Identidades in English No 4, December 2014 | Page 111

happened at the sugar mill, a farm was created,
the Julio Reyes Cairo agro-industrial farm. Yet,
the name is not quite right because it was kind of
agro but not at all industrial. It was a new business. It had no structure yet. It also wasn’t profitable and is currently practically disintegrated
because it has no economic support. There were
times when we went two or three months without
getting paid; it was unable to pay salaries because
the company had no way to get the money.”3
Upon discussing the shortcomings of a supposedly agro-industrial farm, Luis Pita, like Mavis
Álvarez, points out the poor name choice, the
grandiloquence used to name something that
doesn’t exist. If revolutionary euphoria allowed
for the emergence of a handful of concepts, their
legitimacy lasted only as long as the Soviets could
sustain them.
The failures of Fidel Castro’s revolution caused
all his new names for professions to lose meaning. The word ‘peasant’ - which at some point
might have been synonymous with exploited, a
forgotten man, without land - is coming back today not so much to belie the precariousness with
which it was heretofore identified, but to