Word: cuba
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...some extent the government's campaign to develop revolutionary dedication among the workers is an attempt to make a virtue of necessity. As part of the Revolutionary Offensive Castro wants to launch Cuba on the way towards economic development. Cuba is to build 24,000 miles of roads by 1975, increase its cultivated land by 65 percent in the next ten years and complete the mechanization of the sugar industry...
...this requires an immense program of capital accumulation (the state plans to re-invest 30 percent of the total GNP each year, beginning in 1969). In a poor country, capital accumulation means cutting down consumption and putting in extra hours of labor with no material compensation. Since most of Cuba's foreign exchange (crucial to importing machinery) comes from sugar exports, it will try to boost its sugar crop, falling since the early days of the revolution, to a total of ten million tons. The key to achieving this goal is voluntary labor, by students, intellectuals, and urban employees...
LENIN ADMITTED that this vision was tinged with utopianism. He refused to specify how long after the initial overthrow of capitalism it would be achieved. Nevertheless, a theoretical goal of Marxist-Leninist states continues to be the development of a "new man." Before Cuba, only China had tried to create...
...Revolutionary Offensive is different from the Great Leap Forward in some very important ways. First, Cuba is a much smaller country, and a more prosperous one. Also, the Cubans have not gone to Mao's ideological extreme. Far from dismantling their apparatus for state planning. they have been trying to improve it, frequently with the help of U.S. economists. The Chinese deemphasized technology in spurring productivity, and relied instead on applying more manpower. The Cubans appear much more conscious of the need for technology. The Chinese made the mistake of trying to develop industry and agriculture simultaneously, and thus deprived...
Nevertheless, the success of the Cuban effort is far from certain. Cuba is short of trained managers, and in some factories has relied on worker self-supervision. In many of these factories worker productivity has been falling. "Once you take the bosses off people's backs." says one Harvard economist just returned from Cuba. "you don't have people doing the onerous tasks they have to do." And while there is little doubt that masses of students and intellectuals have been doing volunteer work in the cane fields, few observers can tell whether they are there because they want...