Word: cuban
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Revolutionary Offensive is actually a hodgepodge of programs which share a common aim; the elimination of the last vestiges of capitalism in Cuba. At the outset of the campaign the Cuban government quickly confiscated the 55,000 private businesses which had continued to flourish in the absence of efficient state distribution of products. Though 30-40 percent of Cuba's arable land remains in private hands, the government also began curtailing the free market in the agricultural sector, insisting that farmers sell an increasing quantity of their products to the state at government prices...
...Revolutionary Offensive seeks the elimination of any lingering "capitalist mentality" as well as capitalist institutions. Cuban workers now are expected to work out of love of labor rather than out of desire for gain. The aim is to replace "material incentives" in the economy and government with commitment to the revolutionary principles of the society...
...campaign to substitute moral for material incentives in the Cuban economy has an ideological justification independent of its practical advantages. The concept of creating a "new man" -for that is an acknowledged aim of the Offensive-is pivotal in classical Marxist-Leninist thinking about society at the stage of communism. Communism, writes Lenin in State and Revolution presupposes "both a productivity of labour unlike the present and a person not like the present man in the street..." Development of the means of production increases the productivity of labor and permits the transformation of man's consciousness. Abundance eliminates the need...
China's example during the Great Leap Forward of 1957 does not offer much hope for the success of the Cuban venture. Relying heavily on ideological and moral incentives to clicit an outpouring of voluntary effort, the Chinese embarked on a program of rapid development in both the agricultural and industrial sectors. They halted all private economic activity, taking over private plots on communes and eliminating the small free markets. Consistent with Marxist-Leninist theory, they announced the beginning of the withering of the state and dismantled their apparatus for economic planning. At the enterprise level, workers' committees frequently took...
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...