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(Part Three)
The demise of the Soviet Union was to us like
there were no more sunrises; a devastating blow
for the Cuban Revolution. Not only did this
translate into a total cessation of supplies of
fuel, materials and foods; we lost markets and
the prices that we had attained for our products
in the difficult struggle for our sovereignty,
integration and principles. The empire and the
traitors, full of hatred, were sharpening their
daggers with those who wanted to put the
revolutionaries to the sword and recover the
country’s riches.
The Gross Domestic Product progressively
plummeted to 35 percent. What country could
have withstood such a terrible blow? We were
not defending our lives; we were defending our
rights.
Many left-wing parties and organizations became
discouraged in the wake of the collapse of the
USSR after its titanic effort to build socialism
during the course of more than 70 years.
The reactionaries’ criticisms coming from all
platforms and mass media were ferocious. We did
not add our voices to the chorus of capitalism’s
apologists, beating a dead horse. Not one
statue to the creators or followers of Marxism
was demolished in Cuba. Not one school or
factory had its name changed. And we decided to
press ahead with unchangeable steadiness. That
was what we had promised to do under such
hypothetical and unbelievable circumstances.
Nor had we ever practiced personality cults in
our country, something that we had taken the
initiative to prohibit right from the first days
after the triumph.
In peoples’ history, it has been subjective
factors that have brought forward or delay
outcomes, independently of the leaders’ worth.
I spoke to Lula about Che, briefly outlining his
story for him. Che used to argue with Carlos
Rafael Rodríguez about the of self-financed and
the budgetary method, things we didn’t consider
that important then as we were involved in the
struggle against the US blockade, their
aggression plans and the 1962 October Missile
Crisis, a real survival issue.
Che studied the budgets of the great Yankee
companies whose managers lived in Cuba, not
their owners. He drew from this a clear idea
about how imperialism worked and what was
happening in our society and this enriched his
Marxist ideas and led him to the conclusion that
in Cuba we couldn’t use the same methods to
build socialism. But this didn’t mean we were
dealing with a war of insults; these were open
exchanges of opinions that were published in a
small magazine, with no intention of creating
rifts or divisions among ourselves.
What happened in the USSR later would not have
surprised Che. While he held important posts
and carried out his duties, he was always
careful and respectful. His language grew
tougher when he collided with the horrible human
reality imposed by imperialism; he became aware
of this in the former Belgian colony of the
Congo.
He was a self-sacrificing, studious and profound
man; he died in Bolivia with a handful of
combatants from Cuba and other Latin American
countries, fighting for the liberation of Our
America. He did not survive to experience the
world of today, where problems unknown to us
then have since come into play.
You didn’t know him, I told him. He was
disciplined in voluntary work, in his studies
and behavior. He was modest and selfless, and he
set an example both in production centers and in
combat.
I think that in building socialism, the more the
privileged receive, the less will go to the
neediest.
I repeat to Lula that time measured in years
was now flying by very quickly; each one of them
was multiplying. One can almost say the same
about each day. Fresh news is published
constantly, relating to the situations
anticipated in my meeting with him on the 15th.
With plenty of economic arguments, I explained
to him that when the Revolution triumphed in
1959, the United States was paying for an
important part of our sugar production with the
preferential price of 5 cents a pound; for
almost half a century this would be sent to that
country’s traditional marketplace which was
always supplied, at critical moments, by a
secure supplier just off their shores. When we
proclaimed the Land Reform Law, Eisenhower
decided what had to be done, and we hadn’t yet
nationalized their sugar mills –it would have
been premature to do so– nor had we yet applied
the agrarian law of May 1959 to the large
estates. Because of that hasty decision, our
sugar quota was suspended in December 1960, and
later redistributed among other producers in
this and other regions of the world as
punishment. Our country became blockaded and
isolated.
Worst of all was the lack of scruples and the
methods used by the empire to impose its
domination over the world. They brought viruses
into the country and destroyed the best
sugarcane; they attacked the coffee, the
potatoes and also the swine. The Barbados-4362
was one of our best varieties of sugarcane:
early maturity, a sugar yield that sometimes
reached 13 or 14 percent; its weight per hectare
could exceed 200 tons of cane in 15 months. The
Yankees resorted to pests to wipe out the best.
Even worse: they brought in the hemorrhagic
dengue virus that affected 344 thousand people
and took the lives of 101 children. We don’t
know whether they used other viruses –perhaps
they didn’t because they were afraid of the
proximity of Cuba.
When due to these problems we couldn’t send to
the USSR the sugar shipments under contract with
that country, they continued sending us the
goods we had agreed upon. I remember
negotiating with the Soviets every cent of the
sugar price; I discovered in practice what I had
only known about in theory: unequal exchange.
They were securing a price that was above the
world market price. The agreements were planned
for five years; if at the beginning of the
five-year period you were sending an X amount of
tons of sugar in payment for the goods, at the
end of that period the value of their products,
in international prices, was 20 percent higher.
They were always generous in their negotiations:
once the world market price temporarily shot up
to 19 cents, we latched on to that price and
they accepted. Later this served as a basis for
the application of the socialist principle which
says that the more economically developed should
support the less developed as they build
socialism.
When Lula asked me what the purchasing power was
of 5 cents, I explained that with one ton of
sugar at that time we could by 7 tons of oil;
today, the reference price of light oil, 100
dollars, will only buy one barrel. The sugar we
export, at current prices, would only suffice to
import oil that would be used up in 20 days. We
would have to spend about 4 billion dollars per
year to buy it.
The United States subsidizes its agriculture
with tens of billions each year. Why does the
U.S. not allow the ethanol you produce freely
into the country? They subsidize it brutally,
thus denying Brazil income for billions of
dollars every year. The wealthy countries do
the same, with their production of sugar,
oleaginous products and cereals for the
production of ethanol.
Lula analyzes figures on Brazilian agricultural
products that are of great interest. He tells
me that he had a study made by the Brazilian
press showing how world soy production will grow
2 percent annually until 2015, which means an
additional production of 189 million tons of
soy. Brazil's soy production would have to grow
at a pace of 7 percent annually to be able to
meet the world’s needs.
What is the problem? Many countries already
don’t have any more land available for crops.
India, for example, has no more available land;
China has very little and neither does the
United States to grow more soy.
I add to his explanation that what many Latin
American countries have are millions of people
earning starvation salaries and growing coffee,
cacao, vegetables, fruits, raw materials and
goods at low prices to supply US society which
no longer saves and consumes more than it can
produce.
Lula explains that they have set up an EMBRAPA
research office –Agriculture and Livestock
Research Company of Brazil– in Ghana, and he
goes on to say that in February they are going
to also open an office in Caracas.
“Thirty years ago, Fidel, that area of Brasilia,
Mato Grosso, Goiás, was considered a part of
Brazil that had nothing, it was just like the
African savannah; in the course of 30 years, it
was transformed into the major grain producing
region in all of Brazil, and I think that Africa
has an area that is very much like this region
in our country; that's why we set up the
research office there in Ghana and we also would
like to become associated with Angola.”
He told me that Brazil is in a privileged
position. They have 850 million hectares of
land; of these 360 million are part of Amazons
State; 400 million of good soil for agriculture,
and sugarcane takes up only one percent.
I make the comment that Brazil is the largest
coffee exporter in the world. For this product,
Brazil is paid the same as the value of a ton in
1959: around 2,500 of today’s dollars. If in
that country then they charged 10 cents a cup,
today they charge 5 dollars or more for an
aromatic cup of espresso, an Italian way of
preparing coffee. That is GDP in the United
States.
In Africa they cannot do what Brazil is doing. A
large part of Africa is covered by deserts and
tropical and subtropical areas where it is
difficult to grow soy or wheat. Only in the
Mediterranean region, to the north –where
rainfall totals some eight inches a year or the
lands irrigated with the waters of the Nile-- in
the high plateaus or in the south, in the lands
wrested away by apartheid, cereals production is
abundant.
Fish in the cool waters that mainly flow around
its western coast feed the developed countries
that sweep into their nets all the large and
small species that feed on the plankton in the
ocean currents coming in from the South Pole.
Africa, having almost 4 times the surface area
of Brazil (18.91 million square miles) and 4.3
times more population than Brazil (911 million
inhabitants) is very far from being able to
produce Brazil’s surplus foods, and its
infrastructure is yet to be built.
The viruses and bacteria affecting potatoes,
citrus, bananas, tomatoes, and livestock in
general, swine fever, avian flu, foot-and-mouth
disease, mad cow disease, and others that in
general affect the livestock of the world,
proliferate in Africa.
I spoke to Lula about the Battle of Ideas that
we are waging. Fresh news arrives constantly
that demonstrates the need for that constant
battle. The worst media of our ideological
enemies are bent on spreading throughout the
world the opinions of some nasty ‘worms’ who
cannot even stand to hear the term “socialism”
in our heroic and generous country. On January
20th, five days after the visit, one
of these papers published the story of a young
ne’er-do-well who, thanks to the Revolution, had
attained a good level education, health and
employment situation:
“Don’t even mention socialism to me”, and he
went on to explain the cause of his anger: “many
people were pawning their souls just to get a
few dollars. Anything new that happens in this
country, whatever it is, they should give it
another name," he declares. Quite the little
wolf dressed up as a granny.
The very same reporter, who prints this,
gleefully goes on: “Official propaganda telling
the Cubans to go to the polls talks more about
the Revolution than about socialism. For a
start, Cuba is no longer a country in a bubble,
like it was until the end of the 1980’s. The
insular viewpoint is changing towards a global
vision and the country, especially in the
capital, is living through an accelerated
mutation towards modernity. And one of its
effects is that socialism, imported decades ago,
is tearing at the seams.”
We are dealing with imperial capitalism’s vulgar
appeal to individual egoism, as it was preached
almost 240 years ago by Adam Smith to be the
cause of the nation’s wealth, meaning everything
should be handled by the market. That would
create limitless wealth in an idyllic world.
I think of Africa and its almost one billion
population, victim of the principles of that
economy. The diseases, flying at the speed of
airplanes, proliferate at the speed of AIDS, and
other old and new diseases affect its population
and its crops, with not one of the former
colonial powers being really capable of sending
them doctors and scientists.
It is about these issues that I spoke with Lula.
Fidel Castro Ruz
January 26, 2008
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