Hell hath no fury like an advisor scorned, and René Dumont, the French agricultural economist and ex-confidant of Castro is both scorned and furious. In this somewhat awkward translation of his 1964 book on Cuba (updated slightly), Dumont delivers a series of scathing attacks on Cuban agricultural planning and practice. Something of his point of view and the temper of his prose can be gathered from the titles of Chapters Two, Three, and Four, the heart of his book: “1959-1960: Agrarian Reform Amid Revolutionary and Romantic Anarchy;” “1961-1963: The Rush to Adopt Socialism, and the Bureaucratization of Anarchy;” “Management Through a Centralized Budget, or ‘Bureaucratization’ of the Cuban Economy.” These three highly polemical chapters are introduced by a more modest (although not completely coherent) chapter in which Dumont sketches the pre-revolutionary agricultural economy of Cuba, and they are followed by a chapter on “The Possibilities of Righting the Cuban Economy” and finally one on the difficulties of constructing socialism in the context of underdevelopment.
In no sense is this a balanced or scholarly appraisal of the first four years of agrarian reform under Castro. Written in breezy and often disconnected prose, laced with anecdotes of the “Fidel and I” variety, inaccurate and extremely mean spirited in places, it is intended to be a critique of the Castroite developmental style. It is also intended to be a friendly critique. Thus, on the first page of the Preface (xi) Dumont says that the Cuban Revolution “must be helped to reach the age of reason more quickly, with constructive criticism.” But the author’s original protestations of affection for the Cuban experiment are soon forgotten as his avalanche of criticism begins. As might be expected, Castro’s opponents were and will continue to be delighted with the book. After all, if “friendly” René Dumont says that the revolutionaries made a mess out of the agricultural sector through a mixture of ignorance, bad planning, anarchy and bureaucratic methods, it must be so.
But in addition to its worth (to some) as a polemic, the book has value in another context. The author wants his exposé of the Cuban situation to have didactic value; “The young nations that are turning toward socialism must become better acquainted with the Cuban Revolution,” he writes in the Preface (xii). They must realize, as the author constantly emphasizes in his final chapter, that the construction of socialism in an environment of profound cultural and technological underdevelopment is a formidable task. Precisely where socialism is most needed, Dumont argues, there it is most difficult to achieve. This is really the orchestrating theme and message of his attack on the Cubans, and when the book is viewed in this perspective it cannot so easily be dismissed. For although the author’s intemperance and looseness with fact and detail deprive his work of most claims to scholarship, the point of his polemic is persuasive. Guerrilla methods, whatever their political value and ideological attractiveness, have yet to prove equal to the harsh tasks of agricultural development. Nature—even on an island as bountifully endowed as Cuba—is a harsh mistress until won over by the very best planning, technology, and good sense available to man.
