The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.63/No.8           March 1, 1999 
 
 
Land Reform Conquests In Revolutionary Cuba  

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
Below we reprint excerpts from "Land reform and farm cooperatives in Cuba - Introduction to three Cuban documents" by Mary-Alice Waters. It appears in issue no. 4 of the Marxist magazine New International together with two speeches by Cuban president Fidel Castro and "The Agrarian Question and Relations with the Peasantry," theses adopted by the First Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba in December 1975. The magazine is copyright (c) 1985 by 408 Printing and Publishing Corp. and printed with permission.

"The party's policy toward the peasantry is based on the principles of the worker-peasant alliance.

"The worker-peasant alliance is the union in struggle of the working class and the working peasant; that is, with the small and medium peasants who work the land with their own labor and that of their families.

"It is the union in struggle between two laboring classes, two classes that were exploited, that suffered the domination (of the bourgeois-landlord regime....

"The worker-peasant alliance is not a temporary, tactical pact but rather a strategic and enduring union between these two classes, a union whose final objective, as Fidel said, is to `carry the revolutionary process forward until every single one of us belongs to a society without classes, a society of producers, a society of workers with equal rights.

- from "The Agrarian Question and Relations with the Peasantry, " theses adopted by the First Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, 1975.

The revolutionary alliance between the workers and peasants of Cuba, the alliance in struggle to break the yoke of imperialist domination and end their exploitation by the big landowners and capitalists, has been and remains the backbone of the Cuban revolution. The roots of struggle by the toilers of Cuba's countryside and cities go back to 1868, to the beginning of the war for independence against Spain. Its history can be traced through the victorious liberation war of 1895-98, and the defeat of the Spanish colonizers - followed by the military intervention by Yankee imperialism and subjugation once again.

Throughout the twentieth century the struggle continued against the various brutal and corrupt dictators who ruled by the grace of Washington. With the revolutionary destruction of the Batista tyranny on January 1, 1959, the struggle by workers and peasants entered a new stage.

"Without this alliance with the peasantry, the working class would not have united sufficient forces to expel imperialism and its puppet, overthrow the capitalist system, and free itself from exploitation," states the theses adopted by the First Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba.

"Without this alliance with the working class, the peasantry would not have been able to break the yoke of the latifundists and the bourgeoisie."

Without this firm alliance, consolidated through the agrarian reform and other far-reaching social measures of the Cuban revolution, the working people of Cuba would not have been able to withstand the quarter century of U.S. imperialist aggression, sabotage, and blockade.

While the roots of this alliance in struggle go back to the last century, the three Cuban documents that are published in this issue of New International address one of the most decisive questions of proletarian strategy in the epoch of imperialism: the place of the worker-peasant alliance in the political strategy of the working class, which strives to lead the exploited producers to take power, establish a workers' and farmers' government, and carry through the socialist transformation of the economic foundations of society....

The 1959 Agrarian Reform Law, which is referred to frequently throughout the three items that follow, was the measure that more than any other single fact "defined the Cuban Revolution," in Castro's words. Its rapid implementation consolidated the class alliance on which the revolution was based - the alliance of the workers, including the agricultural workers, and working peasants. It brought the revolution into head-on confrontation with U.S. imperialism and its Cuban allies.

The goal of the law was to expropriate the large plantations, eliminate the system of rents and mortgages crushing the peasantry, and guarantee use of the land to those who worked it.

The reform was administered by a newly created National Institute of Agrarian Reform. Staffed by cadres of the Rebel Army and the July 26 Movement (the organization founded by the Fidelista leadership team, which was the political vanguard of the revolution), INRA was granted sweeping powers over virtually every aspect of the economy.

The amount of land an individual family could own was limited to approximately 1,000 acres in most cases, and 3,300 acres for some types of agriculture such as cattle raising, or where the land was especially productive. The maximum size of landholdings was, in fact, the limit written into the 1940 constitution of Cuba, which forbade the holding of latifundia, i.e., individual properties of over a thousand acres.

The Agrarian Reform Law prohibited ownership of Cuban land by foreigners. (Before 1959 more than 50 percent of the most productive land in Cuba was owned by foreigners.)

Ownership of cane land by sugar mill owners was forbidden.

Large estates that had previously been worked as a single unit were kept intact and were soon turned into state enterprises.

Prior to the revolution, 85 percent of Cuba's small farmers rented rather than owned their land and lived under constant threat of eviction. Two hundred thousand peasant families did not have a single acre of land to till for their own use. The 1959 agrarian reform guaranteed each peasant family a "vital minimum" of 67 acres. Every tenant, sharecropper, or squatter cultivating up to 165 acres was given clear title to that land.

Privately owned land could be mortgaged only to the state, which made financing available to poor peasants at favorable rates. Land could not be divided and could be inherited by only one person.

The law stated that agrarian reform land grants "may not be transferred other than through inheritance, sale to the state, or exchange authorized by the authorities charged with its enforcement, nor be the subject of lease agreements, sharecropping agreements, usufruct, or mortgage. "

In short, with the 1959 reform, the system of rents and mortgages ceased to exist. Land was no longer a commodity and land speculation became a thing of the past. The legal maximum holding, nonetheless, was large by European standards; even in the United States a thousand acres is a sizable farm. The terms of compensation were more generous than those of the land reform imposed on Japan by the U. S. army of occupation government under Gen. Douglas MacArthur following World War II.

But the Cuban and Yankee owners of vast landholdings in Cuba were stunned by the new law. They were outraged by the compensation offered: twenty-year government bonds at 4.5 percent, payable in Cuban pesos and not convertible into U. S . dollars. Property values were determined by accepting the evaluations previously set by owners themselves for purposes of taxation, which grossly underestimated the value of their holdings. Owners were given a choice: either pay up the back taxes they had evaded for years by undervaluing their property, or accept compensation based on tax assessment records....

The agrarian reform defined the Cuban revolution and put its stamp on the government precisely because - despite its bourgeois-democratic nature - only the alliance of workers and working peasants could carry it through and defend it. That class alliance, and the capacities of the vanguard leadership in Cuba, determined the dynamic of the revolution and defined its character.

 
 
 
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