20 December 2007

Giving Up

Well, it looks like Cuba is lowering its red flag and raising the white flag of surrender, at least when it comes to agriculture.

All through the 60’s, in Cuba, it seems all you ever heard was about something called “la Reforma Agraria”. Fidel devoted hours upon hours upon hours to lecture us Cubans on how Cuba with its land reforms and socialist model was going to become an agrarian powerhouse that was going to feed its population and have enough left over to export…just like before he took over.

And here we are 46 years later and Cuba has to IMPORT ½ its food, $2 Billion worth, with 50% of its fertile arable land going to waste. To waste. Not being farmed. Run over by Marabu. While the population is hungry.

In a normal country, a farmer who owns the land, would farm it and sell the harvest. The harder he works, the more he makes. You know the drill.

But in Marxist-Castroist-Feudalist Cuba, the State owns the land and all the farming “industry” and the farmers are “employed” by the state and get paid a salary. The harder they work, well, the more they sweat. That’s it.

Faced with the system’s inability to produce enough food to feed its people, the regime realizes that what it needs is a different system and it has been forced to give up on the Castro agricultural model- Surrender. Wave the White Flag. Admit defeat. But rather than give the land to the farmers and let them farm efficiently, assuming there are any farmers left who know how to farm correctly since it has been 49 years since it has been done, the regime would rather bring in foreign investors to farm the Cuban land.

They would rather have foreigners make money off the sweat of Cuban farmers than allow Cuban farmers to make money. This allows them to steal the difference between what the foreign Ag companies pay the regime for the Cuban indentured servant farmers and what the regime pays the Cuban farm workers. It also ensures that the Cuban farm workers stay at the same misery and poverty level as the rest of the population so that they can be controlled with State induced famine through food rationing.What a slap in the face.

And I keep hearing that Raul is a reformer who’s going to bring “structural changes.” Structural changes as to how the regime goes about exploiting the Cuban people, maybe.

6 comments:

Tomás Estrada-Palma said...

I believe you meant to write 50% of Cuba's food has to be "Imported." Their major export remains bull shit propaganda.

roland said...

So instead of companies like United Fruit that the revolution forced out of Cuba, they are now simply replacing them with other foreign companies. The revolution has come full circle, only now everyone outside the ruling elite is poor, hungry, and have no freedom!

Henry Louis Gomez said...

Tomas is right. Cuba "Imports" 50% of its food.

Juan Cuellar said...

Marry Christmas to all.

Cuba has "cheap labor force" for economic growth" according to Joe Garcia. It is tge embargo and the "hard exiles" that is preventing such economics improvement. They want, as Alamar Associates, USAEngage, The Trade World Centers, al sorts of agriculture association, councils, think tanks, etc to establish Cuba as the China of the Caribbean. This is the begining to entice the americans. The oil is another. Poor Cuba if this merchants win. Cuba will be mark for ever and ever. That is why the embargo is so key in this battle.

Tomás Estrada-Palma said...

How can you call it an embargo when you sell the enemy food and medicine while the enemy claims we are blockading them? There is no doubt we are losing that information battle and that I believe is blocking us from final victory in the war.

Juan Cuellar said...

The difference, estrada-palma in the embargo that I am talking about is that still is the law, which means that Castro's goons with their counterparts in the USA cannot imports nothing, zilch, nada over here from over there. The notion that the "gringos" are not filling their segregated hotels, beaches ant those sort of places in detriment of the Cuban people is overwhelming to me and still prohibited. The fact that we, the taxpayers, do not have to subsidize his regimen when his default on his payments. But if you do not understand what embargo I am talking about after all of that, go to the store (anyone) pick a item and see where it is made. Go the the Net and find out how big is our trade deficit with that country that made those items. After you identify that country, see what kind of government that country has. Next, seek out what % the USA occupy in world consumption in the world market. When you finish that, tell me if there is an embargo important enough to defend 'till the end. Yes, we sell the stuffs, thanks to the lobby of those merchants as their first step and their congressman and president Clinton, but thanks to our representative in Washington, those sales has to be paid in cash. They, the ones that lobby in the media for that "humanitarian sales" to the enemy, as you so well put it, are claiming that American business can go over there (Cuba) any time, while the Cubans can only go once every three years. That is the biggest hypocrisy, to say the least.

What embargo? You still ask