Honored guests,

Workers and farmers of the Havana Agricultural Belt;

People who are the fresh dwellers of the new houses of this village who I understand are also present here tonight.

Have they given you the keys yet? (SHOUTS OF "NO!") Not yet? So, if you have not been given your keys yet, what have the three Wise Men brought you today? (SHOUTS OF "THE NEWS") Oh!, the news!

(SHOUTS OF: "HOW WILL IT BE CALLED?") That is a problem we have, what will be the village name (SHOUTS OF "EL CHE!"). No. It has to be decided by the commission. Besides, the village is still very small. It’ll have to wait till we build a larger village. We must give the village a more modest name (SHOUTS OF "VALLE GRANDE" (LARGE VALLEY)).

Oh!, well, that is not a modest name but we can name it so: Valle Grande (APPLAUSE).

The inauguration of a small village like this is not a big issue in itself. In the first place, the significance of this little village is that it was built in just 44 days and it already has 120 houses. It additionally has a playground, a day-care center, a shopping center, a sports field and, finally, what is left to be built is a school. It seems that they did not have the time to also finish the school in those 44 days. Nevertheless, there are 336 children. Anyway, they should begin immediately to build the school here, which will be the type of new schools that we are building in cases like this one, for elementary students; that is to say, a school where they will eat breakfast, lunch and dinner (APPLAUSE).

Once that is built, this will be like a model village to show the way in which urbanization should be organized in the rural and urban areas. This plus the day-care center will allow adults to dedicate themselves fully to work; I mean, it will not be necessary for people to be constantly cooking and washing and ironing, and doing all those chores that are such a large part of the work of women.

This is the type of school that we are going to build in the future. So hopefully, to the same extent that the pace of construction increases, all the children and young people will have their institutions from the day-care center to the pre-university level.

This village is also significant because it marks the conclusion of the first stage of the Havana Agricultural Belt plan. The Havana Agricultural Belt plan was started on April 17 and should end in 1968. It is an effort to develop agriculture in all the area around the capital of the Republic. This project includes the homes of the workers and farmers of the whole area. A part of that area belongs to the State, another part belongs to small farmers.
So, as I said, the plan intends to develop the area in a comprehensive way, including housing and also the agricultural facilities that are necessary.

So far in the Havana Agricultural Belt we have built 458 homes, 130 small pigsties, 100 henhouses, 79 stables, 338 other works, canteens, warehouses, and finished 280 landscaping works.

The Havana Agricultural Belt area has approximately 2300 caballerías of land. For Europeans and our guests from other countries that do not use this unit of measure I should explain that one caballería has 13.4 hectares. So, 2300 caballerías are approximately 30,000 hectares. Of these 30,000 hectares, approximately 19,000 will be planted with fruit trees and coffee plants in between them.

The remaining area includes 6000-7000 hectares of grass, a little further away; and also two forests, one almost in the heart of the city, on the banks of the Almendares River, which will have about 500 hectares, and another forest in the vicinity of 100th Street, of about 300-400 hectares, I don’t remember the exact figure now. These forests will also be completed next year. There will also be the Botanical Garden area, with about 500 hectares. The Botanical Garden will be under the responsibility of the School of Botany of the Havana University; and there is also the area for the future Havana Zoo.

We intend to develop the botanical gardens in all the provincial capital cities, so that they serve as sites for study and recreation, because a well-kept botanical garden is not only extremely useful from the economic point of view, it is also very useful as a basis for studies and also as a place for recreation. Therefore, we have allocated all the land required for such ends.

There are also some areas that will be occupied by the dams that we are building. The 2300 caballerías will have irrigation, that is to say, all 30,000 hectares will be under irrigation.

That, in a sense, is a hydraulic feat. Why? Because in Havana and its surrounding area there are over a million and a half people. In addition, those who colonized our country located the city of Havana initially four centuries ago in one of the narrowest parts of the country without any large rivers. Of course, there is the Almendares River, which is a small stream. Whoever knows what a river is knows that the Almendares River should not be called a river. But in Cuba, which is a long and narrow island, we have no large rivers, we have only small rivers that sometimes dry out. Perhaps for the first inhabitants of the city of Havana the Almendares River may have seemed to be a great river and decided to establish the city around it.

But the city continued to grow for four centuries, and the establishment of the pseudo-Republic at the beginning of the century, together with the phenomenon of intervention and colonization by imperialism, was compounded by the bureaucracy and the growth of the city, where all the rich families of the country came to live: landlords, sugar mill owners, factory owners. That is why you see so many luxurious houses in the vicinity of Havana where we have now about 70,000 boarding students. The rich in Cuba built truly sumptuous houses.

So, the city grew. With the bureaucracy and politics and all forms of parasitism, the city continued to grow until it reached its current level. However, this province has no major river. It does have significant underground water basins, because although it has no river nature endowed this province with some natural reservoirs. However, much of this water must be used for the population’s consumption. There lies a problem.

This province has very good farmland, but the industrial and social water consumption in the city of Havana competes with agriculture. Naturally, that means that in the next few years we will need some plants to purify such water to use it in agriculture, while perhaps in the more distant future we may need to find a solution based on using desalinated seawater; but that of course will have to be further away in the future as it requires much technology and a big investment.

And we are faced with the problem of supplying the city, despite the competition between the consumption of the population and that of agriculture. If in spite of this situation we manage to irrigate that whole area, and to irrigate most of the agricultural land in the province, I say that is a hydraulic feat. As we cannot use groundwater, we are damming all the small streams, small rivers, wherever we can build a small dam, medium-sized. So, a construction effort is needed. Also, this year we should complete about 200 micro dams, plus a big reservoir in the Almendares River; it will be a large one for our conditions; it is not going to be like the Aswan Dam, but a dam of about, say, 80 to 90 million cubic meters capacity. Taking into consideration the rainfall rate in the province and the type of crops, they can provide irrigation to about 15,000 hectares with 100 million cubic meters of water, since the crops that are going to be planted around the city are not crops that require lots of water.

The policy across the country is to impound as much water as possible, based on the slogan to not let a drop run to the sea. A particular emphasis has been put on the province of Havana for two reasons: it has the largest concentration of consumers, as well as the largest concentration of workers. This province benefits from having a large potential workforce. That’s the reason for the big progresses in this province. Contrary to the case of the province of Camagüey which has a farm land total about four and a half times larger than that of the Havana province but its population is one third that of the province of Havana.

Therefore, here you have a very large potential human force to accelerate all this development effort. So the water policy followed in the Havana Agricultural Belt is to be pursued throughout the province at an accelerated pace.

A true contradiction exists in this province. It seemed to have the most developed agriculture, but often when we talked about different plans everywhere we heard people assert that there was no land available in Havana for new agricultural development projects. When we set out to register every inch of the province territory, and took the maps and visited all regions here, we found that in Havana there is enough land not only to be self-sufficient in most products, but also to make a considerable contribution to the export efforts of the country. We have calculated some 28,000 caballerías of farm land. They are about 420,000 hectares that are available in the province apart from cities, roads, industrial facilities and the few non-agricultural areas, which are the hummocks. It so happens that not even the hills can be spared here in this province, and we have already started to make the first farming terraces in the hills of the province, and with very promising results I should say. In the Havana Agricultural Belt the crops that are going to be planted in the hills will be on those terraces, with trenches to protect the soil from erosion. It will be possible to use machines in the hills, and all the terraces will be made with a contour and using a technique that is being tested, which is to accumulate topsoil on the terrace in beds for the type of crop grown. So there well be little land in this province that could be considered non-farm land.

All crops will be protected by windbreaks from the drying effects of the winds, from the physical damage to the plantations caused by the winds, and wherever possible they will also be protected from hurricanes in the major plantations. We are not affected by frost here in Cuba.

We will plant large citrus groves, including in the province of Havana. In the Havana Agricultural Belt we will plant some 4000 hectares of citrus trees. So the citrus fruits that the people of Havana will consume will practically be picked from the backyard of the city, that is, on its boundaries: the houses start on the line where the citrus groves end. Additionally, in the rest of the province there will be approximately 15,000 hectares of citrus groves. This will be a small part of plantations across the country.

For example, in Florida, one of the major and famous producers of citrus fruit in the US – the Americans are renowned as major producers of citrus fruits – they produce over 5 million tons of citrus fruit, mucho of which is grown on lands in Florida that are much poorer than ours.

They have two disadvantages in Florida. They have hurricanes, and almost all the Caribbean hurricanes go up to Florida. I don’t mean that we are happy that it is so because it wouldn’t be right, but it so happens. Some of those hurricanes also hit us. So hurricanes are a natural enemy. But in Florida, like in California, that have another natural enemy, which is frost. They are hit occasionally by frost and their citrus trees get frozen; it’s so bad that they are forced to use artificial heat to protect their citrus plantations. Luckily, we don’t have to spend oil for that purpose! (Laughter.) Fortunately, as far as we know, we have never had any frost in our country. Therefore, we have only one enemy, which are hurricanes. And if they have been able to develop a big citrus industry in Florida on land that is worse than ours, and despite two enemies, there is no doubt that we will have a citrus industry better than the citrus industry in Florida. There's no doubt about it (APPLAUSE).

I was saying that some of the land in the province would be used to meet its citrus fruit needs. Other fruits that will be planted are tropical fruit of the arboreal type. So we are pursuing different objectives: first, to put this land to good use, planting in a rational way. We believe that this large population center, based on health considerations, should be surrounded by a green area that contributes to purifying the air around the city; secondly, a type of crop that does not consume too much water; thirdly, a type of crop that is environment-friendly, and also a kind of high-value crop that can be attended to by the huge workforce available in the city of Havana.

I was saying that this province was said to have a shortage of land, and what really happened was that the land was very much misused and underutilized. The farmers in the area around Havana actually had a very backward agriculture; we must admit so. I know that many of them are present here; this is a fact, and thanks to having acknowledged that fact we will correct the situation. They practiced a self-consumption farming mostly. Let me give you an idea of the way this land was used; the revolution initially concentrated its efforts in the provinces where there are large tracts of land, specially on large tracts of State land. At the time of the agrarian reforms, approximately 70% of the total land remained as State-owned land, to be exploited by national entities, as national centers of production, while 30% remained in the hands of smallholders, who were sharecroppers, squatters or tenants. The agrarian laws exempted them from paying any taxes.

When we speak of “small farmer”, you should not compare the figures from other countries. A small farmer in densely populated human settlements is a farmer with half a hectare, or one hectare; here, the land owned by small farmers is larger. But there were large estates in the country when the agrarian laws were made. Just that you have an idea, one of the American-owned estates in Cuba had 200,000 hectares of farmland. So the law was extremely radical. Ours is not an overpopulated country, so a small farmer here naturally has more land area than in a densely populated community. The Revolution exempted the small farmers from paying taxes and freed them from other calamities, provided them with resources, gave them loans and as much help as possible on the basis of the resources available to the country and the experience we all had, which was quite little, as a matter of fact.

Many of the comrades who were in charge of agriculture grew somehow unconcerned about the way small farmers cultivated their land, so on many maps you only saw the State lands, and when we asked them: "And what is there in that blank space? ", they would say "Well, they are small farmers." And we would reply: "But aren’t the small farmers and this land part of the country? Isn’t the production from that land contributing to the country’s earnings?"

Our small farmers had a backward agriculture due to underdevelopment, technical backwardness and the level of illiteracy that was so widespread. And, of course, all this resulted in an extremely backward agriculture, without machineries, without fertilizers, without appropriate farming techniques, without the appropriate seed varieties, without irrigation. Such was the situation.

Of course, a land that is not given fertilizers, a land that is not irrigated, yields poorly and results in a low-productivity, uncertain agriculture. That was the situation. We had to find a way to integrate small farmers into the production process, and help small farmers raise the productivity of their land, too. Naturally, our small farmers did not have the resources to do it, so we needed to make a nationwide effort to achieve that and make plans based on the interests of the country; in this sense it was necessary to overcome a stage, a stage of trade relations between the socialist State and the small farmers.

What is the meaning of a trade relationship? There was a period of the Revolution here when if carrots were scarce a price was fixed on carrots. The agencies in charge of collecting the products followed a pricing policy; so if there was a shortage of carrots, the price of carrots was raised. Then, the following year, there were lots of carrots but no beets, then they raised the price of sugar beet. Or there might be carrots and beets, but no taro; another year they raised the price of taro and planted taro but the coffee fields were neglected. And so on, it was a never-ending situation. We have had that experience.

It so happened that the country had a fairly modern, pretty efficient sugar mill in a given area, and we would find a farmer in the vicinity who was growing carrot, or beets. If in order to solve the problem we had raised the price of sugar cane so that it could compete with carrots and beets we would have fallen into an endless situation, with enormous amounts of money needed to make the cane next to the sugar mill compete with beets. Besides, if we increased the price for that sugar mill we had to do the same for the others, otherwise they would say: Why are you paying more to them if they are cultivating cane too and are doing the same kind of work that we are doing?

That policy also included a series of bank lending processes, of contracts and agreements; contracts between the bank and the farmers, contracts between the farmers and the agency in charge of collecting their products. And so, many producers signed a piece of paper with the collecting agency, delivered to it a certain amount of products, and that practically consecrated the farmers’ right to sell at any price whatever they were left with at the end.

Finally, we came to the conclusion that through such relationships we could never manage to develop agriculture in the small farmers’ sector and do what was best for the country, nor would it contribute in any way to creating a revolutionary consciousness among small farmers.

If the country had a sugar mill in a certain place and there were 10 hectares under production, rather, 13.4 hectares, one caballería, with a few cows that produce milk, what would happen? We calculate that when there is a dairy next to a sugar mill, one kilometer from a sugar mill, to supply milk to the sugar mill we would need to transport about 500 quintals of milk – our quintals, which are half the European quintals and are measured in pounds, not in kilograms – approximately 25 tons. If one caballería of the cane that was supplied to the sugar mill was 10 kilometers away, then the number of trips needed to transport that cane measured in kilometers-tons were a thousand times more; listen well: a thousand times more to move cane, with high productivity, a distance of 10 kilometers from the sugar mill compared to the number of trips needed to carry the milk to the sugar mill from a mile away. The only truly rational thing to do was to move the milk production center to a place 10 kilometers away and bring the cane to a land one kilometer from the sugar mill, simply because having the cane at a 10-kilometer distance implied a thousand times more freight transport, that is to say, five hundred times as much in half the time; so, in six months during the sugar harvest we would need to carry a thousand times more cane.

Such a situation was rife. There were even many State dairies close to sugar mills. Sugar cane is now being planted near sugar mills both on State and private land.

Well: how should we approach the small farmer? The small farmer, ultimately due to their backward means of production, had a miserable income; and their land contributed very little to the country's economy. If in order to develop agriculture we had to limit ourselves to a policy of signing contracts and fixing prices over and over again, it would be a never-ending situation, as the farmer would have said, "Well, should I get into debt? Should I get into a mortgage? I do not want any debt, I do not care to plant that crop here, I feel unsafe." So the problem would have been intractable.

What have we done? We have changed the whole old system of relations with the farmers. We have come to understand that if the farmer produces a ton, the country receives a ton; if the farmer produces 20 tons, the country receives 20 tons. Because what the farmer produces is consumed domestically or exported by the country, and any loss that he has would be a loss for the economy of the entire country.

Hence, starting with this province, we have embarked on a new policy whereby we will give a rational and optimal use to all State and private lands; also, as we have the advantage of starting from a very low productivity level on these private lands, this will allow us to rationalize the use of these lands for the benefit of the country and of the farmers as well.

The State starts making all the investments; this means that if plowing is necessary, if we need to start a new plantation, these plans will include the production and housing facilities as well, not with a profit-making approach, not based on the farmer getting into a mortgage or owing a cent to the State. We will work to develop that production unit and the only obligation on the part of the farmer is simply to attend to it following the appropriate technical standards, and have the highest yield possible. If his crops need additional work force, the national work forces can be mobilized and we will harvest the crops in the same way that we grow the plantations and do the huge work that you can see around Havana.

At the end of the day, with an optimal use of these lands we will produce so abundantly that in the near future the products from these plans will also be taken out of the commodity trade circulation.

Society then cultivates the State land, makes investments in lands not owned by the State, invests in and contributes to its development, contributes to its operation to have such a high productivity that the country can take nearly all these out of the trade circulation. That is, our society is seriously planning to move towards a communist distribution (APPLAUSE).

Naturally, this has to be based on the highest level of technological development, productivity of labor and land productivity.

All the farmers who are benefiting from the micro-plans immediately experience a dramatic improvement in their situation. While they used to live in a hut practically without sanitation, we are now creating for them housing and working conditions that are incomparably better.

To give you an idea of what this plan means economically, say, for example, here in the Havana Agricultural Belt, suffice it to say that the value of production per hectare will increase twenty times; that is to say each of the hectares in which we are working will produce economic values twenty times higher than before.

In our talks with some farmers, we have discussed their milk production, for example. We have explained that with their current productivity we would need a million hectares to supply milk to the city of Havana alone. But in fact, we will provide full supply of milk to the province of Havana, and not only of milk but also of cheese and butter to great extent, from some 80,000 hectares of land; with eighty thousand! (APPLAUSE) And with a level of supply that would be twice what would have been supplied by farmers with that level of productivity in one million hectares of land.

This means that we are making a revolution in agriculture in this province, as in the rest of the country.

What has been the farmers’ reaction to these plans? Naturally, they have welcomed them with extraordinary joy, with extraordinary optimism, with extraordinary happiness.

So, a contradiction that existed between the private ownership of the land and the low productivity of these lands and the interests of the rest of society is resolved, it has been surpassed in the only way that is in our best interest and in which we must overcome any contradiction within our revolutionary society, that is, among the workers and farmers, any type of contradiction.

As a matter of fact, one of the most difficult problems in all revolutionary processes has been the land issue and the small farmer issue.

In our country we had an agricultural proletariat, there was a mass of small farmers; but, in addition, there were large estates, some of them under a greater rate of use and almost all with a minimum rate of use, but all of them farmed by paid workers.

We did not distribute land when the revolution implemented the agrarian reform. The people who had some land already, those who owned some land – small farmers who paid rent and gave part of their crops to the big landowners as payment – were exempted of any payment; but we didn’t distribute the State lands.

Most likely the Revolution would have failed had we distributed the land; we would have fallen into an unproductive mess of smallholdings, and we would have been forced to immediately socialize the land that had been distributed.

No distribution was made. And given Cuba’s conditions it was not necessary that we did. The prior distribution had become a kind of dogma in the political doctrines.

Fortunately, we were able to understand timely that under the conditions existing in Cuba it would be a step back to distribute the estates that remained undivided. As a result, we have provided a solid foundation for the development of a modern, highly mechanized, highly technical agriculture, that is to say, a process of mechanization and modernization of agriculture; and it has also allowed us to pursue a policy to develop and modernize agriculture without getting into contradictions with the farmers. We did not rush into distributing the land; we did not make any distribution, that is why it has not been necessary to socialize the land.

In fact, when the country gets to live under a communist distribution system the whole society will be working to produce for the whole of society.

That's why we are willing to help farmers, willing to raise the farmers’ productivity, to improve their housing conditions, improve their general living conditions, build roads, highways, and facilities of all kind, so that farmers will have virtually all their needs met. And a communist distribution will entail the satisfaction of the material and spiritual needs of the whole of society.

This means that the contradiction of having a large proportion of land that belongs to society and a portion of the land that belongs to individual farmers will be resolved by way of distribution in the future. We believe we have found a proper solution.

Therefore, we have not explicitly promoted cooperatives. If some farmers want to be part of a cooperative, they are free to do so. The counterrevolutionaries told the farmers that because this was socialism their land was going to be socialized, and we told the farmers: "as this is socialism we will not to socialize the land"; because socialism is the alliance of workers and farmers and not the forced socialization of the farmers’ lands, and we will respect the farmer’s desire to either remain as individual producers or enter into a cooperative.

In fact, based on the new ideas for agricultural development in the near future, every inch of land in the country will be producing what interests and suits the country: cane next to the sugar mills; milk in the areas dedicated to the dairy activity; citrus fruits in the areas planted with citrus fruit trees; pineapple in the areas with pineapple; bananas in the banana fields; root crops in the root crop areas; rice in the rice fields; definitively, all lines of agriculture, which will allow us at some point to be producing rationally and optimally, according to the various needs of the country, in every province, in every region and according to the characteristics of the land, whatever suits the country to produce. And you see how this plan is developed around the capital and is progressing quickly.

How did the micro-plans begin? The micro-plans began with some farmers. And others wondered what those micro-plans were. And gradually, as the plan gained prestige, increasingly more farmers wanted to join the plans. So, a vast majority of the farmers in the Havana Agricultural Belt, I would say that more than 90%, are now part of the plans. And what is happening in every region of the country is that farmers are asking when the micro-plans will reach their region, when the micro-plans will reach their province. And now that's the problem, unfortunately we cannot implement them at the pace that they want and that we would like, too.

In the Havana Agricultural Belt, 4100 additional houses are needed to solve the housing situation, to eliminate slums, the unsanitary huts, and provide housing for all the people who work in the Havana Agricultural Belt.

Fortunately, after six months of work, after collecting scraps, pipes, iron items everywhere, a brigade of communist labor, mainly composed of students of the provincial school of Havana, yesterday finished the feat of building a cement plant with a capacity of 100 tons per day (APPLAUSE). That factory was not part of the country's plans and is the result of the imagination of the comrades in the province. So, they finished the little factory yesterday, which will start production immediately. And with that cement, plus the cement that will be produced by the two large factories that are to be completed in the second half of this year, it will be possible to boost this plan in the province of Havana. So, we hope that with the work of the workers of Havana and the cement that will be produced we will be able to solve the housing problem for all the workers and all the farmers in the Havana Agricultural Belt this year of 1968 (APPLAUSE).

Starting from the second half of this year our country will be in a position to increase considerably the construction of dwelling facilities, because in the past years we have been constrained by a shortage of cement.

This village was built in 44 days. Well, in order to solve the housing problems in our country we need to build the equivalent of 100 villages like this one every month during 10 years. This means that the number of construction works to be completed for us to meet the demands of the industrial development, the agricultural and social development, should be in addition to all the schools that need to be built in the country, the social facilities in general, the waterworks, the factories, the roads, the highways; in short, a huge amount of work lies ahead of us in the construction area.

But, fortunately, we hope that in a fairly short time we can fully mechanize the sugarcane harvest. So this will release 300,000 workers primarily for construction and other economic activities. The mechanization of the sugarcane harvest will free the vast workforce that we need for construction.

That’s why I said that the objective significance of this village is very little. In these years the Revolution has not been able to build past the 10,000 homes per year, while we need to build approximately 100,000 homes annually.

The effort we are making now in construction, in the industrial arena, is focusing on the mechanization of the construction activity and on laying the foundation for the use of precast elements. I mean, we need to mechanize construction as well as to employ a large number of workers in these activities.

As of the second half of this year, the home-building effort will increase substantially across the country. But, where are we going to make the main emphasis? Our main emphasis will be made in the countryside, I mean the focus of our housing construction effort. And we will prioritize the construction of housing for the people who work in the People's Farms.

In the future, the construction system shall not include building separate houses; instead, we must maximize the land use and save space. We have to build upwards. So the comrades at the Ministry of Construction are testing this new 17-story building, which is being built very quickly using precast elements. In the countryside we will not build such tall buildings; nonetheless we will build vertically rather than horizontally. And the policy to be followed in terms of housing construction is to give priority to the countryside over the city, and give preference mainly to the people who work on State farms, while gradually targeting the farmers’ housing problem. So, the construction works in the countryside will take precedence over works in the city. And that is very logical and quite fair; I do not think anyone would object to that (APPLAUSE).

To the residents of the province of Havana and to all those who may be interested in the plans that are being implemented in this province, I just need to additionally say that behind the fruit belt we will have the dairy belt. This dairy belt will occupy the land that lies beyond the fruit belt; we are making the belt also in an undulating terrain which is unsuitable for other crops, and we will have 80,000 hectares of grazing land for this dairy belt in Havana.

We cannot do with livestock what we do in the case of coffee. The natural development of livestock takes more time, unlike the case of coffee of which you can grow one million seedlings in a few weeks. As for coffee, we are going to plant this year in the province of Havana about 100 million trees, so in 1970 Havana will be fully self-sufficient in coffee. I should note that the coffee consumed in Havana comes from 1000 kilometers away; it is harvested in the mountains of the province of Oriente where tens of thousands of local people have to go and harvest the coffee in the mountains. A great part of that coffee then travels 1000 kilometers. Havana will produce the coffee it consumes, and by 1970 it will be fully self-sufficient in coffee. And coffee will be planted as a secondary crop in the fruit tree plantations. That will take us only two years.

In the case of animal husbandry, each province has its own plans and each province will develop its own livestock. A province with a small population and a large mass of cattle – as is the case of the province of Camagüey – will be able to have dairy cows sooner than the province of Havana under the massive dairy cattle breeding plan. But the province of Havana must breed its own dairy cows. It should breed them from the dairy cattle that it has and from the zebu cattle that will be transformed into dairy cattle by way of insemination. Of course, on the basis of the province's milk requirements, the best sire bulls will be selected for this plan with a view to have a high-yield cattle in the province of Havana.

Therefore, the increase in milk production will be slower in this province than in other provinces that have a smaller population and larger cattle herds.

This will be a careful work based on the implementation of a policy on animal health whereby we will remove all the cows that are affected by brucellosis or tuberculosis. Brucellosis and tuberculosis have become endemic almost everywhere in the world. For example, in Europe they pay more for the milk from cows that do not have tuberculosis or brucellosis. In fact, they have not been able to eradicate tuberculosis and brucellosis there.

Even though it might mean that we move more slowly, our policy with livestock will be to eliminate in this province and in general all the cows with tuberculosis and brucellosis. That is to say, in the dairy region of the province of Havana, as in the whole country, we will eradicate such diseases that, for example, in Europe, have become endemic and permanent. They fight these diseases through vaccinations and other procedures, but they have not been able to eradicate them. So we are set to develop a high-quality and healthy livestock in the dairy belt that will lie behind the fruit belt.

Then come the irrigated plain areas, where the sugar cane belt and the root crops and tubers belt will be grown. It will not be a belt, it will be a stretch of land, because on the southern part of the province the land is flat and excellent for irrigation, and there we will cultivate the root crops, tubers and vegetables for the province. Currently, sometimes we bring the root crops, tubers and vegetables from the province of Oriente, that is 1000 kilometers away.

Additionally, we will cultivate all the cane necessary to operate all the sugar mills in the province to their top capacity. The 1970 plans for the province of Havana are to produce 100,000 tons of sugar in excess of what was planned for 1970¹. The province of Havana will also produce a significant share of the rice that will be consumed here. So it will supply all the milk it needs, all the cheese, almost all the butter, because naturally there will be other areas that produce much more butter than this province; it will produce all the fruit that it needs; it will produce the root crops and tubers and meat that it needs.

For us the root crops and tubers include potatoes, taro, cassava, and plantains; their name here is different than in Europe and we must speak in a way that Europeans can understand. The Latin Americans who are here might better understand our actions, our language, but ... Well, I do not know if they understand much of this because I do not know if intellectuals are very familiar with the issues related to agriculture (APPLAUSE). Anyway, I apologize if I have spoken too long on this issue, but we should keep in mind that it is the material basis for the entire cultural development of the country (APPLAUSE).

In addition to being self-sufficient in virtually everything it needs, except for a few staples, the province of Havana will export agricultural products worth at least 100 million pesos – the province of Havana alone. That means it will achieve self-sufficiency with the technical revolution that is taking place in the province; it will be self-sufficient in almost all items, except for a few, and will earn the country 100 million in foreign exchange through exports.

Therefore, the population of this province, the population of the city of Havana will be redeemed from that sort of colonialism, of colonization to which it had submitted the rest of the country. Rather than the capital city of Cuba, Havana was the metropolis of Cuba; and now Havana can be the capital and not the metropolis, because it will no longer be a burden but a tremendous help to the country on account of its huge workforce, of its enormous technical resources. Therefore, Havana’s mission is to train technicians for the other provinces, much of the technicians needed elsewhere, and it has the obligation to help the rest of the country as it is doing in many ways already ... (SOMEONE IN THE AUDIENCE TELLS COMMANDER FIDEL CASTRO THAT HE WISHES TO HAND HIM A LETTER).

Don’t we have mail? Ok, but don’t interrupt me now; keep the letter and you can give it to me later. If I get interrupted, I lose my train of thought about cows, coffee, caballerías, hectares and everything may be very confusing.

What was I saying, by the way? (LAUGHTER.) I think I was talking about Havana as a capital city rather than a metropolis.

Many of the seedling of very high-quality citrus cultivars that will be planted under the different plans around the country are already being grown in the province of Havana. So it has already started to provide technical assistance to the rest of the country. By 1969, therefore – that is by the end of next year – the over four hundred thousand hectares of the province will all be cultivated.

It does not mean that production will stop at that level. The years from 1969 to 1975 will be a period of constant struggle to increase the productivity of the land. Therefore, we believe that agriculture in this province will contribute more than 100 million pesos to the country's exports by 1975 besides supplying for the needs of the future population of this region.

Of course, the future development plans must ensure that Havana does not grow further. Havana is quite big already and we must develop the rest of the country. Consequently, we must see to it that the long-standing migration to the capital stops for good, and, if possible, that many young people with technical skills from Havana go to work elsewhere in the country, as they are already doing in the Isle of Pines and in many other places, and we want to create the necessary conditions to make that possible.

Fortunately, neither in this city nor in any other city in Cuba can one see a beggar. Perhaps those who come from large cities, very opulent cities, with many neon signs, with much luxury and pomp, might miss here in our capital the beggars that used to be seen everywhere; they might miss the brothels in this city, where unfortunately in the past, under the yoke of imperialism, tens of thousands of women could not find any job other than prostitution. And that scourge that is so common and ordinary in large, highly developed and industrialized cities no longer exists in our country. No bums can be found here, no youths can be found on our streets who are not studying, who are doing nothing; so our country is managing to do away with these secular evils.

We do not have a great economic development yet, but we can say with absolute confidence and absolute assurance that our country has such a rate of development and progress that nothing and nobody can stop it (APPLAUSE). Our people is working with increasing enthusiasm, with increasing awareness, with increasing organization and using more machinery and technical know-how. So, the pace of our progress is remarkable and unstoppable.

I guess that the imperialists and detractors of this country must feel great bitterness about our development. And today they even have to admit that the country is moving forward, so they have not been able to launch their usual campaigns regarding the oil issue, and they have had to admit as a fact the increased needs as a result of the enormous development effort that we are making in Cuba. They can’t but admit these facts.

And we're not far from 1970. And the skeptics, those who fell for the imperialist propaganda, those who thought this country was very radical and very revolutionary but incapable of organizing itself, incapable of developing itself; the skeptics who felt sorry for Cuba, who thought that Cuba discredited the ideas of socialism because they didn’t see such-and-such an index can now feel at ease and free of these concerns, because they will really see a country that not only can be profoundly revolutionary and internationalist but can also overcome the huge obstacles that underdevelopment poses in the present world (APPLAUSE).

In addition to all this, the imperialists also have to accept these successes with bitterness, and they will lose the tool of propaganda that they have used so many times against the Revolution. Because the imperialist strategy was to do all in their power to make us fail, to put as many obstacles as possible in our way, so that they could then say: “See? Socialism does not work, socialism is not the way.” That is like a doctor who would go all the way to kill someone just to prove that a drug is not good at all.

That has been the policy pursued by the imperialists: to go all the way to make our economy fail, so that they can say “Do you see now that socialism is not the solution?”, while they make efforts that they say they are doing, specially talking efforts, imagination efforts, to see how the other Latin American countries can develop.

And by 1970, the clear, indisputable, irrefutable fact will be that in eleven years’ time our country will have made gigantic historical leaps, will have made great progress, while the other peoples of Latin America will be in a worse economic position, will be more backward, much more underdeveloped, that is to say, the gap between them and the economically developed countries will be much wider.

As I said in my speech on day 2, the imperialists have looted and still constantly plunder the nations of Latin America of their technicians, their doctors, their engineers, and all their skilled personnel. Of course, the yankee imperialists do not plunder Latin America only. Even some European countries like England are victims of the practice of looting by the US which pays so high salaries that the government of that country has recently started to look for ways to counter the massive drain of English technicians by the United States. The yankee imperialists plunder every country around the world: they plunder the underdeveloped countries, the developed countries, the poor, the rich, everyone.

So, the situation of our country by 1970 will not stand any comparison whatsoever, and we are approaching that moment.

This year they have made a lot of propaganda about sugar. It is true that we have suffered from a very severe drought this year. Our country will be highly dependent on the weather for its fundamental crops still until 1972, but this dependence will gradually decrease, and by 1972 we will no longer need to be looking up to the sky to see if it will rain or not. By that year our agriculture will be free of all the vagaries of the weather, regarding rain, that is; hurricanes are a different issue because we still cannot control them.

Despite the severe drought, the work that was done with the cane, the effort in applying fertilizers to the cane, has compensated considerably the effects of the drought, so much so that they will not be able to do much campaigning based on this harvest, because this coming harvest will be a good harvest. And we say this without any fear about sugar being likely to fluctuate some points. And of course, we reaffirm once more: we will inexorably reach the ten million tons in 1970! (APPLAUSE.) There will be more than enough cane, given the enormous effort that is being made to achieve that goal.

So, this is the reality of our country. We have many more resources; right here we have gathered the rubber-tire tractor operators, the mat tractors with their female operators, because we already have groups of small machinery operated entirely by women (APPLAUSE). They have gathered here tonight the two hundred-odd machines that are operating in the Havana Agricultural Belt.

As I said in my speech on day 2, since 1960 to date some 35,000 tractors have been imported; those 35,000 tractors, together with some others that were left and are a little older, make a total of 40,000 tractors approximately that are available now. Those 40,000 tractors are operating, and it is not just that they are working, but they are operating in many cases around the clock; this means that each tractor has two or three operators, in a better organized way and with better maintenance. Therefore, we believe that the country's progress is really unstoppable and there will be no difficulty capable of even slowing down our economic development.

I understand that we have here also the brigade that was entrusted with eradicating the marabu weed² around Havana. On September 28 we stated that within a year there would not be one plant of marabu weed left around Havana, and it seems that not one plant of marabu will be left around Havana but in the entire area of the Havana Agricultural Belt as well by the month of March, that is to say, a few months before the deadline that was envisaged then. This is an example of how everything is accelerating, because at that time it really seemed a goal difficult to achieve even within a year, and it is being achieved practically in six months.

I think this comprehensive explanation – maybe a little boring – that I've been giving to you and to our guests mainly of whom we have plenty here tonight and who have kindly come to participate in this little party, leaves clear the fundamental issues about the belt and agriculture in the province and some issues about the country; and we are ready to answer any question that you may want to ask (APPLAUSE).

(HE IS ASKED WHEN THE HOUSES WILL BE DELIVERED). According to the poem by Indio Naborí, the houses were to be delivered today, but now I see it is not going to be today but tomorrow. Actually, I should say that it is us who are to blame, and rather the Cultural Congress is. Can you believe it? Because we were to inaugurate the cement factory on the 4th, and the village on the 5th; but then the Congress was opened on the 4th, we inaugurated the factory on the 5th, and on the sixth day of this month we inaugurated this village. That's the reason for this 24-hour delay. I believe that Indio had written "tomorrow". I do not know how he corrected his poem, or if he did correct it, because I had seen a version of the poem and it said "tomorrow", but it is today, and the houses are left for tomorrow.

Will you live in this village? ... Oh! How many are in your family? ... Only four? ... But more will come! right? ... That is, you are not going to have such a large house for a family of four only.

(SOMEBODY ASKS ABOUT THE TRANSPORTATION ISSUE). There is electricity in the village... does it have electricity?... and a shopping center, a playground, a social center, a sports field, and there will be schools. But, gosh, we are not complete yet: transportation is lacking. Ok, well, of course, you will have transportation available. I am sure that comrade Faure is looking after that, and whenever we build a new village, a new road, he provides a solution to all those problems. But I want to know one thing: what’s next? What will you need next? (SHOUTS OF "WORK").

You, where do you work? (ANSWER: “IN ALQUITEX”) In Alquitex, in Alquízar! Hey, that’s far! Then the transportation you're worried about is transportation to Alquízar...

Well, the sooner we finish this meeting, the sooner the night ends and the sooner the neighbors will receive their homes. So, I thank you all very much.

Homeland or Death!
We shall overcome!
(OVATION)

 

 

1 Translator’s Note: (sic)

2 Translator’s Note: Dichrostachys cinerea, known as sicklebush, Bell mimosa, Chinese lantern tree or Kalahari Christmas tree (South Africa), is a legume of the genus Dichrostachys in the Fabaceae family… Other common names include acacia Saint Domingue (French), el marabu (Cuba)… (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org)