Word: reformative
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Though it has never been enforced, Article 90 of Cuba's constitution says that "large landholdings are proscribed," and "the acquisition and possession of land by foreign persons and companies shall be restrictively limited." Last week Prime Minister Fidel Castro enforced Article 90 with a vengeance. His agrarian-reform decree, signed in the six-hut eastern village of La Plata, scene of one of the first guerrilla attacks in Castro's revolution, outlawed the $300 million U.S. investment in Cuban sugar...
Sugar-company lawyers puzzled over the law's 66 sections all week, but the key language was unequivocal and plunged Cuba down a land-reform road where many Latin American hopes have been dashed (see box). No corporation can own land in Cuba unless all stockholders are Cuban; no foreigner may buy or inherit land. If U.S. sugar companies do not sell out within a year, their land will be expropriated and paid off in 20-year government bonds bearing 4.5% interest. According to Castro's estimate, made on a television show, the bond payments would range from...
...companies were officially silent, privately frantic. "This isn't expropriation," cried one sugar executive. "It's confiscation!" Said another: "We're sort of sick here." Sugarmen talked hopefully about one provision in the law: the newly created National Agrarian Reform Institute can let foreigners own land when "beneficial for the development of the national economy." This loophole may permit the companies to stay on until they can find buyers for the land. But losses will be heavy. The price of sugar land has already dropped by half from a year ago, and shares of the affected companies...
...labor-union curbs being considered by the House Education and Labor Committee, thundered Lewis, are nothing more than a plot to oppress the poor laboring man: North Carolina Representative Graham Barden's reform bill is "88 pages of misery," and the mild Kennedy reform bill (TIME, May 4) is "66 pages of misery that is not quite so strong." As for Senator John McClellan's investigation of labor-management racketeering, it marked "a re-establishment of the principle of the Star Chamber of the Tudor and Stuart kings, with a slight touch of the Spanish Inquisition...
...within 90 days, reopened the University of Havana, confiscated the holdings of 117 firms (mostly construction companies that gave kickbacks to the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista). This week, Castro transported the entire Cuban Cabinet into the Sierra Maestra country, where his revolution began, and promulgated his pet law-land reform. He brought along $1,000,000 to make the first farm loans...