CUBA: The Case of the Colonos

The U.S. needed Cuba’s sugar and would pay for it. Since July, the U.S. had boosted the price about 20% *—something like $30,000,000 in Cuban pockets. Then President Ramón Grau San Martin announced that his Government would take the increase, use it to subsidize food imports so that Cubans might get their rice, beans and jerked beef cheaper.

To sixty-year-old Nicolás Rodriguez Díaz, on his farm in western Cuba, and to some 50,000 colonos (sugar planters) like him, it was startling news. At the cockfight in town, and over a glass of country wine in the bodega afterward, he and fellow colonos talked angrily of raising less cane if they were not cut in on the price rise. Some even heeded the tocsin of the leftist Federation of Campesinos (Farmers), boarded trains and buses for Havana, demonstrated on the Capitolio’s steps (see cut). By last week President Grau was reported ready to climb down. What Money Buys. Owning his own land (some 67 acres), a superior four-room wooden house and possessing three oxen, a couple of cows and a horse (the local equivalent of a Chrysler), Nicolás was much better off than most of his fellow colonos. Yet after giving 53% of his sugar crop to the central (mill) in return for grinding it, and paying for wages, fertilizer, etc., he would have about $64 left of the $4,200 his 1946 crop was supposed to be worth. In the slow, throaty speech of the Cuban countryman, Nicolás summed up his problem: “We would be making some money now but prices have gone so high that we don’t make ends meet any better than we did in bad times. Our crops don’t sell for three or four times what they did before the war, but we pay three and four times as much for rice, clothes, fertilizer.”

As for the 1,500 schools, the farm credit bank, the country roads, and the rest of President Grau’s program for raising rural standards of living and abating the tyranny of King Sugar, Nicolás said: “The work the politicians do for the campesino is tomorrow, and I have to live today. I have never received anything from Havana, and don’t know of anyone who has. To the politicians the campesino is just a poor campesino, and they let it go at that.”

*The price, pegged to the U.S. cost-of-living index, rose from 3.675¢ a lb. in January to about 4.38¢ a lb. in July, might go higher by year’s end.