HARVEST Poem by Sergio Raimondi

The concept to consider in the Camagüey conference
was the dialectic between consciousness and work.
So before the speech he climbed onto a harvester


and in a few days cut forty-five thousand arrobas.
That was a declaration, at least the empirical base
to sustain a speech of forty-five thousand words.


The minister saw the macheteros at the vanguard
of the oppressed of Asia, Africa and the Americas.
The machetero saw a sugar cane, one and then another.


How to explain that this wasn't just another field
but the potential reserves on which depended
a war against the most powerful force in history?


Up onto the machine to check how it's working.
Badly. Of course, it's new, right. But why?
Too many blades! Ok. Now what else.


The difference between cutting for the company
and the revolution is the revolution demands double:
it wants a muscle with the power of abstraction.


This isn't a furrow, it's a power plant, it's purification
and efficient boilers, hard currency, a Russian tractor,
diversification and the coming of the Socialist World.


But in the cooperative the numbers weren't going well.
While some of them were trying to improvise
a local replacement for the broken couplings


that for a long time now couldn't be sourced,
others didn't understand why they worked so hard
to bring about the day you don't work at all.