When the Communist PSP encouraged peasants to take the land reform into their own hands with ‘spontaneous land seizures’, Castro issued a severe rebuff: ‘We are opposed to anarchic land distributions ... Any provocation to distributions of lands disregarding ... the agrarian law is criminal’. [22] When the final version of land reform was finally implemented, it was done without even the participation of the peasants and landless labourers. René Dumont, a left wing agronomist who was twice invited to Cuba (in the early and late 1960s) to advise Castro on agricultural matters, tells how plans for cooperatives were developed and then replaced by what were effectively state farms:
The statutes governing the cooperatives were worked out behind closed doors and not in public discussions ... By August 1960 ... the cooperative formula was definitively set aside, without those involved being either advised or consulted. [23]
What leaders said went – and among the leaders what Castro said went. As Farber writes:
These masses would support and participate in what came to be known as the mass organisations but would not truly and democratically control these organisations, let alone their own destiny. The mass rally, in which the leaders control the podium and speak and spell out policy which the masses applaud, not daring to amend or object, became emblematic of the new regime. [24]
Dumont noted that by the early summer of 1960 ‘stringent criticism, even of a technical nature, was no longer fashionable in the Cuban press’. [25] Farber points out that ‘the elimination of all opposition and independent newspapers ... occurred during the summer of 1960, when most of the printed and visual media supported the regime and the government faced no clear and present danger’. [26] Dumont summed up the attitude of the leaders of the revolution as he found it, saying this was rule ‘for the people, but it was not government by the people, who, it was assumed, did not know what they needed’. [27]
It was an attitude reflected in statements of Che Guevara at the time
https://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/2006/xx/cuba.htm
My own private Guantanamo
No comments:
Post a Comment