Identidades in English No 4, December 2014 | Page 110

in ways unknown the very cause/concept in question.
This is what happened in Cuba when the development model imported from the Soviet Union collapsed and, with it, the entire socialist bloc.
Decades of extensively inefficient agriculture and
high costs abruptly ended, but the myriad ‘donors,’ ‘millionaires’ and ‘cooperativists’ had no
chance to continue producing basic foodstuffs,
which were sacrificed in favor of sugar cane. Indeed, these definitions are fragile, but their lack
of historicity or roots makes them even weaker.
Why the Castro State’s insistence that peasants be
distanced from a name with which they’ve been
identified throughout our history and geography,
questions Mavis Álvarez? One reason for the
State’s animosity - or at minimum, rejection - for
this term is the same which explains why Cuban
businessmen or owners are called cuentapropistas (self-employed), a marginalizing term. The
peasant and the business owner were always a
problem for the socialist State. Both work independently and rigorously, and they enjoy personal
recognition for what they do. Thus, they are hard
pressed to accept the totalizing nature of doctrines.
The quality of any particular land can affect the
kind of growing that is done on it; its depletion
over the years causes a change in agricultural
methods. Even the adaptation of technology and
science also varies. One needs people who stay
put for decades to be able to deal with these limitations; folks who will take responsibility for the
results and can pass on to their descendants what
they have learned. Above all, however, they must
have autonomy.
Castroism is unwilling to guarantee any of this,
not as a right, at least, and the action of depriving
someone of his or her autonomy is legitimized
when the name of that activity, and its implicit
meaning, is lost. That’s how peasants were turned
into ‘cooperativists,’ National Work Heroes, or
‘millionaires.’ When the entire imaginary in
which they existed is deconstructed, they go
home as ubepecistas, farmers or cuentapropistas—never as a campesino.

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Castro ‘statism’ quickly realized the difficulties
that autonomous work meant for its totalizing
mission. Even if the First Agrarian Reform Law
(1959) conserved the peasant practice, the Second
one (1963) managed to blur it.2 Subsequent revolutionary offensives against the small private sector, which could process agricultural products in
a traditional manner, the creation of Acopio
(Cuba’s State Procurement and Distribution
Agency), which deprived peasants of their ability
to freely sell what they grew, and State pressure
for cooperative integration, turned the Cuban
countryside into a place fertile for exhortations,
but not for growing things. This is how it damned
the country’s peasants.
The programmatic, documented proposal that
Maylan Álvarez sets forth for the restructuring of
the sugar industry in the the first half of La callada molienda is also an exhortation:
“Current lands being freed up by the sugar industry, which add up to 62% of Cuba’s agriculturally
useful land, could be used for livestock production—meat and milk, to grow vegetables, beans,
and intensive hydroponics and orchards. All this
would increase the availability of foodstuffs for
even the sugar families, as well as for the entire
population. It would also reduce imports and create new jobs for cane and sugar workers, and for
their families.
A portion of the land freed up by sugar will be
devoted to forestry, both to industrial forests, for
the purpose of using its wood and pulp, which is
a great value added, and to natural forests, for the
production of fruits, which can be consumed nationally and exported.”
To dare to suggest a future with fruits, trees and
cows for Cuban families, some of the many things
they have been deprived of being able to buy, in
addition to basics like rice, eggs, etc., is borderline grotesque. If it did not cause laughter among
the peasants who were going to lose their jobs, it
must have been because they were aware of the
gravity of the announcement.
Sugar technician Luis Pita Suárez, one of the people interviewed by Álvarez, responded to such a
declaration in the following manner: “After what