Adelante Cubanos -1959 (Parts 1 and 2)

[Billy Burnett]

Found this while trolling archive.org ...

Adelante Cubanos
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=Adelante%20Cubanos%20%28Part%20I%29%20AND%20collection%3Aprelinger

Exhorts the Cuban people to support industrialization on the island and the production of consumer goods.


part 1
http://www.archive.org/details/Adelante1959

part 2
http://www.archive.org/details/Adelante1959_2

[bherrera]

1. Obsolete

They decided to grow sugar after this period, and failed. Later, Castro was wondering why his economists did not tell him growing sugar was not sensible if it was not subsidized by the Soviet Union. Even later, he killed a viable biofuels industry, which uses sugar as the raw material.

[naaman fletcher]

2. Sugar was very sensible

before Castro nationalized the sugar industry. Then he and his managers ran it into the ground, but at least there wasn't a single capitalist who made any money so thats ok.

[Billy Burnett]

3. Nothing to do w/US sugar subsidies designed to cripple the Cuban sugar market?

The strong attachment to 'Castro this and Castro that' is worth observation.
Thanks. ;)

[naaman fletcher]

4. maybe.

But, hey, if you think that the decline of sugar in cuba being 100% coincidental with Castro taking over the sugar industry, well, i dont know what to say.

[Billy Burnett]

7. Yes. The US sugar subsidies, coincidentally, were initiated right after the Cuban revolution.

I agree w/you. Yes. The US sugar subsidies, coincidentally, were initiated right after the Cuban revolution.

Said subsidies were specifically designed to undermine Cuba's sugar industry.

I'll try to cough up some links later, if I have some time.
(Not that it will matter to you, w/all of your deep nuanced understanding of Cuba, I'm sure that there's no need. :eyes:)


Sticking to the 'Castro this and Castro that' routine, I see. LOL

[Downwinder]

8. Wasn't enough to save Hawaii sugar production. Corn Syrup and beet sugar won.

[Billy Burnett]

9. Big Sugar in Florida is doing just fine.

After externalizing the impact of their pollution of the Everglades to the citizens/taxpayers of this country, Florida Big Sugar is doing fine. Also see:

-

The Sugar Roulette
http://www.thegully.com/essays/cuba/000305roulette.html

MARCH 5, 2000. Cuba's economy before Castro was like a roulette game in Mob boss Meyer Lansky's Havana-Riviera casino, with the U.S. as wily croupier. If the price of sugar and the annual Cuba sugar quota bought by the U.S. were high, Cuba would hit the jackpot; if they were low, Cuba would lose its shirt.

As always, the odds were with the house. Sugar, the bulk of which was sold to the U.S., accounted for nearly 90% of Cuba's exports and 33% of its national income. Economic planning was all but impossible, as sugar prices swung wildly, from under 12 cents per pound in 1920 to an abysmal 1 ¾ cents in 1937 to 5 cents in 1958.

American companies controlled about 40% of Cuba's sugar production and owned 75% of Cuba's arable land. Most of that land was not cultivated (in fact, only 22% of all Cuba's farm land was cultivated). American companies also controlled 50% of railways (crucial for sugar transportation) and more than 90% of telephone and electric services.

Cuba was a slave to sugar.

And sugar was hostage to the world market and to U.S. political calculations, making Cuba an economic colony of the U.S.

Enter Castro.

No wonder Castro's "first object of attack was the sugar industry, the monoculture it encouraged, the foreign-owned latifundia on which it was erected, and the landless peasantry it created," as the distinguished historian Eric Williams put it.

The 1959 Agrarian Reform Law, which was enormously popular in Cuba, even among many who would later flee to Miami, expropriated large latifundia, with compensation in the form of bonds issued in Cuban currency and maturing in 20 years.

Eisenhower retaliated by slashing Cuba's sugar quota in 1960. Castro countered by threatening to take a mill for every pound cut from the quota. "We can lose our sugar quota and they can lose their investments," he quipped. Which is exactly what happened.

[Downwinder]

10. An indication that Florida has never passed out of the Territorial Period?

[Judi Lynn]

5. Not to mention the delibate, direct attacks on Cuba's sugar industry from the U.S.,

like bombing ships transporting sugar in Havana's harbor, small details like that!

I know you'll remember they also destroyed the sugar on board other ships, by simply ruining the products in storage.

All those things happened before Eisenhower dropped the economic bomb of the embargo on Cuba.

Published on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Cuban Embargo: Nothing Succeeds Like Failure
by Saul Landau

Once again, Cuba has asked the United Nations to help end the U.S. economic, financial and trade embargo. Havana says this blockade cost it more than $242 million last year. The embargo also stymies Cuban access to foreign capital from other nations, because investors face possible U.S. sanctions for doing business with Cuba.

Polls show that most Americans favor dropping the U.S. embargo and our ban on travel to Cuba. Instead of scrapping it, however, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are clinging to the policies they inherited. In policy terms, it's the equivalent of scientists insisting the world is flat.

Nothing succeeds like failure in imperial Washington. So while Washington's failed Cuba policy has endured for half a century, its proponents ask us to "give it time."

This policy has flopped since its inception. In July 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower cut Cuba's sugar quota to punish Cuba for expropriating U.S. companies. The Soviet Union formally entered the U.S.-Cuban dispute to buy Cuban sugar. In October, Ike imposed a partial embargo that President John F. Kennedy completed in February 1962, by which time Cuba had expropriated all U.S. companies.

Early U.S. pressure on Cuba's revolutionary government wasn't just economic. Responding to Fidel Castro's disobedience in early 1959, Eisenhower authorized Cuban exiles to launch terrorist attacks on Cuba. He ordered the CIA to overthrow the regime in early 1960, but withheld the order to unleash 1,500 Cuban exiles the CIA had trained to invade the island.

~snip~
Obama administration officials know better than to ask the obvious question: What exactly did Cuba do to the United States to merit terrorism and economic strangulation? The answer then and now: by being disobedient, refusing to abide by Washington's interpretation of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/10/28-8

[Judi Lynn]

6. I should add the U.S.-based Cuban terrorists also burned sugar in Cuba's warehouses. n/t