CUBA: With a Vengeance

Racing ahead of his land-reform timetable, Fidel Castro last week began grabbing cattle land, literally with a vengeance. The Prime Minister flew into Camagüey, Cuba’s range country, and issued an order “intervening,” i.e., putting under government control, all cattle ranches larger than 3,316 acres (25,000 acres of it owned by Texas’ King Ranch). Armed soldiers in twos and threes marched into 400 ranches and took over 2,345,340 acres. As soon as the Red-tinged Agrarian Reform Institute can calculate what part of each ranch the owners will have to give up, intervening will become expropriating.

Expropriation in most cases is supposed to take as much as a year, but Castro jumped the gun because of his fury at the stubborn ranchers. The National Cattlemen’s Association had criticized the reform as “confiscatory,” planned a $500,000 advertising campaign against it. Castro called the cattlemen “counterrevolutionary,” a capital offense in Castro’s Cuba. His soldiers picked up and jailed Félix Fernández Pérez, president of the Rustic Estate Owners, a tobacco farmer and rancher and onetime Castro supporter, now an outspoken critic (TIME, June 22). Then Castro summoned press, labor and government delegates from all over the hemisphere to Cuba this week to hear him explain what a good idea land reform is.