Cuba: Lessons from the Bad Old Days

Fidel Castro had an unexpected bit of advice for his countrymen: Learn some lessons from the way capitalism ran things in the pre-Castro days. Present-day Cuba, admitted Castro in a speech in Havana, is afflicted with loafing, mismanagement, overcentralization and red tape. “Some people here apparently believe that socialism is to mess up everything and entangle everything and make things impracticable and unworkable.” Under capitalism, the owner at least “protected his interests,” while the government-appointed manager of an expropriated enterprise “is not disposed to protect the interests of anybody because he has an assured salary.” A U.S. “monopoly,” Castro went on, “managed 330,000 acres of land here and did not manage them badly. Because they had a good organization and selected people well and demanded responsibility of them, it functioned well.”

Castro also admitted that the revolution’s dreams of rapid industrialization will have to wait. Agriculture, he said, “will be the base of our economy” for the next decade. “Why hurry to make a steel industry now when there are other more urgent things to be done?” Among the urgent tasks is the restoration of Cuban agriculture to the production levels it reached under capitalism. Last week the official Havana newspaper Hoy reported glumly that the 1963 sugar crop is the smallest since 1945.