Behind yellow and green holiday lights festooned across a 23-story concrete building in downtown Havana, the select inner ring of Fidel Castro's chaotic dictatorship this week celebrates its first anniversary in power. The building is not the national palace or the long-deserted Congress, but the tightly guarded headquarters of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA). Yugoslav Theoretician Milovan Djilas once observed that the first duty of any Communist revolutionary is to destroy the political force that brought him to power and replace it with an enormous, patronage-rich bureaucracy. Castro has quietly smashed his own July 26 movement, populated by moderates, and handed to INRA the goal of remaking Cuba politically and economically.
Only seven months after its creation, INRA has more power and money than any other institution in Cuba. It controls 10% of the country's economy and, with the expropriation of the big sugar estates, due next spring, it will soon control 50%. INRA owns Cuba's entire fishing fleet, runs the marketing of coffee, potatoes and tobacco, operates the $14 million Havana Riviera Hotel. Every egg in Cuba goes to market bearing INRA's purple stamp.
The Bite. INRA's charter, Latin America's most drastic land-reform law, authorizes the expropriation, for 20-year 4½% Peso bonds, of all land holdings greater than 995 acres, except sugar, rice or cattle farms, which may be as big as 3,316 acres. In practice, INRA agents, who outrank even rebel army officers, have seized whatever farms they pleased regardless of size, and no bonds for payment of the farms have yet been printed.
The 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:
¶Wrote checks totaling $1,378,107 to take over Cuba's entire sisal industry.
¶Took over management of four industrial plants involved in labor disputes.
¶Took steps toward outright confiscation of the 22-company, $50 million industrial-agricultural empire bossed by Havana and Manhattan Socialite Burke Hedges, who was Dictator Fulgencio Batista's last Ambassador to Brazil.
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.