• Submitted by: admin
• national
• Business and Economy
• 05 / 16 / 2010

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This is the weekend that the National Association of Small Farmers [ANAP] is holding its congress in Cuba.

Solving the island's extraordinarily difficult food problem has been declared by the island's leadership as a matter of national security.

Here's some news of an experiment which seems to be bearing encouraging fruit, if you don't mind my mixing metaphors here.

It helps us to understand that these leaders aren't stubbornly persisting in policies which obviously don't work. They may well have worked at one time, but now don't.

They're open to other options and not operating under the assumption that they have a magic formula which can solve all problems.

In Fidel Castro's November 17 speech given at the University of Havana, he stated rather emphatically "among all the errors we may have committed, the greatest of them all was that we believed that someone really knew something about socialism, or that someone actually knew how to build socialism.

It seemed to be a sure fact, as well-known as the electrical system conceived by those who thought they were experts in electrical systems.

Whenever they said: 'That's the formula', we thought they knew."

Some on the political left think that all of Cuba's problems, or indeed all of the world's problems, can be solved by a simple, almost magical formula.

Each grouping with such magical formulas thinks that it, and only it,has what we used to call in the Trotskyist movement, the "correct program", which was to say a formula derived from one time and one place, but which each group considered then to be applicable at all times and in all places under all circumstances.

In Cuba what we have is a living revolution with a leadership not, in the words of The International, bound by tradition's chains. That's a good part of what keeps me interested, and I hope and trust that it keeps readers of these messages interested, too.

Source groups.yahoo.com/