Expropriate and enforce

Abstract

With the arrival of the Revolution in 1959, the agricultural direction to be taken by the country's economy was established in order to regenerate the worn-out society left by the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. As Fidel said on March 13, 1963, while commemorating the sixth anniversary of the assault on the Presidential Palace, "agriculture needed arms" to make the country progress. Arms and land, because Cuba had to make up for the accumulating legacy left by the American companies which, for the Revolution, together with Batista and the foreign landowning elite, undermined the peasants' own economic means, appropriating their land and exploiting them for labor. Everything they had fought for and opposed to the Revolution was represented in the capital of the multinationals Shell, Texaco, Minimax markets, and other international companies based in Cuba which were intervened as the first act of the revolutionary government.