By Roberto Morejón

To mitigate material shortages, Cubans must work, as stated by historic leader Fidel Castro, with tenacity, organization, discipline, efficiency, because then, he said, they will be able to achieve whatever they set out to do.
 
That concept, reiterated by the young lawyer who delivered the historic plea History will absolve me, should take root these days, when Cubans remember with respect the 97th anniversary of his birth.
 
The dignitary insisted on the imperative of working for today and tomorrow, for this generation and those to come.
 
Older Cubans and their collaborators remember the habit of the man who commanded the expedition of the Granma yacht of appearing where no one could imagine.
 
He would arrive in the midst of his many occupations, interested in the development of the Caribbean nation and how manual and service workers were performing.
 
As those who knew his thought pointed out, the statesman insisted that the duty of a people in Revolution was, precisely, to work, to do, to produce.
 
The most honorable thing is and must always be work, stressed the leader of the insurrectionists in the Sierra Maestra.  
 
Indeed, against underdevelopment, poverty, the inability to extract the maximum of what is available and the U.S. blockade, only the daily struggle, with one's own efforts, can dent the burden of difficulties.
 
Even more so in the current times when the Food Sovereignty and Food and Nutritional Security Law and the 63 provisions to boost agricultural production in the largest of the Antilles have not achieved the necessary recovery.
 
As Deputy Prime Minister Jorge Luis Tapia pointed out in a recent parliamentary session, Cubans have to attend to every inch of land, plot and yard with the capacity to produce in order to achieve food sovereignty.
 
It is not by chance that Cuba is today engaged in a better organization of local food systems, based on municipalities, in search of the development of potentialities, sustainability and resilience.
 
Economic strategists have called for a better integration of the different actors, from the scientific to the productive, always based on the fact that, as Fidel Castro said, every man and woman has the duty to work.