Word: inra
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...INRA bite so far comes to 123 confiscated plantations and 452 other farms that have been "intervened" (taken over) by the installation of an INRA administrator. Total: 2,200,000 acres. But INRA's actual functions go far beyond land reform. Its industrialization branch poses a threat to every private business in Cuba. Last week, as a signal of things to come. Dictator Fidel Castro, who is also President of INRA...
Slush Funds. Despite its sprawling role in the Cuban economy, INRA operates by Castro whim, slush-fund financing and capricious changes in personnel. Explains INRA's day-to-day boss, Captain Antonio Núñez Jiménez, 36, who got the job because he fought hard in Castro's army, and is the author of a Marxist Geography of Cuba: "Accounting is no problem; everybody here is honest." Without benefit of ledgers, INRA has run through $70 million this year...
...source of its funds is compulsory "donations." Sugar workers, by means of a 4% salary deduction, last week turned over a check for $30 million. The bank workers' checkoff has so far yielded $20 million. The revolution's faithful can toss their spare change into big INRA barrels at Havana airport. And if money runs short, INRA has decree power to "rent safety deposit boxes, borrow money with or without interest, open and close current accounts of any kind with any bank or banks, in any type of money." In 1960 INRA plans to spend $160 million...
...INRA is supposed to provide a "vital minimum" of 66 free acres for each peasant family, though peasants who receive land from INRA may not sell it and must farm it as INRA directs. In practice, with a bow to Russia or Red China, INRA has concentrated on state-bossed cooperative farms, which so far number 485, equipped with 1,771 new INRA tractors. (Castro recently complained that INRA's major obstacle was "U.S. industrial strife," i.e., the steel strike, which has slowed delivery of farm machinery.) INRA has handed out small plot deeds to just 91 peasant farmers...
Payoff. If it has defaulted on ownership, INRA has brought to the peasant a definite, though perhaps temporary economic advance. In Oriente province, called the "cradle of the revolution," the INRA boss is Major René Vallejo, a bearded, widely-loved obstetrician. Blowing a kiss into the air, he shouts, "We are doing beautifully!" The 1,400 workers on Vallejo's Twenty Roses and Camilo Cienfuegos cooperative farms last week collected their pay-about $2.70 a day, up $1 from the old scale - and happily lined up to buy ice cream or have their pictures snapped, at 25? each...