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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >You mention the support of the USSR, so I will present the opposite view.

Good post and good points, Bev, but it is not an 'opposite' view.

The soviets used agriculture to punish some people.  For example, in Russia 
before the revolution, the pople were under a patronage system of the Czarist 
plutarchy.  When they went to collective farms it was simply substituting one 
taskmaster for an other.  But in Belarus and the Ukraine the land had been 
held 
for centuries by individual farmers, most of them small-holders.  

The Soviets wanted all farms to be collective (coming to a country near you 
soon) and so instituted policies which rewarded the farmers for selling their 
holdings to the collective and economically punished those who resisted.  By 
taking all collectively produced food and shipping it out of counry, denying 
farmers equipment, feed, seeds, etc. and other policies,. the Soviets hoped 
to 
starve the people into submission.  The result was the 'holodomor' [Ukrainian 
for 'death by starvation'] and by the mid 1930's they had managed to starve 
eight million people to death.

But in the case of Cuba the Soviets did not want the communist country so 
close to hte US to fail, so they shipped them farm equipment, chemical 
fertilizer, and fuel to grow sugar cane and then bought all they produced at 
as much as 
ten times the word's going rate for sugar.  When the USSR collapsed, the 
Cubans had to offer their sugar on a world market at going prices with 
predictable 
results.  They had been used to selling the overpriced sugar and buying 
almost 
all their food ... and why not?  If you could grow a commodity for a 
guaranteed buyer at ten times the going price, why waste your effort growing 
food 
which you can buy cheaply?

I would submit to you that it's not an opposite view, it is simply a 
recounting of how the Soviets treated one people differently than another for 
their 
own purposes.  But I would say that in the end the results aren't all that 
different.  Never is with socialism.


James