José Alberto, on the right, together with José Ramón Monteagudo Ruiz, member of the Secretariat and head of the Agrifood department in the Central Committee of the Party, and Rafael Santiesteban Pozo, national president of ANAP (Photo: Osval)

After listening to the debates in the VIII Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, and being part of themselves as a delegate to the meeting, José Alberto González Sánchez, a peasant with a soul attached to the earth almost from his birth, is one of those who believes in the urgent need of the Ordering Task.

The only president of a Cooperativa de Producción Agropecuaria (CPA by its Spanish initials) in Cuba with the rank of member of the Central Committee of the Party, affirms that it is not easy to harmonize the order in the short term, in what he qualifies as a giant task, which, he has no doubts, «will arrive at a safe harbor; a task that from beginning to end includes monetary and exchange unification, devaluation, reform of prices, wages and a lot of control and intelligence in what is done”.

For him and his people, the ordering task enters through the furrow. They have shown it over the years in one of the most food-producing areas in the country: La Cuba.

He and his more than 300 associates at the CPA are prime examples when it comes to the productive transformation that the field requires.

Since its founding, on April 25, 1979, due to the enthusiasm of 16 peasants, including two women, Paquito González has always been profitable, although after the Ordering Task they have experienced irrentability for the first time in history, it was mainly because of the rise in the prices of inputs, above the value of the food grown in the field.

Despite all that, the great farming family is not daunted and looks for new ways to lower costs and produce food, which is most appreciated by the population at the end.

There, any image of progress is based on economic efficiency: profitable since its foundation, more than 1,600 hectares, all in use, average income in the order of 20 million pesos at a cost that has never exceeded 0.80 cents, "even when the hurricanes Geroge, Dennis, Ike, Paloma, Irma passed", José Alberto specifies. "We immediately recovered, with work as a flag, because you cannot raise another task when the people want more food on their plates."

-Alternatives?

- Sales to tourism, exports, coal, the introduction of science and technology, drip irrigation, the administration of the exact dose of fertilizer - if there is any, he clarifies - to crops, but above all, the best of all: not wasting a minute for the good of food production and looking inward in the search for efficiency, because there are still reserves.

-May 1st?

—Although Covid-19 has changed the way we celebrate, it is still a town festival, the prelude to May 17, Peasant's Day; both, parties from homes, turned into squares and avenues.