costs sufficiently into account...
...ED.] THE MILITARISM OF FIDELISMO A Militarized Agriculture Unique In the World M M UCH WORK AND DISCIPLINE are needed to build socialism, especially when starting from a low economic level...
...to improve the yield and raise the production mean...
...They have been given the means, generally very closely estimated, to achieve their assigned goals...
...Everything is transmitted to the province, where responsibility is assumed for carrying out the essential line...
...Men are moved about constantly...
...Then eliminate 40 percent of the more mediocre Fl heifers...
...his, however, is the one that is being executed...
...To have the right to a meal (without tickets) in a restaurant one endures, standing and unprotesting, a wait of a half hour to two hours...
...It is now 11 years that Cuban agriculture has been in a state of perpetual transformations: the cost of each has come high...
...The parceling out of pasture land in small plots RENE DUMONT is patterned after the example of Voisin...
...Following behind the noble squads of the bulldozers come the modest foot soldiers, a group of unskilled laborers who, with their little axes, endlessly chop up all the limbs that can be used for posts, sawmills, or fuel...
...However, a rather dogmatic principle stands in the way of this...
...Some delegates tried timidly to defend those small farmers who were doing a good job...
...That night, however, when, in the euph-hardly want to save or invest it, nor are they oric start of my visit, I said to Fidel that per-encouraged to do so, for one would have to haps he was going to beat all records for agri-promise them interest—a heretical promise...
...As I have said, centralized planning permits one to take a rapid first step, but it slows down later advances, which have to be more closely adapted to local conditions...
...This is not to exclude other contributing causes...
...However, as of March 1, 30 student rice specialists were available 50 kilometers away from the site...
...Accordingly, they lack dynamism...
...RENE DUMONT launched with the Cuban mentality in mind, presenting the goal as a challenging sports record, "an engagement of honor for the entire nation...
...but lemonade and fruit juices that are more sugared than fruited...
...Let us suppose that one were to reach that rate in 1970...
...No doubt, without Fidel there would be less fantasy but also less genius...
...and they see too little attraction in farm work, which is, in turn, too little esteemed and too badly paid...
...This hinders her in purchasing all the equipment she needs, and places her in a position of economic, ergo political, dependency on the U.S.S.R...
...Finally, in a period of shortages, something is always missing that prevents prefashioned plans from unfolding as anticipated...
...Such scattering of work activity cuts down on productivity— and sometimes annuls it...
...start building modest cowsheds, and expanding this project proportionately as the pasture lands demonstrate their real potential...
...WHENEVER SOCIALISM is in power, discipline is essential, understandably so, in order that national planning can be rapidly devised, especially when the country must emerge quickly from economic underdevelopment...
...He remains the one leader...
...These things cannot be measured in economic terms...
...His situation contrasts too sharply with that of the elderly couple whose pension only just enables them to pay for the meager official ration, so that sometimes they literally go hungry (1800 calories a day, at times...
...He is no longer content with his military and political claims to glory, or his unquestionable human value...
...6 As of February 1970, the general opinion in Cuba was that the goal would not be met...
...Similar puestos de mando have been or are going to be established at provincial, regional, and national Plan levels, and the country's agriculture will be somehow codified...
...And not having been on the spot in the meanwhile, I have not experienced the disappointment of these people...
...With co-operative organizations, where everybody has an interest in keeping up the work's pace, one would surely not do worse—indeed, that is scarcely possible...
...Bayamo was a radiant town in early 1960, in the midst of the joys of traditional holidays and the liberation...
...the Cuban organizational structure is demonstrably incapable of effecting this, which permits one to ask whether it is indeed well founded...
...Everybody goes to demonstrations in the Plaza de la Revolucion...
...5 Fidel adds that if he had not called as early as 1964 for 10 million tons of sugar for 1970, he would have got much less— his first hint that perhaps he will not get them...
...They are disenchanted, and they have many reasons for being so...
...If there were a truly democratic participation in decision-making one could talk of sacrifices voluntarily accepted...
...As wage increments outpace production and as consumer goods imports are so reduced, the queues cause an unproductive fatigue, and the living standard is lowered...
...To what extent does a ruling group have the right to impose its concept of the future on the country...
...It was he who decided on the priority of agriculture, since which time he has been, and is still, an important agent in the acceleration of agronomic progress...
...However, sacrifices that have been prolonged since 1961 have become unbearable for the people today...
...The savings in foreign exchange and the savings in time would enable the Cubans to resolve their food problem...
...It was this which led him into the errors of the special Plans...
...Because the structure is military—that is its essential characteristic—not enough confidence is placed in the base...
...Elsewhere I have emphasized how, in the plans for improved pasturage in Camaguey, land was reclaimed everywhere at the same time, instead of the crews' systematically beginning where it could have been seen in advance that the investment would be most productive...
...Of course, with the use of artificial insemination, Fl heifers are born en masse of zebu cows...
...The old section in Havana was once so gay...
...until now, this calculation seems to be neglected in Cuba...
...Hurricane Flora flooded all the Oriente savannahs, and he himself almost lost his life there, together with a crew of rescuers...
...This is very apparent...
...The drivers had to be taught how to do the work, four other men who had been trained for it had been sent to cut cane...
...A few kilometers by car, and he will stand at the foot of reforested hillsides, with artificial lakes and antierosion terraces (which are badly lacking farther out into the country...
...What is done is done for, not by, the people...
...Starting in 1969, the rest of the work was done by a succession of brigades...
...Had they more level fields, and such do exist, they could supply neighboring cities with meat, which is in very short supply...
...but "management" wants to keep them all, which is a big mistake...
...but it did not come up with equivalent organizational abilities...
...A distinguished agronomist who occupies a chair at the Institut National Agronomique in Paris, Dumont (born 1904) is also a veteran French leftist who had paid several visits as an expert adviser to and sympathizer with Castro's Cuba...
...RENA DUMONT kilometers farther on, a stretch of road is badly deteriorated, his jeep gets stuck (the time is October) and churns its way out of the mud with difficulty...
...One will have to pour cement by the tens of thousands of tons as deeply as possible into the ooze, or haul tens of thousands of truckloads of earth to build a dike-road, which will never be strong...
...Cuba is definitely not a case of a classical Latin-American dictatorship...
...Everyone observes the same pace of development, whereas the better trained, more judicious unit chiefs should have the possibility of striking out ahead of the others and of trying new techniques—such as the adoption of electric fencing...
...In July 1969, it had seemed to me probable that the 10 million tons of sugar were potentially there in the canefields...
...Cuba could try to disengage herself from personalized government...
...Socialism demands real popular participation at all decisionmaking levels...
...Southeast of Havana, in the Guines region, 40 percent of the malangas or taros, which are much relished by Cuban housewives and their children, could not be harvested in the winter of 1968-69 for lack of both manual labor and machinery...
...During the main speech, the sale must be suspended, and the people who draw near the pot of gold grow angry...
...Those 50,00 tractors more or less badly maintained by agricultural incompetents 7 The same military ceremony was repeated in1969, with female battalions driving Piccolinos, the small Italian tractors...
...If you cook pork, the whole neighborhood can smell it and if the Revolutionary Defense Committee in your part of town hears about it, they denounce you...
...When the occasion does arise, everytimes still capable, he added, "You know, a one rushes to the scene and the lines grow revolution is hard...
...From July 14 to November 1, 1969, a total of 200,000 tons of sugar was produced, or 2 percent of the goal...
...The THE MILITARISM OF FIDELISMO almost total lack of most consumer goods and the stiff rationing are also somewhat justified by Cuba's very high investment rate, which approaches 30 percent and thereby beats all records for underdeveloped countries...
...The mechanical milkers arrived, whereupon another type of building was advised...
...A number of institutions were named after him, for he is considered on a par with the Heroes of the Revolution...
...Pizza costs 1.20 pesos, a small bottle of beer is 0.80—when it's available— and a hot dog (in Spanish, perro caliente) costs 0.40...
...Its failure is implicitly recognized in the present reorientation—the Special Plans—which we will be studying here...
...There is hardly any place to spend extra money except at a restaurant or on the black market...
...Most serious of all, no member of his technical staff dared show him his mistake (his multiple mistakes...
...As of March–April 1969, the men in charge of the machinery on the granjas were replaced by lieutenants, and the militarized tractor drivers were assigned fixed wages (thereby eliminating overtime pay), military schedules, 25 days of continuous work with no Sundays off, and a five-day leave once a month—work permitting...
...The fear of hurricanes haunts Fidel, especially since October 1963...
...The young civil servant fresh from the university earns 300 pesos, and while on his official rounds—sometimes real, sometimes fictitious—he receives gratis meal tickets that are worth 7 pesos...
...Our title has been supplied by the editor.—En...
...The first rice plantations south of Havana had in part been situated, according to the provisions of the first Plan, on the clayey soil of Matanzas, where the earth has a gritty consistency...
...In the course of his tours, he did order a "test" of the Japanese formula,-" in three large fields of more than a thousand hectares in all, "in order to see...
...Then Fidel's independent ideas are laid down and received, adding a further and truly official work program that is at least as imperative as the first...
...Must Cuba repeat all the economic mistakes of the socialist camp...
...also, remembering 1963, I had never believed the earlier promises, which have come to nought...
...one need not win, by sometimes difficult persuasion, the voluntary adherence of a peasantry that includes many independent farm owners, not all of whom are well enough informed to grasp quickly the anticipated benefits...
...Chicken is reserved for invalids and pregnant women...
...It would be more worthwhile, for example, to 8 Voisin died suddenly in Cuba and was tenderedan official funeral...
...It is most unlikely that the majority of the latter would have approved their recent dispossession...
...Political Participation, the End of Democratic Centralism...
...dear to forget basic economic laws, and its slowness in rediscovering them hindered its moving ahead...
...Fidel is a remarkable being—and would be altogether extraordinary if he were better able to master himself, to listen, to reflect more, and to stop promising the moon—a man who is capable of feeling and expressing the aspirations and potentialities of the Cuban people...
...A rational plan would have called for this formula to be tested at the six small experimental stations that had, indeed, just been set up in several provinces, with control plots to keep track of differences in the soil...
...No one makes any effort to gather ideas from workers, cadres, intellectuals, or peasants...
...Absolute Priority for Exports THE PRIORITY ACCORDED to exports is understandable, for at least two reasons...
...They are replaced by workers and peasants, pre-university and university students, and, last, the Army...
...I suggested that he check into East German or Hungarian material, rather than Soviet studies...
...It is a military figure of speech: the guerrilla fighter must often be asked to make superhuman physical efforts...
...Agriculture had become more than a pressing problem hopefully to be resolved...
...Children are sometimes dressed in odds and ends of old sacks, and young girls are ashamed of their rags...
...It should mightily impress foreign visitors, who are a little too much kept in mind when such displays are set up...
...In the foreground, sheep graze in the midst of orchards...
...His retirement would risk plunging the country into chaos...
...in private, his partisans are much less numerous...
...On March 6 of this year Jose Milian, then head of the Control Department of the Sugar Ministry and since then deposed, announced that by March 5, 4 million metric tons of sugar had been harvested...
...However, after the Army moved into Camaguey, the Brigade broke up into small groups and there was less talk of it...
...As the Chinese remind us, however, man remains the decisive element...
...However, at the first of the year, the poor provincial technicians receive their official work programs, which has been established and agreed upon by the planning junta and the technical ministries...
...Let me simply cite here the pumpkins of Ciego de Avila, which rotted in June–July 1969, because they had been planted in poorly drained fields totaling dozens of hectares...
...quickly, but have very few opportunities to then, with that sincerity of which he is some-do so...
...This first English translation of lengthy sections from Cuba: Est II Socialiste...
...It will be extended into July 1970...
...A higher goal would subsequently be less difficult to maintain, for 500,000 hectares of new cane have been planted...
...It is essential to him that he also be recognized as first in scientific research and in agricultural education...
...It says that the Cuban government shall progressively repurchase all peasantowned lands but never, even by way of a provisional exchange, cede land to the peasants...
...thus, more than 1,000 men moved into the fields, the majority of whom remained for one to two weeks, sometimes less than a week...
...Fifty a Technicians from Eastern Europe are even more severe in criticizing Cuban inefficiency and the fact that they themselves are underemployed, which scandalizes them at least as much...
...he has restored dignity to the poorest group, the farm workers, and to the most despised, the blacks and 12 A gusano, an opponent of the regime, said inthis connection, "Sometimes indeed one would wish for Fidel to disappear, but then one would have hisbrother Raul, who's now in charge of the Army, and that would be worse...
...Quadruple the Milk Supply in Two Years" IN MAY 1967, Fidel addressed the peasants attending the second—and probably last—congress of the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP...
...This amounts to a genuine takeover of a faltering socialist agriculture, by the military, for the Army directs all motorized activities...
...Everyone bustles about in an attempt to move fast, even too fast—which makes for poor work...
...It cost the U.S.S.R...
...most important, they cannot act on their own initiative...
...Often one small orange or half of a big orange is given out for a child...
...The phrase made some people think of one last effort and even, lurking in the background, of the possibility of failure...
...Moreover, often these families are underemployed because they have inadequate land at their disposal, especially for growing their own foodstuffs and the feed for their pigs...
...This more realistic hypothesis would already represent very considerable progress (for which there are few precedents in agrarian history), but one would not even be doubling the output in two years...
...they would have 500,000 that would begin producing milk in 1970...
...For "Fidel's test," one most certainly chose the richest land, the best quality of seed, the optimum dates for optimum sowing, and the most advanced and best tended growing techniques...
...Another consideration: it was estimated that the irrigation reservoirs will not have to be refilled with lime for 25 years...
...Castro wants to do everything himself...
...Men and machinery are summoned to points where the severest lack exists, always in the midst of great confusion...
...In terms of a national average Fidel stressed that more than 1 percent of the sugar had been lost, since in Camaguey 11 percent had been realized...
...We'll begin again in October...
...It was a courageous ad-longer and longer...
...One month went by before a commission produced a too sketchy topographical survey of the area...
...It has been necessary to leave excessive quantities of refined sugar from the 1969 harvest in the vats to permit crystallization of the juices coming from this unseasonable harvest, which had only a 5.5 percent sugar yield...
...Thereupon they received orders to rejoin their classes and, much discouraged, took off, convinced that they had worked to no purpose...
...So one tries to do everything, although the same bulldozers cannot be both on the road bed and by the dam on the same day...
...mulattoes...
...Haste has caused so many mistakes that one should know better how to avoid them in the future, but it is now more than ten years that Cuba has been making mistakes and not very many lessons have been learned from them...
...Quickly, up with the barriers, for there are immense waiting lines...
...The Institute of Physical Planning found a very favorable location— directly behind the port, requiring no demolition of existing buildings, and well serviced by road and rail, etc...
...If the truck stops en route, many 2 Since the fall of 1969, only plastic or, occasion ally, canvas shoes are distributed...
...It can be heard mur RENE DUMONT muring down below, at many meetings, and echoes have reached Fidel...
...The diplomatic corps, in the main—even representatives of the East European countries—privately believes that the Cuban economy is moving toward imminent catastrophe...
...The central agricultural stations, which were then in the process of being enlarged, did not all function well...
...this was true of all the cities I passed through...
...The rehearsal for the Army's takeover seems indeed to have begun in October 1967, by the Che Guevara Brigade...
...The students who were to work with this project had, in the meantime, been assigned elsewhere...
...they were being maintained in moderately good conditions, probably comparable to those the whole herd will enjoy in 1970...
...If you miss a day's work you are not paid...
...The surplus of molasses does not compensate for this...
...To quadruple it in two years, with a bovine population of 7 million heads—when I read that in France, my few remaining hairs rose on my head...
...From the economic point of view, organizationwould stand to gain if Raul were able to surroundhimself with the best brains available, It is not certain that he would...
...In my view, to achieve a more rational order of priorities for investments that would maximize production growth, one should grant responsible autonomy to the units of production, establish less arbitrary domestic and foreign price scales, and levy some interest rate on the capital supplied to various enterprises...
...I prefer not to mention names so as to avoid causing them harm...
...Were Raul to replace him, as some people in Havana were envisaging early in 1970, the situation would risk becoming more difficult...
...A simple meal of soup, spaghetti, an ice, coffee, and beer costs 4.5 pesos...
...In the camps, a man carries out decisions that have been taken at the Plan level, which is certainly less removed from the area under consideration than was Havana from its granjas in 1963...
...Of the 50 scrapers that were to be provided for the three French teams, one group received 17, and another 5, which for all practical purposes were useless for a period of six months, the accompanying tractors having been despatched elsewhere...
...you leave from wherever you work, and it's obligatory...
...Foreign Technical Assistance Underexploited I CITE ONE OTHER EXAMPLE of the very high cost of overambitious goals and of the disorganization introduced by the militarized bureaucracy...
...Consumers have been divided into groups, to reduce the queues at the official ration stations...
...People looked at each other, stunned...
...Superhuman Effort for 10 Million Tons of Sugar...
...At a subsequent meeting...
...Here again, the wish has been to go full speed ahead, which is not necessarily the best way to win a race...
...Death of the Farm, Killed by Nomadism A GRANJA COMPRISING 2,000 hectares of rice paddies had, by way of stable personnel, only a manager, a two-man service team of storekeeper and cook, and two elderly, virtually retired section supervisors...
...Therefore, to the rear of the port a new area of warehouses must be created...
...Schools were established for tractor drivers or machine operators, which served also as schools for young recruits...
...there were two pairs...
...Militarization was pushed forward to cope with the general disorder, such as the passive resistance of a growing percentage of unwilling workers...
...But the peasantry's farm production is largely disregarded and is disappearing...
...it was now a splendid terrain for Army maneuvers...
...And we, we couldn't do it...
...Elsewhere in this study I note the many problems one encounters on the spot...
...The result is that thousands of Sierra Madre families are still cultivating—and thereby eroding—many steep hillsides...
...I want...
...By the end of the month, you can't wash yourself except with a horrible detergent...
...the afternoon and evening of Sunday, June Wages have been raised, and most Cubans 29, his assurances were rather convincing...
...It would seem desirable that a Central Committee at long last aware of its responsibilities make him understand that, on the basis of a partial view of the whole, he cannot decide every single detail himself without upsetting an order of priorities that has been established after mature consideration...
...In one small city, a long line waited throughout the night under the rain for espadrilles...
...Instead of starting, in scientific fashion, from the observation of facts and deducing guidelines for action from them, these people propose to bend facts to theory, to transform nature and man...
...His rejection of statistical calculations shows,1° on some scores, that his scientific education leaves much to be desired...
...EVERYONE, THEN, receives a plan, which generally has been elaborated at the national or provincial center, and this he must apply...
...It is difficult to believe that is was, or is, reasonable...
...Fidel would not accept this, because he has savored absolute power too much to be able any longer to divest himself of it by stages...
...Production costs rise in proportion to mounting mistakes, and revenue is thereby lowered...
...The moment has come for him to do some serious thinking, but he is so overwhelmed by the daily tasks he has taken on as part of his office that unfortunately he has no time...
...A certain quantity of cane that could have been ground in 1969 was carried over into 1970...
...It was late in 1968 that Fidel Castro formally promised to quadruple Cuban milk production within two years...
...interests...
...But this has not prevented in Cuba a rather similar sociological process to that which took place in Russia...
...with a medical excuse, you get a third of your pay...
...Among the 200 macheteros feeding one loading point, there have often been only 5 to 7 experienced cutters...
...cultural progress in the socialist world, he They all want to spend their money, and seemed to hesitate...
...Nothing more need be said here except that in our judgment Dumont offers further evidence for the view that without democratic criticism, institutions, and opposition, no society can be built on socialist lines...
...My neighbor's son is now two years old, and she has still to get the chickens due her when she was carrying him...
...Anyone who works in a factory is fed by his canteen, and this supplements his rations...
...Today it is across these rice fields that Fidel wishes the southern highway to pass, although this narrow, marshy strip will require enormous and futile preparatory work...
...The possibilities of agricultural growth are becoming indeed enormous, with the acceleration of scientific advances...
...The succeeding socialist system, one of co-operatives and granjas, mobilized all available resources and was mechanized, even overmechanized...
...By giving priority to the heaviest equipment, one does not necessarily acquire the most economical or most productive equipment per unit of foreign exchange spent...
...Present Party procedures in Cuba really provide for nothing more than the registering of approval...
...Today, in their majority, the Cuban people are no longer convinced, as they were in 1959 and 1960...
...At that point, he begins to feel he's had enough, and his production reflects it...
...But he also exaggerated the priority of sugar and, above all, alienated many competent technicians who became disgusted and were ultimately driven into the opposition...
...They finally turned up...
...The structure of the economy is such that it has become almost impossible to establish valid estimates whereby it might be better oriented...
...this was the reaction of the proud Caballero, not of the economist who is realistically aware of the present disproportion between the economy of Cuba and the tremendous might of Japan—the "third big power," according to Robert Guillain...
...What quantity of manure, what equipment, what growing techniques— all these questions are decided at the "technocratic" level, which is supposed to keep abreast of the most modem methods...
...Cuban agrarian plans are determined in terms of physical objectives, above all—in hectares to be planted and sown...
...This is "progressive decentralization": one no longer need go so often to the capital...
...One may ask this especially when those who are in control in Cuba do not practice austerity in their own lives, as do their Chinese counterparts...
...He is the one who knows everything, 10 Calculations without which one could not have selected the Filipino "miracle rice," which is so useful in Cuba...
...I am very much concerned...
...He gives orders that it be repaired immediately...
...But Fidel decides, with one stroke of the pen, that this section will be handled like the rest of the belt encircling Havana, which was planted with fruit trees interspersed with temporary coffee bushes...
...By three o'clock in the afternoon, a series of torrential rains began, earlier than usual...
...Also, the Plans are always falling behind schedule, so one must always work too fast, to the detriment of quality...
...Still others have become soldiers, tractor drivers, sowers...
...Still the lines lengthen, because firstcomers are better served as to quality, and they are more sure of being served...
...The official in charge, who had understood the usefulness of the canal, was transferred...
...And as we shall presently see, the all too modest effectiveness of Cuban capital investments greatly reduces their true value...
...The manager did what he could, but he was only the executor of a series of (sometimes conflicting) orders received either by shortwave (permanent monitoring post) or by impromptu visits...
...Fidel supported his position with marginal examples: he cited cases of extreme poverty in the Sierra Maestra...
...they live in barracks and cannot organize any kind of family life...
...this last lengthens the work day and aggravates the fatigue of pregnant or overworked women...
...half- hour tour I made with Fidel Castro on The basic food rations are very cheap...
...In July 1969, the Havana-Santiago de Cuba highway was begun...
...The scrapers arrived the following day, April 19, when the students were no longer on hand to help the drivers in leveling the terrain...
...The Havana harbor must increase its port facilities, for the provincial crops (citrus fruits, pineapple, bananas, coffee, early vegetables) and the output of new factories will augment the traffic flowing through it...
...THE MILITARISM OF FIDELISMO people slip away...
...Furthermore, the priority assigned to plantings for the "zafra of 10 millions" disorganized the 1969 harvest, especially its transportation...
...Anyone who opposes Castro's ideas is quickly thrown out...
...2 Some of my neighbors have been able to get them, but what lines they had to stand in...
...Cuban agriculture, however, carries out an ensemble of tasks that is infinitely more complex than those of a peacetime army...
...One result is that much cane has been cut out of season—when it was either too young or too old, or during the rains—and hence the yield is diminished...
...The rice was lost...
...Why sheep at the gates of a city that has such need of fresh milk, a product for which it is important to cut down on shipping distances and costs...
...Even if, in general, the top managers have a lofty awareness of their national and revolutionary responsibility, at the same time they satisfy their thirst for power...
...The brutal clearing that I have seen in Camaguey has uprooted too many trees that were useful for their shade, or as protection for riverbanks, or could have served as posts for wire fencing around the pastures, etc...
...A windfall...
...The doctors answered, "The Commission will decide...
...On February 2, it was decided to prepare only 33 hectares of rice paddies, but a more detailed topographical study was still needed before bringing in the equipment...
...In the meantime, until the windbreaks are widely established, the big trees could have been left standing...
...The first lap leading from the capital is an eight-lane road, four lanes each way...
...one would then obtain a production of 1,050 liters per existing milch cow, which, with the existing 500,000 Fl heifers, would make 525,000 more tons of milk...
...Grandiose Projects, Mistakenly Conceived IN THE SOUTH OF CAMAGUEY, 440 hectares of heath were cleared for the cultivation of rice IR 8. A drainage canal was needed to complete the job...
...Without denying socialism—indeed, quite the contrary— all could be permitted to share more widely in local, regional, and provincial power, as well as in the management of social services...
...If the Plans are to be flexible, the organizational structure, on the other hand, cannot continue with impunity to change so often...
...He agreed to circumvent the hospital, but his third sketch was still much inferior to the plan the specialists had prepared...
...In the Commission's offices, the lists of those "leaving for the big battle" were already drawn up...
...far from it...
...To achieve this, one would have to hand over to the Sierra Madre peasants—who do have to go on living—more moderately sloping fields, which would be assigned to THE MILITARISM OF FIDELISMO them in exchange for too precipitous hillsides that the government could protect by reforesting or planting cover crops...
...In October 1969, for the first time Fidel was booed in a workingclass neighborhood...
...Yet erosion worries him less, although this indiscriminate clearing of land encourages erosion on all the moderate slopes, and no adequately serious measures are being taken to halt it...
...Then we will have so many bananas that we will not sell them to you, we will give them to you...
...This would be quite acceptable in a chief of state if he did not insist on directing everything himself...
...The assignment of equipment to mobile brigades, which are separate from the farm production units, somewhat resembles the all too famous Soviet MTS [Mechanized Tractor Stations] of unhappy memory...
...But the fact that it was Fidel himself who ordered the test invested it with many supplementary chances of success that have nothing to do with science...
...he depended on the U.S...
...he had found that it was two hours and twenty minutes a day...
...Management Plans Are Too Uniform AT THE PROVISIONAL SEAT of the puesto de mando [command post] for Oriente Province, which at the time of my visit was in Bayamo, they explained to me how agriculture for the entire province was going to be organized...
...The fact that it is estimated one man will cut 1,150 to 1,300 kilograms a day, whereas a good machetero can manage 4 tons and a champion 7 tons, proves that unenthusiastic mobilized workers have predominated among the field hands...
...new equipment was not all in working order or well geared to earlier machinery...
...The doctrinaires in his entourage, not all of whom are Cuban, have posited philosophicalpolitical principles that are debatable but that in Cuba must now be accepted as revealed truths...
...RENE DUMONT what a marvelous training schoolthat can be for us" is approximately what a famous major said...
...Antihurricane windbreaks will eventually crosshatch the country, of course, but it takes time for them to be planted and grow to sufficient height—long, long years...
...He explained the advantages of large-scale cultivation, and sharply condemned the micro fundi, or small, peasant-owned farming...
...in three days of intensive training (they were full of good will), they learned how to do surveying, and within two weeks completed an impeccable relief map...
...Five hundred thousand times three, and one has 1.5 million more tons of milk a year, Fidel told us...
...You queue up for the too infrequent bus...
...In the best small dairies in the vicinity of Havana, if one eliminates the mediocre or short-term producing cows, and if the animals are well cared for, one often obtains 3,000 liters in first lactation...
...This portrait has recently been confirmed by Castro himself, who, as the New York Times reports on July 26, 1970, "drew a bleak picture of the Cuban economy, with conditions in many sectors bordering on chaos...
...Economic laws—and not all are abolished under a socialist government—sometimes take a diabolic revenge...
...As for the worker who suffers under a cruel sun and in badly ventilated barracks, he suffers even more when he gets complaining letters from his family, relating the multiple difficulties of daily life...
...Above all, each agricultural enterprise should have the minimal means of production at its own disposal...
...the French expert was asked to be content with 13 hectares-1 percent of the initial project—and with two scrapers...
...However, the difficulties of putting these advances into practice increase proportionately—above all, when one wants to go too fast...
...the tractor and machinery stations were always embroiled in discussion with "their" kolkhoz, and in the end had to be discontinued...
...Almost 1,000 caterpillar tractors, bulldozers, and tanks (their turrets removed) were assembled on the Cauto plains and received the signal to take off from Castro himself, as he stood in his command car and passed the troops in review...
...As a rule, the Army offers three separate messes—one for officers, one for noncommissioned officers and regular servicemen, and a third for the temporary recruits, who do not feel much like praising the food after listening to their comrades who wait on table at the officers' mess...
...Fidel defends the Cuban national interest...
...Of course, posters everywhere say "All energies tensed," but such a superhuman effort cannot last for several decades...
...However, one remains a guerrilla for only a few months, at the end of which is defeat or death or exhilarating victory...
...His entourage seems to be subjugated by a mixture of fear and admiration...
...Units of this scope, with the overcentralized direction of enterprises that extend over tens and even hundreds of thousands of hectares, require altogether exceptional organizational abilities...
...One hundred years of struggle," says the propaganda...
...DURING THE FIRST FEW DAYS I was inAT THE OUTSET, let me emphasize that in Cuba in late June 1969, I believed Cuba one does not encounter the extreme that an imminent transition to a com-poverty of some parts of Mexico, numerous munism without marked privations was fea-regions in northeast Brazil, or much of the sible...
...thus vast stretches of land were left unprotected against dangerous wind erosion...
...all important enterprises are headed by a major, a captain, or a first lieutenant...
...In this [1969] campaign, two trial efforts were ordered—stockbreeding and sugarcane cultivation and both failed...
...But when he begins "to promise the moon," many Cuban listeners flick off their radios...
...If all the feeders of these reservoirs were protected and if the cultivation of steep hillsides were forbidden, their span of usefulness could be greatly extended...
...but still, it ought not to be overdone...
...Apparently, in public everyone is for Fidel...
...THE MILITARISM OF FIDELISMO and the peasants used to be open-mouthed in admiration...
...Here I am again, incorrigible that I am, recommending materialistic incentives...
...The Che Guevara Brigade ESTABLISHED IN 1967-68, the Brigade was composed of 36 mechanized squads, each comprising 117 men and 20 heavy tractors and bulldozers, which enabled it to reclaim tens of thousands of hectares for cultivating sugarcane, rice, or pangola...
...Posts are beginning to receive from the production units that have been placed under their orders, daily, weekly, and monthly information, which is transmitted in various ways—by telephone, telex, radio, telegrams, and courier...
...As difficulties accumulate, Castro asks his fellow citizens not to linger over the present but to turn their eyes toward a more and more distant horizon-1980, for example...
...To adapt to or correct unforeseen situations, more local initiative should be allowed...
...This fact of perpetual transformation enables one to explain to visitors what the difficulties are...
...The section supervisors quite understood their own insignificance and were resigned to it...
...were the minimum salary spent on such meals, it would pay for 19 of them in a month...
...it is he who puts women to work, he who pushes the country ahead quite as much as he meddles in everything...
...But not all the tonnage has been turned into sugar yet,6 for there is urgent need to improve the coordination of all harvest activities and of loading...
...At another place, the crops are more neglected than elsewhere: "I want an agricultural school in this sector...
...All important posts are entrusted to the Army...
...earlier this year in France, it created a sensation throughout Europe...
...With the monthly minimum salary of 85 pesos, if you have a lot of children, there's scarcely any question of buying extras...
...And he draws an ever more idyllic picture of that future—on condition that his people accept a program of work that becomes more and more extravagant, especially in the eyes of anyone who thinks first of the Cubans' daily rice ration...
...But they are muffled by his entourage, which bears, without always realizing it, the heaviest of responsibilities...
...The goal was 10 million metric tons...
...You'll build me a real road, a good asphalt road here...
...I sense once again foreign visitors in the background of this project, for many are easily impressed...
...12 It is a question that makes one hesitate, certainly, for if Fidel is a caballero he is also the caballo, the horse that, for better or worse, pulls the Cubans onward...
...You think so...
...However, it is the command center that decides, albeit far from the field of operations...
...The socialism we are looking for in no respect entrusts to one man alone all the decisions, big and small, nor the power to delegate responsibility to his men alone, chosen solely by him...
...His colleague, who was responsible for experimentation throughout the province, asked me to get him a book on the organization of labor in agriculture...
...On December 15, when the project plan was received, the French team learned that they would have to be content with 10 scrapers and begin work December 22...
...the other began work the morning of April 21...
...At the time of this writing, all the Agricultural Plans are already depicted there, with individual lights that allow one to quickly illuminate all the rice plantations, citrus orchards, grazing savannahs, etc...
...extraordinary records were cited24 hours, and presently 72 hours of uninterrupted work...
...It should be pointed out that this makes them a privileged group in comparison to the ordinary workers on the granjas and the Plans, who earn 85 •to 120 pesos a month and who generally must pay for their own food...
...Thus he assumes unchecked personal power, which fosters around him a courtier-like atmosphere...
...it is too porous for rice, but very fertile and suitable for other crops, The French technicians had difficulty in getting the site shifted to a marshy zone...
...has occurred since 1963 [the year of the RENE DUMONT author's previous visit], but a change for the worse...
...No one is permanently on hand THE MILITARISM OF FIDELISMO to watch over the crops closely enough, except perhaps the experts in insect and plant diseases...
...transport facilities are inadequate, and much repair work is delayed...
...Who will have the courage to propose to Cuba that she establish democratic discussions along with the forms of popular control such as Che used to speak of and that Lenin considered to be an obligatory counterweight to democratic centralism...
...and made every concession to U.S...
...In the United States, people who often compare the present situation to the preceding dicatorship of Batista are wrong...
...The moment one refuses to make use of the formidable profit motive, mankind's most potent incitement to activity, or as soon as people have moved out of primitive or patriarchal societies, other motivations must be found...
...By 1968, the Cubans saw that the scrapers could be put to many other uses...
...The Cuban people were made increasingly subservient to the Party and the Army, and it was becoming more and more difficult to distinguish between the two, inasmuch as both groups wore uniforms and carried revolvers...
...Prior to March 1969, one used to find vegetables, books, some clothing...
...His successor said that he was going to do the job "using dynamite, it's quicker," and then did nothing...
...They waited two weeks for the truck that was to transport them (they could have covered the distance faster on foot...
...Sugar losses are immediate, and this time, instead of the average 12 percent yield, the rate dropped to as low as 3 percent...
...However, Fidel had just read two beautiful books on the Olympic Games in Japan, with superb photographs of highways and interchanges: "The Japanese are more—than we are, and they've done it...
...I've not had a pair of shoes since 1963...
...Instead of 10 liters over 300 days, they were giving on an average 6 liters for 250 days, or 1,500 liters per lactation...
...in a state enterprise that justifies its existence only on the grounds of its technical superiority, such an error is inadmissible...
...To meet the goal, a part of the 1969 harvest had already been sacrificed, and it barely exceeded 4.3 million tons...
...At that, the French expert let it be understood that he was "disgusted to have been paid to do nothing, out of ex change saved on food for the Cuban people," and he refused to stay on.9 One of his colleagues had noted down the actual daily cutting time for reaper-beaters during the rice harvest...
...For, he said, the granjas, were going to plant 2000 caballerias (27,000 hectares) in bananas for Oriente Province alone, and these state farms RENE DUMONT would be in full production in 1969...
...So it is up to other political leaders of the country, and I mean here especially Raul Castro, Osvaldo Dorticos, C. R. Rodriguez, Armando Iart, and Bias Roca, to advise him to move in this direction, if they have the courage to do so and if they realize that the present power structure, set up as a personal dictatorship, risks leading quickly to a series of difficulties that could end in catastrophe...
...A good meal costs more than twice as much...
...Everything for the Foreign Visitor NONETHELESS, CASTRO IS WELL INFORMED in agricultural matters and many of his decisions are justified...
...Fidel Castro took his book, La Productivite de l'Herbe, which does contain interesting information, a bit too much as holy writ, and has gone about ordering a pattern of small pastures all over the country...
...After the heavy June rains, the 440 hectares, each bearing more than four tons of well-ripened grain, were covered by three feet of water...
...But he does all this according to his own ideas, convinced that his are the best...
...You queue up for the films, queue up to make a cab drive around Holguin, queue up to sit on the terrace of a cafe, which sells neither coffee nor beer...
...The clearing of the land followed a line of march roughly paralleling that of the rebel columns ten years before—a sentimental, guerrillalike work criterion that did not allow for adequate economic evaluation...
...I caught myself just in time, for I was on the verge of pronouncing the phrase "self-management of base units," which would have led to my being accused of the Yugoslav heresy...
...Such symbolization of power does not make him very attractive...
...Or to permit privations caused by an urgent preoccupation with future development to be aggravated by economic disorganization...
...He counseled —logically—against planting bananas on the steep slopes of that historic mountain, where every planting precipitates erosion...
...For the departure point of the two highways that will extend from Havana to the west and to the east, Fidel proposed the Plaza de la Revoluci6n, and with one stroke of his red pencil indicated their position on a map that specialists had been studying for weeks...
...In 1969, one learned occasionally that such and such a plan had been assisted by elements of the Brigade...
...It is the reply not of a socialist but of a grand seigneur...
...when they were no longer useful, one could have blasted them out with "dynamiters," which use a fertilizer, nitrate of ammonia, as explosive...
...To hasten the sprouting of the rice, he interpreted the technician's advice in his own fashion and ordered 3,000 big lamps, circus spotlights, to be installed on 12-foot posts "to keep the rice continually warm...
...A lot of time is lost not only in moving them about from place to place but also in setting up and organizing each work camp...
...Agriculture: A Military Drill Field THE CASTRO ADMINISTRATION'S first step was to eliminate a capitalistic agricultural system that did have many flaws—both men and land were underemployed—but was quite efficiently organized...
...The fact that Castro announced on November 6 that the Army would have to cut 20-30 percent of the cane emphasizes the seriousness of the labor shortage...
...Many tickets are not honored...
...The monthly ration of beans makes three meals...
...This would seem more urgent than building the terraces of Pinar del Rio...
...the proof is that they survive him, beyond their semieclipse under Khrushchev...
...A very limited participation exists today, but it may not infringe on the domain Castro reserves for himself—even though this domain would gain by being limited to the essential elements of defense and security...
...Major Parra would have liked me to share his enthusiasm by just imagining the immense relief map of Cuba, 27 meters long and 8 wide, which was soon to be installed in the big room...
...Nonetheless, a centralized structure offers certain advantages: one can impose a series of innovations simultaneously throughout the country...
...If the command center does not have suffici ently detailed information, its decisions risk being irrelevant to the actual situation...
...So one does a bit of everything, and loses still more time in shifting equipment about...
...The old manure formula, which by comparison is very badly handled, is hardly in danger of yielding more—which could provoke a memorable burst of anger from Fidel...
...One young French expert declared he was amazed to see my evaluation of the Cuban situation fall so short of what he was kind enough to consider my habitual clear-sightedness...
...often the work is halted before things are beginning to run smoothly...
...His route would have required a very wide avenue to provide access to the port— city traffic augmenting the flow of vehicles on the two highways—and the old quarter of the city would have had to be disemboweled at great expense...
...I hesitate to reach this conclusion, for I have looked carefully for all the positive factors...
...The test was made during the dry season of 1968-69, when there was scarcely any danger of damage from rain beating down and therefore less need of potash...
...Plans are quickly elaborated on the basis of too hasty or even nonexistent studies...
...In the Camaguey dairy triangle, there were already 6,000 Fl heifers producing milk...
...Sugarcane has demonstrated over the centuries that it fits well into single-crop cultivation and that it can be grown indefinitely in the same soil...
...Certainly Castro's personality is very different from that of Stalin...
...Offices are staffed by relatively uninformed advisers who will not listen to those who know more than they do...
...It was genuine warfare, complete with communiques...
...More serious still: the clearing tactics are most brutal...
...with a little imagination, S There is magnesium sulfate in the subsoil water...
Vol. 17 • September 1970 • No. 5
