CUBA: Confiscation!

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...

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