Agricultural Downturn Continues in 2010
HAVANA TIMES, Nov. 3 — Agricultural production decreased 5.1 per cent in the first nine months of 2010, as compared to the same period last year, according to a National Office of Statistics (ONE) report. Drought, organizational deficiencies and difficulties in financing were behind this contraction, despite the increase in planted areas and the handing over of idle land in usufruct, a process that began in 2008 to encourage food production, reportó IPS.
This spanglish piece is vague and inaccurate at best, it just makes the situation that much worse. Let somebody else who gives a damn write about such a serious situation.
Henry G. Delforn
Carpinteria, CA
This “handing over of idle land in usufruct” is an example of the disastrous ideology of state monopoly socialism imported into the movement in 1848 by two privileged-class incompetents.
Under this ideology it is deemed anti-socialist to have small farmers and ranchers “owning their own land.” In addition, such small rural producers have been spat upon a “not just conservatory, but reactionary.” Hence, the PCC, like the Soviet party upon which it is modeled, can’t stand the thought of anyone other than the state “owning” the land–or anything else, actually.
Direct ownership of the land or the instruments of production is not anti-socialist, at all. Real socialist is where those who do the work, whether cooperative industrial and commercial workers or small rural producing families, own the means of production directly.
This silly idea of usufruct is a brainchild of bureaucrats who hope to get relief from the insipid production scheme of state monopoly, while still clinging to the quasi-religious madness of state monopolism.
Cuba simply must give or allow direct ownership of land by rural producing families on the Denmark model. This model works!
The PCC will either wake up, get rid of its prejudice against the institution of private property in land and other productive assets, and progress to a socialist cooperative republic, or the Cuban Revolution is doomed.