CUBA: Animal Farm

Behind yellow and green holiday lights festooned across a 23-story concrete building in downtown Havana, the select inner ring of Fidel Castro’s chaotic dictatorship this week celebrates its first anniversary in power. The building is not the national palace or the long-deserted Congress, but the tightly guarded headquarters of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA). Yugoslav Theoretician Milovan Djilas once observed that the first duty of any Communist revolutionary is to destroy the political force that brought him to power and replace it with an enormous, patronage-rich bureaucracy. Castro has quietly smashed his own July 26 movement, populated by moderates, and handed to INRA the goal of remaking Cuba politically and economically.

Only seven months after its creation, INRA has more power and money than any other institution in Cuba. It controls 10% of the country’s economy and, with the expropriation of the big sugar estates, due next spring, it will soon control 50%. INRA owns Cuba’s entire fishing fleet, runs the marketing of coffee, potatoes and tobacco, operates the $14 million Havana Riviera Hotel. Every egg in Cuba goes to market bearing INRA’s purple stamp.

The Bite. INRA’s charter, Latin America’s most drastic land-reform law, authorizes the expropriation, for 20-year 4½% Peso bonds, of all land holdings greater than 995 acres, except sugar, rice or cattle farms, which may be as big as 3,316 acres. In practice, INRA agents, who outrank even rebel army officers, have seized whatever farms they pleased regardless of size, and no bonds for payment of the farms have yet been printed.

The INRA bite so far comes to 123 confiscated plantations and 452 other farms that have been “intervened” (taken over) by the installation of an INRA administrator. Total: 2,200,000 acres. But INRA’s actual functions go far beyond land reform. Its industrialization branch poses a threat to every private business in Cuba. Last week, as a signal of things to come. Dictator Fidel Castro, who is also President of INRA:

¶Wrote checks totaling $1,378,107 to take over Cuba’s entire sisal industry.

¶Took over management of four industrial plants involved in labor disputes.

¶Took steps toward outright confiscation of the 22-company, $50 million industrial-agricultural empire bossed by Havana and Manhattan Socialite Burke Hedges, who was Dictator Fulgencio Batista’s last Ambassador to Brazil.

Slush Funds. Despite its sprawling role in the Cuban economy, INRA operates by Castro whim, slush-fund financing and capricious changes in personnel. Explains INRA’s day-to-day boss, Captain Antonio Núñez Jiménez, 36, who got the job because he fought hard in Castro’s army, and is the author of a Marxist Geography of Cuba: “Accounting is no problem; everybody here is honest.” Without benefit of ledgers, INRA has run through $70 million this year.

One source of its funds is compulsory “donations.” Sugar workers, by means of a 4% salary deduction, last week turned over a check for $30 million. The bank workers’ checkoff has so far yielded $20 million. The revolution’s faithful can toss their spare change into big INRA barrels at Havana airport. And if money runs short, INRA has decree power to “rent safety deposit boxes, borrow money with or without interest, open and close current accounts of any kind with any bank or banks, in any type of money.” In 1960 INRA plans to spend $160 million.

By law, INRA is supposed to provide a “vital minimum” of 66 free acres for each peasant family, though peasants who receive land from INRA may not sell it and must farm it as INRA directs. In practice, with a bow to Russia or Red China, INRA has concentrated on state-bossed cooperative farms, which so far number 485, equipped with 1,771 new INRA tractors. (Castro recently complained that INRA’s major obstacle was “U.S. industrial strife,” i.e., the steel strike, which has slowed delivery of farm machinery.) INRA has handed out small plot deeds to just 91 peasant farmers.

Payoff. If it has defaulted on ownership, INRA has brought to the peasant a definite, though perhaps temporary economic advance. In Oriente province, called the “cradle of the revolution,” the INRA boss is Major René Vallejo, a bearded, widely-loved obstetrician. Blowing a kiss into the air, he shouts, “We are doing beautifully!” The 1,400 workers on Vallejo’s Twenty Roses and Camilo Cienfuegos cooperative farms last week collected their pay—about $2.70 a day, up $1 from the old scale — and happily lined up to buy ice cream or have their pictures snapped, at 25¢ each. “We are comfortable,” said Co-op Laborer Elinai Proenza.

INRA has established 460 “people’s stores,” driving small, private merchants out of business. “We make less than 10% profit,” boasts Major Vallejo.

But on Las Villas province’s 30,000-acre Washington Sugar Central, the entire destinies of 4,000 co-op farmers are controlled by a 23-year-old ex-schoolteacher; so far, he has concentrated on sewing lessons for young girls, close-order drill for a “sanitation corps” of boys. The practical effect, says a U.S. plantation foreman, has been to “set Cuban agriculture back five years.” In Oriente province INRA plowed up 20,000 acres of ranch land for truck farming—then learned that there was no way to irrigate the parched land.

Imported Reds. The top INRA staffers under Castro and Núñez Jiménez are Attorney Waldo Medina Méndez and Production Chief Oscar Pino Santos. In 1951, the last head count on Communists before the party went underground, both were registered Reds. They have brought in six Chilean Communists to take over key INRA posts.

This INRA inner crowd is applying a clever squeeze on the $850 million U.S. investment in Cuba. In the face of prohibitive decrees on oil exploration, petroleum companies representing virtually every major U.S. oil firm would gladly ship every drilling rig out of the country —except that they dare not rouse Castro’s ire against their $75 million investment in Cuba refineries. The sugar companies, fuming at the pending expropriation of their land for token payment, still hold cane mills representing a big chunk of the total $300 million investment; Conrado Becquer, boss of the Sugar Workers’ Federation, warns that any cut in the Cuba quota on the high-priced U.S. market will lead to seizure of the mills.

In this cat-and-mouse game, the decisions are all flowing from INRA’s towering headquarters, the most tightly guarded building in Havana, with white-helmeted security guards at every staircase and elevator bank. From there go INRA agents to scour Europe for credit and for weapons and warplanes to arm the peasants and the rebel army. Inside the building, Fidel Castro, his pro-Communist brother Raúl, his old Communist crony Ernesto (“Che”) Guevara, and Communist-lining Núñez Jiménez play chess far into the night and plot their course, which has cost heavily in production losses, decline in private investment, falling gold reserves, instability for the Cuban peso—sure to lead, in the end, to police-state controls and hunger.