Castro is talking about plans to increase the use of machines to cut the sugar cane in future harvests. A combine can cut thirty times as much cane as a machetero can. But they should not be afraid of losing their jobs.

a prissy-looking man in rimless cheaters with a smear on his chin that might have been a goatee

The poor family were turned out of their lodgings at only an hour's notice.

We find ourselves once more in the presence of the phenomenon shath, the interversion of personalities occurring in the course of mystical union. God concedes His part to the ecstatic soul which becomes His mouthpiece; the latter can do no other than speak in the first person, or rather it is God speaking, as it were, by his mouth.