National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA, Cuba)
국가농업개혁청 (쿠바)
The agency set up by the Cuban revolutionary government on 17 May 1959 to carry out the first Agrarian Reform Law. Implementing the reform laws of 1959 and 1963, it oversaw rural infrastructure, state farms and cooperatives and became a main pillar of the early revolutionary economy. Fidel Castro was its first president and Antonio Núñez Jiménez its first executive head; from 1962 to 1965 Carlos Rafael Rodríguez headed it and defended Soviet-style economic calculation. In 1976 it was replaced by the Ministry of Agriculture.
In depth
Place in the Great Debate
In the early 1960s the Cuban state sector was run in two ways. The consolidated enterprises under the Ministry of Industries followed Guevara's budgetary finance system, while the enterprises of INRA and the Ministry of Foreign Trade used economic calculation (Soviet-style khozraschet) with elements of enterprise autonomy. INRA's president Rodríguez defended economic calculation, and the foreign trade minister Alberto Mora opened the debate with his June 1963 article on the law of value. In 1987 Rodríguez recalled that Che's system had been more progressive and egalitarian, but that economic calculation had suited Cuban conditions better.