[lbo-talk] Cuba's painful transition from sugar economy

Guest lbodownload at yahoo.com
Thu Aug 25 23:38:22 PDT 2005



> Why is agricultural work so awful and unproductive?
> "Productivity" hides
> a lot of things....like the taste of food or the
> fact that working in
> the fields to raise organic produce is probably
> healthier than working
> in a lot of toxic industrial environments.
>

There's an old Taiwanese woman lives next door to me who collects bottles and cans in our neighborhood to supplement the shitty pension the government gives people here- comes to around 100 US a month I think. Like most country people she's not in the least intimidated by foreigners, so sometimes we talk a little about the bad old days. But I have to sit when we talk because she only comes up to my solar plexus or so.

A lifelong, mostly vegetarian diet of all-natural, organic, pesticide free grains and green vegetables stunted her growth to the point that her twelve year old granddaughter stands a head taller than she. Decades of wholesome physical labor, stooped over rows of rice plants in the fields outlying our town bent her spine so that she walks in a permanent crouch, like a beetle. I've never seen her stand up straight.

I don't think she can anymore.

So, traditional agriculture. Yeah.

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