BY MARTÍN KOPPEL AND BRIAN TAYLOR
HAVANA, Cuba - "On May 17, 1959, we crossed the Rubicon," stated Cuban president Fidel Castro at a rally here celebrating the adoption, exactly 40 years ago, of a land reform law, one of the first - and defining -measures of the Cuban revolution. "It was a step from which there was no retreat."
"The assault on the Moncada barracks allowed no turning back. The landing of the Granma was an action that allowed no turning back," Castro continued, referring to other turning points in the revolutionary struggle that led Cuba's workers and farmers to overthrow a U.S.-backed dictatorship on Jan. 1, 1959, and take political power.
The rally, held in the auditorium of the ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, was sponsored by the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP). Hundreds of peasants from around the country were among the special guests at the event, which was the culmination of activities marking the 40th anniversary of Cuba's first agrarian reform law.
Through that 1959 measure, the revolutionary government confiscated millions of acres of large landholdings owned by U.S. and Cuban capitalist families, and hundreds of thousands of small farmers received titles to the land they worked (see the text of Castro's June 21, 1959, speech on the agrarian reform beginning on page 6). A second agrarian reform measure in October 1963 further limited the size of landholdings.
Over the previous weekend, Peasants Day, as May 17 is known, was marked by popular festivities in all of Cuba's provinces. In Pinar del Río province, ANAP members gathered at a farm cooperative to celebrate four decades since the first peasant militias were initiated by a group of farmers in that region to defend the revolution against growing threats by Washington and attacks by local capitalist-backed counterrevolutionaries.
A similar celebration was held in the town of Cruces, Cienfuegos province, which was awarded first place in an emulation campaign for strengthening the work of ANAP.
Also that weekend, ANAP hosted an international gathering that brought together, at ANAP's national leadership school in Havana province, about 100 delegates from more than a dozen countries from throughout the Americas and Spain. Earlier, ANAP together with the Institute of Cuban History and the ministries of sugar and agriculture sponsored a conference on "Agrarian Reform and Development: Past, Present, and Future" attended by several dozen historians, social scientists, teachers, and a number of peasants who were leaders of the early stages of the revolutionary struggle.
The ANAP-sponsored events were more than commemorations of a historical date. The thread running through them was the determination of Cuba's farmers and workers to strengthen their revolutionary gains today in face of the international capitalist economic crisis and Washington's unremitting hostility toward their revolution.
Repudiation of assault on Yugoslavia
In one conversation after another, farmers and others
interviewed by Militant reporters brought up the U.S.-led
assault on Yugoslavia, voicing their repudiation of the
imperialist savagery against the people of that country.
Identification with the people of Yugoslavia is widespread, as
is the understanding that what is happening there is a threat
aimed at the Cuban revolution as well.
At the "Heroes of Bolivia" farm cooperative in Havana province, Alexander Leyva, 26, expressed his view of the NATO bombing campaign in the Balkans. "It's a slaughter," he declared. "They couldn't do that against Cuba. If the imperialists ever decided to launch an attack on us like they're doing against the Yugoslavs, they would be making a big mistake. We will defend our country, our land, and everything we have."
Castro condemned the imperialist war against Yugoslavia in his May 17 speech. "Yugoslavia is being bombed by swarms of planes. They are destroying everything -homes, bridges, communications, services, factories, fuel centers - depriving the country of all means of life," he said. "They want to wage a war without [NATO] casualties. But if it becomes a ground war, everything will change."
"With all their immense military might, the imperialists have been unable to crush the Yugoslav people," the Cuban president stressed.
Likewise, he added, echoing many working people here, "our people are capable of resisting any attack."
Castro pointed out that the Cuban people have come out stronger in the course of their battle against the effects of the worldwide capitalist economic crisis. The harshest consequences of this crisis, known here as the Special Period, were unleashed a decade ago with the abrupt collapse of favorable commercial relations with and aid from the Soviet bloc countries, which accounted for 85 percent of Cuba's trade. The island was brutally thrust into the world capitalist market.
"Cuba suffered blows," Castro said. "Our fields suffered the effects of not having fertilizer for years. They could not be tended adequately because of the lack of fuel" needed for tractors and other farm equipment. One result was that the sugar industry suffered damage over a several-year period that is still taking its toll on the production of Cuba's main crop, which generates much-needed hard currency for the country's social needs and economic development.
Surviving Special Period a `major feat'
The economic crisis has been compounded by Washington's
tightening of the economic embargo, Castro said, pointing to
the 1992 Torricelli law, the 1996 Helms-Burton law, and other
measures tacked onto U.S. government budget appropriations
bills that make it more difficult and costly for Cuba to
obtain needed goods from other countries. In a recent
provocation, a U.S. judge ruled in favor of the Bacardi
family - former Cuban capitalists - granting their company the
right to continue using the name "Havana Club" to sell its
own, non-Cuban rum.
Revolutionary Cuba's ability to weather the Special Period "is a major feat," Castro underlined. "The collapse of the socialist camp shook up a lot of people" around the world, he noted, referring to the disintegration of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. "But the [Cuban] revolution did not crumble as some had hoped."
"Not a single school, child-care center, or clinic was closed. Not a single doctor was left unemployed. And during this same period, 300,000 new doctors became part of the health-care system," the Cuban president pointed out. In fact, despite the economic blows, Cuba today has a lower infant mortality rate than the United States, the wealthiest imperialist nation.
In contrast to countries in the semicolonial world, including most of Latin America, where governments have sold off state-owned companies to capitalist investors and slashed jobs and living standards of millions of working people in the process, "we haven't sold off the country. This country belongs to us," Castro emphasized.
Referring to the sweeping measures adopted in 1993 to turn most of the state farms into cooperatives known here as UBPCs (Basic Units of Cooperative Production), Castro noted to great applause that instead of selling off the land to real estate sharks or imperialist banks, "we turned it over to workers." That was the `privatization' we carried out."
Despite the hardships, "the country is moving forward, and no one can stop it," the Cuban president stated. "During the lean years, these experiences have taught us" many things about producing more efficiently, with less waste and better quality.
Speaking before Castro, ANAP president Orlando Lugo Fonte reported that Cuban agriculture has improved in a number of areas over last year. This year's sugar harvest, while still about half of the average levels attained in the years prior to the Special Period, will be slightly larger than last year's harvest of 3.2 million tons. And non-sugar agricultural production grew by 35 percent over the previous year. There have been increases in the production of root vegetables and citrus fruits, and record or near-record harvests of potatoes, tomatoes, and other vegetables.
Land reform law sparks U.S. hostility
Reviewing what Cuban working people have achieved since the
first agrarian reform law was signed 40 years ago in the
mountain village of La Plata in the Sierra Maestra, Castro
explained that "with this just and necessary law, the conflict
with imperialist interests began" because that measure gave
land to hundreds of thousands of Cuban peasants, at the
expense of U.S. companies, which had owned 3.7 million acres
of prime agricultural land throughout the island.
Wealthy families left Cuba and rejected the revolutionary government's offer of compensation for the confiscated land, believing they would soon return to reimpose their rule - a miscalculation on their part.
"Beginning with that agrarian reform law, the U.S. government decided to try to overthrow the revolution," Castro stated. We were not yet talking about socialism, he noted. That came two years later, in April 1961, as Cuban working people were mobilizing to crush the U.S.-backed mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs (known in Cuba as Playa Girón).
The agrarian reform, which many Cubans today point out was in fact an agrarian revolution, is the foundation on which the alliance between Cuba's workers and farmers has been forged. It has defined the unity and strength of the Cuban revolution.
"The revolution gave peasants something more than a land reform law," Castro said. It "brought peasants education, health care, security, credit, the writing off of their debts after natural disasters, electrification, and education - for themselves and the opportunity for their children to pursue university studies to any career."
The creation of jobs and mechanization of the sugarcane harvest put an end to the scourge of the dead season, which before the Cuban revolution left hundreds of thousands of canecutters jobless for nine months out of the year.
Cuban farmers, previously subjected to the rule of the bosses' political parties, now hold positions at all levels of government, Castro noted.
"The peasant began to fully become a person, instead of being a pariah as he was before the revolution," when peasants were supposed to tremble at the arrival of the Batista dictatorship's rural guards mounted on their big Texan horses, he said.
"It is the peasants who have defended the revolution, together with the farm workers, the workers in the cities, and students," Castro stated. Peasants fought against the U.S.- backed invasion at Playa Girón in 1961, and in the struggle in the early 1960s against counterrevolutionary bands operating in the Escambray mountains. "Forty thousand working people mobilized in the Escambray, and captured every single counterrevolutionary bandit," he said.
As a result of the gains made by working people and the active role played by working farmers in the fight for a socialist future, "imperialism will never have a social base among the peasants in Cuba," Castro said. "They have always been in the front trenches of the struggle to defend the revolution."
At a celebration of the agrarian reform law held at a local ANAP center south of Havana, two veteran revolutionary farmers brought home this point in a discussion with Militant reporters.
Before the triumph of the revolution, said Angel López Rivero, 71, he could only find work three or four months a year as a sugarcane cutter on big capitalist plantations.
He had to live off those wages during the tiempo muerto, the dead season. Agueda Fernández Soto, 66, López's fellow fighter and lifelong companion, explained, "My father had a small plot of land and times were hard for us; they were even rougher for those who had no land. I had four kids with no shoes or clothes for them, nothing. There were simply no jobs. I was semiliterate."
Fernández learned to read and write through the literacy campaign in the early 1960s and today remains active in ANAP, carrying out local leadership responsibilities.
At the beginning of the revolution "we had doubts and fears about socialism," López said. "We heard stories that socialism in Cuba would mean an Iron Curtain and other such garbage. But when the revolution was victorious and the land reform started, we began to see the revolution with new eyes.
"We defended the revolution during the Playa Girón invasion. And we are ready to give our lives to defend the revolution against imperialism today," he said. López and Fernández added that these are the lessons, based on their firsthand experience with capitalism, they try to bring to the new generation.