Word: canings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...goes on to say the "will to cut cane" is what guarantees success in work and that the 216 of us will be divided into seven brigades for the daily seven-hour work routine...
...after that for six weeks we were awakened at 5:30 a.m. by Cuban music on the PA system-loud and fast tunes with a lot of percussion and with lyrics usually about the sugar harvest or Vietnam. After breakfast, we'd walk together in brigades out to the cane fields...
...first it's hard, boring work cutting cane. Grab a long, thin stalk with your gloved left hand, chop it in the middle with your machete, snip off the leaves at the top, then bend down and separate the lower half of the cane (where the plant is thickest and there's the most sugar) from the soft earth with a few short flicks of the wrist. Make sure your machete is free of dirt and go to the next stalk...
...over the island 300,000 men and women are doing the same thing, 80 per cent of them are not professional cane-cutters. They come from all kinds of work: near our camp a brigade of cigar and cigarette workers and one made up of people from the Health Ministry were cutting. In all cane-cutting camps, all material necessities-food, lodging, clothing, recreational facilities, and a small medical clinic with both a doctor and a dentist in each camp-are provided completely free. This is true at all agricultural work places and in many factories also...
...they are not working to pay for enough "things" to live on. The only incentives used in Cuba are moral ones. People understand and speak to you all the time about how their work in the current ten million ton harvest will speed the day when the cutting of cane will be completely mechanized. Workers in all the different sections of a sugar mill we visited (which was owned by Hershey Co. before the Revolution and now is named after Camilo Cienfuegos, a leader of the R?bel Army in the war against Batista) put up big red banners...