Death of an organization

In retrospect of the past Jose' my father-in-law saw in 1962 what we have to worry about today Jose' said "It's Everybody's Battle" -- Ian Jay Germaine No private organization was free of attack and confiscation by the Communist regime. I was a member of the Certified Public Accountants Association. The Communists took it over. They took it over right under our noses and we couldn't do anything about it. They had the guns. We did not. Some of our directors used the only weapon they had--their voices and their pens. For this they were jailed or executed.

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Here is what happened: The Communists formed a committee at the University of Havana to judge all professors and students as to political thought. The committee judged, found wanting, and expelled several professors of the faculty of Certified Public Accountants. The other professors, except one or two of that faculty resigned in protest. At once the CPA association published a declaration supporting those professors. There the trouble began. Communists newspapers accused the CPA's of being counter-revolutionary. The CPA directors called a meeting to get a vote of confidence from the members. Five hundred members assembled. This meeting was infiltrated by about 20 Communists who made such a disturbance that orderly conduct of business was impossible. Militiamen with machineguns patrolled the street outside and sat in the windows. Other militiamen drove around and around the block with the sirens of the trucks shrieking. Since it was impossible to talk or conduct business, the meeting was called off, and most of us departed. The Communists remained They seized the building. They seized the files of the organization. They named themselves the new directors. From that day forward the organization was, for all practical purposes, dead. The Communists pretended to maintain it for a time, and then it went completely out of existence, in name as well as fact. Castro explain that professional associations such as ours were servants of capitalism and that there was no room for such organizations in the new Cuba. The truth is that he feared the existence of any group of intelligent, educated people who might use their collective strength against the regime.

What happened to the CPA organization happened to the association of doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, artists, newspapermen, radio and television commentators, and all others

What happened to the CPA organization happened to the association of doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, artists, newspapermen, radio and television commentators, and all others. Thus the Communists destroy the people who think for themselves, who therefore must be discouraged from joining hands, who together might comprise a dangerous threat to tyranny. Here is a thought to remember. Communism thrives only on the support of the ignorant and the acquiescence of the informed. While we of the business and professional classes were having our property and our respect stripped away, Castro was also proceeding in an orderly manner with the destruction of Cuban agriculture. The first step was the creation of the Agrarian Reform Law. This was represented as a "fairer" distribution of land, a means of improving the standard of living of farmers, and an encouragement to agriculture production. But in practice the law was a weapon to confiscate the sugar and cattle industries, all the soil of Cuba, and the tools and equipment used on the farms. This opened the way to making slaves of all the farmers on what, at the beginning, were called farm cooperatives, and later "Farms of the People." Essentially they did not differ from the communes of Communist China. This law also was the origin of that monster, the so-called Institute of Agrarian Reform---a state within another state from which the Communists have been ruling Cuba. Farm workers suffered in the same way as those of other industries taken over by the government. The Communist aim was complete control of the land and complete control of the people who worked it. So Castro told them: "This farm is yours." The advantage was harder work at less pay-- and sometimes no pay at all. The reward was often a printed slip of paper for exchange in the "peoples stores." Never before had they owned so much and had so little. (NEXT: EMPTY STOMACHES IN "UTOPIA" Column reprinted with permission of the Long Beach Press-Telegram