American farmers - 16 June 1995

In a favourite magazine of mine, there used to be a feature, a column that corralled items of news with old bits of information, on any subject whatever, that might not have come your way. The column was called "Intelligence From All Over" and took in things that don't fit into any running theme, but are interesting nonetheless.

This week I jotted down a few items that flashed by on the telly for instance, though it has no connection with anything I remembered talking about ever. I see that a pharmaceutical company has been labouring away at a task, which to old people with arthritic hands will be welcomed as a noble undertaking. They say they've almost achieved it, which is thrilling news indeed. Achieved what? Why something we crave at least three or four times every day of our paltering life, namely a bottle cap that can be opened easily by the old, but not at all by crawling children.

If you are now a middle-aged mother you may recall with gratitude the day, what 20 years ago, when they got out a bottle cap that simply could not be opened by a small child, no matter how athletically it pulled and pushed and twisted and bit it. The trick was to press down with the thumb and turn counter anti clockwise at the same time. Wonderful if you're an anxious mother otherwise, thanks a lot. I can no more press down with the thumb and twist the cap at the same time than I can run a one minute mile. I can run a 20 minute mile.

For years, while young mothers rejoiced and grandfathers groaned and cursed, well now it seems, the pharmaceutical researchers have heard our prayer and have come up with a cap that no child can ever open, but which the old can unscrew by a new ingenious motion without effort. The research lab that reported this the other evening said in the beginning, it would talk oldsters about five minutes to open the cap, but with regular practice they could get this down to one minute. Come to clock it, one minute is a heck of a long time to take to open a plastic bottle. Still, after all, the first automobiles were stopped with a red flag for speeding if they touched the whizzing pace of 30 mph and I expect researchers will eventually give us a cap that can be unfastened in 30 seconds or 20, or even, like a whiskey bottle, in one second flat and that could well come in our time.

Another brief flash item that came on the news the other evening, which took only 30 seconds to report on the bottle cap evolution took two minutes – but it's a matter of great importance to the American consumer and to all the politicians who are so eager to out promise each other in balancing the budget. The first picture in this story was of a squared jawed senator from Carolinas sitting in on a senate committee looking into the perennial nuisance, or blessing, of farm subsidies. This particular senator, whatever else he would like to trim: food stamps, Medicare, aid to mothers with dependent children, has every intention of seeing that pork literally this time hogs get the many millions in subsidy they always have had.

This story suddenly came alive in the most melodramatic way by cutting from the senators iron expression to a long shot of a trench reaching from here to the horizon in which thousands and thousands of hogs were squealing and muscling each other to get to the lumps of food just thrown in, not thrown out, thrown into this endless deep artificial channel. Indoors none of them ever sees a blade of grass or, I expect the sun.

I remember during the Second War seeing in Iowa, pigs being raised on a skating rink and fed a cement mulch, they matured in a half the time and were ready for shipping in no time.

Well now this hog story the other night was illustrating first of course that hogs are raised these days in factories by farming conglomerates. The hero or chief victim of this story, was a small farmer whose family had, through three generations, grown varied crops of wheat and sorghum and corn, and had a herd of cattle, but now he and all the folk of the small town he lives in are up in arms, not just about the supplanting of individual farmers by corporate hog factories, but the actual foul atmosphere the snuffling thousands of pigs in their cement trenches give off, not at intervals but all the time. The nearest town has farmers and farm implement companies and retail stores that give jobs to 93,000 people – an actual majority of them doubt they can stay. All of them are quite certain they'll soon be no more incoming shoppers or people willing to buy their products. The smell is said by everybody who lives within a range of four or five miles to be worse than any odour they've ever encountered.

One farmer who is bitterly quitting said: "I never thought I'd be forced out by agriculture putting the stink on me." I doubt they'll be many available public tears for his plight. after all it's the corporation and their technology that have made it possible to feed 260 million Americans far more plentifully and with much more variety than 20 times the number of farmers could feed 70 years ago, half that population, 130 millions.

The apathy of the general population to farming problems is easily understood when you consider that at the turn of the 20th century between 55 and 60 per cent of all Americans lived on farms. Guess what it is today? Two per cent.

If you listen to these talks, do you remember a week or two ago my telling you about the Liverpool rugger player who owns and runs a second avenue pub, and how in manly protests against the new New York City anti smoking laws in restaurant – no smoking at all if their seating for 35 or over – how he threw out a pile of chairs, reduced the seating capacity to 34 and now wallows in the smoky atmosphere from dawn to midnight, of a crowd of happy temporarily, eaters, drinkers and smokers? That item made the New York and neighbouring media, but I doubt it went around the country.

However, two evenings a go, there was a restaurant item that was on all the national networks, a piece of news, maybe amusing to most of Americans but quite possibly thrilling to the very large Cuban immigrant or refugee population of Dade County Florida, which encompasses Miami and its environs.

For the first time, Castro is allowing private restaurants. Thirty five years ago, the Cubans came in in their thousands, as exiles or refugees from the new regime of Fidel Castro. Today, they have a great compact and prosperous community and they are led socially and politically by Cubans who pray and work for their return to a free market Cuba, or at least one that is no longer – whether willingly or rebelliously – under the rule of a dictator. It may be news to some Europeans, to Madame Mitterrand for example, that Castro, though to many Europeans looks like a harmless big teddy bear of a man, is absolutely no doubt about it, a pretty ruthless dictator.

It's just 43 years ago since Cuba was under the heel of a merciless and corrupt dictator Fulgencio Batista. Back in the hills a young student leader began to assemble a band of students and guerrillas and for four or five years harried and raided and eventually terrified and overcame the forces of Batista who fled into exile on New Years Day 1959.

The United States, including President Eisenhower and the soon to be President Kennedy, were glad to see the end of Batista and at first welcomed the new regime, which started out as so many communists regimes have done, as a populist agricultural reform movement to save the people from arrogant rich landowners. Castro promised the sort of regime which has been the dream ideal of European socialists: a benevolent democratic socialism communism without the K.G.B.. The first promise was of course the elections, to be held in 1960. Thirty five years later we are still waiting for them.

By this time, Castro must be the ruler of the last pure economist state. Once the true form of Castro's regime took shape: farms collectivised, stringent labour controls, the prompt imprisoning of political opponents, the execution of many, general rationing. About 700,000 Cubans emigrated voluntarily most to the United States. Through most of these years, Cuba was a dependent of the Soviet Union. Now that most of its supporting arms, money and sugar subsidies have been withdrawn, it's generally assumed that Castro is in a bad way. He doesn't look it or sound it and though we plainly cannot get the evidence of a national poll, the view of most foreign observers outside the United States is that the people are, on the whole, behind Fidel Castro.

The United States still maintains an export embargo and has never restored full diplomatic recognition. There are still rationing in Cuba, still labour controls, still no free press, still the prospect of imprisonment for serious dissenters and the literature of torture in the usual South American forms is still well and sickeningly documented.

But Castro on one point has relented. After 35 years, Cubans will be able to take a meal not at a state run restaurant. Can you imagine living for 35 years in a country where all the restaurant were run by the government? Castro now says anyone can run a restaurant for private profit, provided there are no more than 12 customers. You know in this country, we used to describe any government run domestic policy as galloping socialism. The Cubans in Florida hope that with this new generous concession Castro has taken the first step towards galloping capitalism.

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