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One source of its funds is compulsory "donations." Sugar workers, by means of a 4% salary deduction, last week turned over a check for $30 million. The bank workers' checkoff has so far yielded $20 million. The revolution's faithful can toss their spare change into big INRA barrels at Havana airport. And if money runs short, INRA has decree power to "rent safety deposit boxes, borrow money with or without interest, open and close current accounts of any kind with any bank or banks, in any type of money." In 1960 INRA plans to spend $160 million.
By law, INRA is supposed to provide a "vital minimum" of 66 free acres for each peasant family, though peasants who receive land from INRA may not sell it and must farm it as INRA directs. In practice, with a bow to Russia or Red China, INRA has concentrated on state-bossed cooperative farms, which so far number 485, equipped with 1,771 new INRA tractors. (Castro recently complained that INRA's major obstacle was "U.S. industrial strife," i.e., the steel strike, which has slowed delivery of farm machinery.) INRA has handed out small plot deeds to just 91 peasant farmers.
Payoff. If it has defaulted on ownership, INRA has brought to the peasant a definite, though perhaps temporary economic advance. In Oriente province, called the "cradle of the revolution," the INRA boss is Major René Vallejo, a bearded, widely-loved obstetrician. Blowing a kiss into the air, he shouts, "We are doing beautifully!" The 1,400 workers on Vallejo's Twenty Roses and Camilo Cienfuegos cooperative farms last week collected their pay—about $2.70 a day, up $1 from the old scale — and happily lined up to buy ice cream or have their pictures snapped, at 25¢ each. "We are comfortable," said Co-op Laborer Elinai Proenza.
INRA has established 460 "people's stores," driving small, private merchants out of business. "We make less than 10% profit," boasts Major Vallejo.
But on Las Villas province's 30,000-acre Washington Sugar Central, the entire destinies of 4,000 co-op farmers are controlled by a 23-year-old ex-schoolteacher; so far, he has concentrated on sewing lessons for young girls, close-order drill for a "sanitation corps" of boys. The practical effect, says a U.S. plantation foreman, has been to "set Cuban agriculture back five years." In Oriente province INRA plowed up 20,000 acres of ranch land for truck farming—then learned that there was no way to irrigate the parched land.
Imported Reds. The top INRA staffers under Castro and Núñez Jiménez are Attorney Waldo Medina Méndez and Production Chief Oscar Pino Santos. In 1951, the last head count on Communists before the party went underground, both were registered Reds. They have brought in six Chilean Communists to take over key INRA posts.