REFLECTIONS BY THE COMMANDER
IN CHIEF
LESSONS WE LEARNED FROM THE 6th
HEMISPHERIC MEETING IN
María Luisa Mendonça brought to the
meeting in
As I did
in my previous reflection, I have written a summary using María Luisa’s own paragraphs
and phrases. It goes as follows:
We are
aware that most of the wars in the last few decades have been waged over control
of energy sources. Both in central and peripheral nations, energy consumption
is guaranteed for the privileged sectors, while the majority of the world's
population does not have access to basic services. The per capita consumption of energy in the
The
private monopoly of energy sources is ensured by clauses in the bilateral or
multilateral Free Trade Agreements.
The role of the peripheral nations is to
produce cheap energy for the central wealthy nations, which represents a new
phase in the colonization process.
It’s
necessary to demystify all the propaganda about the alleged benefits of agrifuels.
In the case of ethanol, the growing and processing of sugarcane pollutes the soil
and the sources of drinking water because it uses large amounts of chemical
products.
Ethanol distillation
produces a residue called vinasse. For
every liter of ethanol produced, 10 to
Burning
sugarcane to facilitate the harvesting process, destroys many of the microorganisms
in the soil, contaminates the air and causes many respiratory illnesses.
The
Brazilian National Institute of Space Research issues a state of emergency
almost every year in Sao Paulo –where 60% of Brazil’s ethanol production takes
place– because the burning-off has plunged the humidity levels in the air to
extreme lows, between 13% and 15%; breathing is impossible during this period
in the Sao Paulo area where the sugarcane harvest takes place.
The
expansion of agrienergy production, as we know, is of great interest to the
corporations dealing with genetically modified or transgenetic organisms, such
as Monsanto, Syngenta, Dupont, Bass and Bayer.
In the
case of Brazil, the Votorantim Corporation has developed technologies for the
production of a non-edible transgenetic sugarcane, and we know of many
corporations that are developing this same type of technology; since there are
no measures in place to avoid transgenetic contamination in the native crop fields,
this practice places food production at risk.
With
regards to the denationalization of Brazilian territory, large companies have
bought up sugar mills in
As a
result of all this, we are aware that the expansion of ethanol production has led
to the expulsion of peasants from their lands and has created a situation of
dependency on what we call the sugarcane economy, not because the sugarcane
industry generates jobs, on the contrary, it generates unemployment because this
industry controls the territory. This
means that there is no room for other productive sectors.
At the
same time, we are faced with the propaganda about the efficiency of this
industry. We know that it is based on the exploitation of cheap and slave
labor. Workers are paid according to the amount of sugar cane they cut, not
according to number of hours they have worked.
In
Pedro
Ramos, a professor at
Even the
Ministry of Labor in
A
researcher with the Ministry of Labor in
According
to María Cristina Gonzaga, who carried out the survey, this Ministry of Labor
research shows that in the last five years, 1,383 sugarcane workers have died
in
Slave
labor is also common in this sector. Workers are usually migrants from the
northeast or from Minas Gerais, lured in by intermediaries. Normally the
contract is not directly with the company, but through intermediaries –in
In 2006,
the district attorney’s office of the Public Ministry inspected 74 sugar mills,
only in
In March
2007 alone, the district attorney’s office of the Ministry of Labor rescued 288
workers from slavery in
That same
month, in
Every
year, hundreds of workers suffer similar conditions in the fields. What are these conditions? They work without being legally reported,
with no protective equipment, without adequate food or water, without access to
washrooms and with very precarious housing; moreover, they have to pay for
their housing and food, which is very expensive, and they also have to buy
their implements such as boots and machetes and, of course, when work-related
accidents occur, which is often, they do not receive adequate care.
For us,
the central issue is the elimination of the latifundia because behind this
modern façade we have a central issue, and that is the latifundia in
Having
said this, I would like to present a documentary that we filmed in
This
documentary was made with the Pastoral Land Commission of Brazil (CPT) and with
the unions of forestry workers in the state of Pernambuco.
With this,
the outstanding and much admired Brazilian leader concluded her speech.
And now I
shall present the opinions of the sugarcane cutters as they appeared in the
film shown to us by María Luisa. In the
documentary, when the people are not identified by name, they are identified as
being a man, a woman or a young man. I am not including them all because there
were so many.
Severino
Francisco de Silva.- When I was 8 years old, my father moved to the Junco
refinery. When I got there, I was about
to turn 9; my father began to work and I was tying up the cane with him. I worked some 14 or 15 years in the Junco sugar
mill.
A woman.- I’ve
been living at the sugar mill for 36 years. Here I was married and I gave birth
to 11 children.
A man.- I’ve
been cutting cane for many years, I don’t even know how to count.
A man.- I
started working when I was 7 and my life is that: cutting cane and weeding.
A young
man.- I was born here, I’m 23 years old, and I've been cutting cane since I was
9.
A
woman.- I worked for 13 years here in
Salgado Plant. I planted cane, spread
fertilizer, cleaned sugarcane fields.
Severina
Conceiçäo.- I know how to do all this field work: spread fertilizer, plant sugar
cane. I did it all with a belly this big
(she refers to her pregnancy) and with the basket beside me, and I kept on
working.
A man.- I
work; every work is difficult, but sugarcane harvest is the worst work we have
here in
Edleuza.- I
get home and I wash the dishes, clean the house, do the house chores, do everything. I used to cut cane and sometimes I’d get home
and I wasn’t able to even wash the dishes, my hands were hurting with blisters.
Adriano
Silva.- The problem is that the foreman wants too much of us at work. There are days when we cut cane and get paid,
but there are days when we don’t get paid.
Sometimes it’s enough, and sometimes it isn’t.
Misael.- We
have a perverse situation here; the foreman wants to take off from the weight
of the cane. He says that what we cut here is all that we have and that’s that.
We are working like slaves, do you understand?
You can't do it like this!
Marco.- Harvesting
sugar cane is slave work, it’s really hard work. We start out at
A man.-
Sometimes we go to sleep without having washed, there’s no water, we wash up in
a stream down there.
A young
man.- Here we have no wood for cooking, each one of us, if we want to eat, has
to go out and find wood.
A man.-
Lunch is whatever you can bring from home, we eat just like that, in the hot
sun, carrying on as well as you can in this life.
A young man.-
People who work a lot need to have enough food.
While the boss of the sugar plantation has an easy life, with all the
best of everything, we suffer.
A woman.-
I have gone hungry. I would often go to bed hungry, sometimes I had nothing to
eat, nothing to feed my daughter with; sometimes I’d go looking for salt; that
was the easiest thing to find.
Egidio
Pereira.- You have two or three kids, and if you don’t look after yourself, you
starve; there isn’t enough to live on.
Ivete
Cavalcante.- There is no such thing as a salary here; you have to clean a ton
of cane for eight reales; you earn according to whatever you can cut: if you
cut a ton, you earn eight reales, there is no set wage.
A woman.-
A salary? I’ve never heard of that.
Reginaldo Souza.- Sometimes they pay us in
money. Nowadays they are paying in
money; in the winter they pay with a voucher.
A woman.-
The voucher, well, you work and he writes everything down on paper, he passes
it on to another person who goes out to buy stuff at the market. People don’t see the money they earn.
José
Luiz.- The foreman does whatever he wants with the people. What’s happening is that I called for him to
“calculate the cane”, and he didn’t want to.
I mean: in this case he is forcing someone to work. And so the person works for free for the
company.
Clovis da
Silva.- It’s killing us! We cut cane for
half a day, we think we are going to get some money, and when he comes around
to calculate we are told that the work was worth nothing.
Natanael.-
The cattle trucks bring the workers here, it’s worse than for the boss’s horse;
because when the boss puts his horse on the truck, he gives him water, he puts
sawdust down to protect his hoofs, he gives him hay, and there is a person to
go with him; as for the workers, let them do what they can: get in, shut the
door and that’s that. They treat the
workers as if they were animals. The “Pro-Alcohol” doesn’t help the workers, it
only helps the sugarcane suppliers, it helps the bosses and they constantly get
richer; because if it would create jobs for the workers, that would be basic,
but it doesn’t create jobs.
José
Loureno.- They have all this power because in the House, state or federal, they
have a politician representing these sugarcane mills. Some of the owners are
deputies, ministers or relatives of sugar mill owners, who facilitate this
situation for the owners.
A man.- It
seems that our work never ends. We don’t
have holidays, or a Christmas bonus, everything is lost. Also, we don’t even get a fourth of our
salary, which is compulsory; it’s what we use to buy clothes at the end of the
year, or clothing for our children. They don’t supply us with any of that
stuff, and we see how every day, it gets much more difficult.
A woman.-
I am a registered worker and I’ve never had a right to anything, not even
medical leaves. When we get pregnant, we have a right to a medical leave, but I
didn’t have that right, family guarantees; I also never got any Christmas
bonus, I always got some little thing, and then nothing more.
A man.- For
12 years he’s never paid the bonuses or vacations.
A man.- You
can’t get sick, you work day and night on top of the truck, cutting cane, at
dawn. I became sick, and I was a strong
man.
Reinaldo.-
One day I went to work wearing sneakers; when I swung the machete to cut cane,
I cut my toe, I finished work and went home.
A young
man.- There are no boots, we work like
this, many of us work barefoot, the conditions are bad. They said that the sugar mill was going to
donate boots. A week ago he cut his foot (he points) because there are no
boots.
A young
man.- I was sick, I was sick for three days, I didn’t get paid, they didn't pay
me a thing. I saw the doctor to ask for
a leave and they didn't give me one.
A young
man.- There was a lad who came from “Macugi”.
He was at work when he started to feel sick, and vomit. You need a lot
of energy, the sun is very hot and people aren’t made of steel, the human body
just can’t resist this.
Valdemar.-
This poison we use (he refers to the herbicides) brings a lot of illness. It causes different kinds of diseases: skin
cancer, bone cancer, it enters the blood and destroys our health. You feel
nauseous, you can even fall over.
A man.- In
the period between harvests there is practically no work.
A man.- The
work that the foreman tells you to do, must be done; because as you know, if we
don’t do it… We aren’t the bosses; it’s them that are the bosses. If they give
you a job, you have to do it.
A man.-
I’m here hoping someday to have a piece of land and end my days in the country,
so that I can fill my belly and the bellies of my children and my grandchildren
who live here with me.
Could it
be that there is anything else?
End of the
documentary.
There is
nobody more grateful than I for this testimony and for María Luisa’s presentation
which I have just summarized. They make
me to remember the first years of my life, an age when human beings tend to be
very active.
I was born
on a privately owned sugarcane latifundium bordering on the north, east and
west on large tracts of land belonging to three American transnational
companies which, together, possessed more than 600 thousand acres. Cane cutting
was done by hand in green sugarcane fields; at that time we didn’t use
herbicides or even fertilizers. A plantation could last more than 15
years. Labor was very cheap and the
transnationals earned a lot of money.
The owner
of the sugarcane plantation where I was born was a Galician immigrant, from a
poor peasant family, practically an illiterate; at first, he had been sent here
as a soldier, taking the place of a rich man who had paid to avoid military
service and at the end of the war he was shipped back to
He worked as a hand for an important
trans-national company, the United Fruit Company. He had organizational skills
and so he recruited a large number of day-workers like himself, became a
contractor and ended up buying land with his accumulated profits in an area
neighboring the southern part of the big American company. In the eastern end
of the country, the traditionally independent-minded Cuban population had
increased notably and lacked land; but the main burden of eastern agriculture,
at the beginning of the last century, rested on the backs of slaves who had
been freed a few years earlier or were the descendents of the old slaves and on
the backs of Haitian immigrants. The
Haitians did not have any relatives. They lived alone in their miserable huts
made of palm trees, clustered in hamlets, with only two or three women among
all of them. During the short harvesting season, cockfights would take place.
The
Haitians would bet their pitiful earnings and the rest they used to buy food
which had gone through many intermediaries and was very expensive.
The
Galician landowner lived there, on the sugarcane plantation. He would go out
just to tour the plantations and he would talk to anyone who needed or wanted
something from him. Often times he would help them out, for reasons that were
more humanitarian than economic. He could make decisions.
The
managers of the United Fruit Company plantations were Americans who had been
carefully chosen and they were very well paid.
They lived with their families in stately mansions, in selected
spots. They were like some distant gods,
mentioned in a respectful tone by the starving laborers. They were never seen at the sugarcane fields
where they sent their subordinates. The shareholders of the big transnationals
lived in the
I know very
well the family that grew out of the second marriage of that Galician immigrant
with a young, very poor Cuban peasant girl, who, like him, had not been able to
go to school. She was very self-sacrificing and absolutely devoted to her
family and to the plantation’s financial activities.
Those of
you abroad who are reading my reflections on the Internet will be surprised to
learn that that landowner was my father.
I am the third of that couple’s seven children; we were all born in a
room in a country home, far away from any hospital, with the help of a peasant
midwife, dedicated heart and soul to her job and calling upon years of
practical experience. Those lands were all handed over to the people by the
Revolution.
I should
just like to add that we totally support the decree for nationalization of the
patent from a transnational pharmaceutical company to produce and sell in
Brazil an AIDS medication, Efavirenz, that is far too expensive, just like many
others, as well as the recent mutually satisfactory solution to the dispute
with Bolivia about the two oil refineries.
I would
like to reiterate our deepest respect for the people of our sister nation of
Fidel Castro Ruz