Is there a way in XSL 1.0 to fix the < and > in front of and
after the CDATA section?

<rss version="2.0">
<item>
<title>Title text</title>
<link>URL</link>
<description>&lt;![CDATA[description text]]&gt;</description>
<pubDate>pubDate</pubDate>
</item>

Isn't this simply a case of XML errouneously encoded as a string? The
generator probably wanted a CDATA section, but not knowing how to do it
inserted a text node, like this:

12:12:30,45 C:\MILU\dev\XSLT-1
# more cdata-unparsed.pl
use strict;
use warnings;
use XML::LibXML;

my $doc = XML::LibXML::Document->new;
my $root = $doc->createElement( 'Urmel');
$doc->setDocumentElement( $root);

my $node1 = $doc->createElement('eins');
$node1->appendTextNode( "<![CDATA[$text]]>"); # wrong
$root->appendChild( $node1);

my $node2 = $doc->createElement('zwei');
$node2->appendChild( XML::LibXML::CDATASection->new( $text)); # right
$root->appendChild( $node2);

12:12:47,15 C:\MILU\dev\XSLT-1
# perl cdata-unparsed.pl
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Urmel>
  <eins>&lt;![CDATA[Eene &amp; meene &lt;und&gt; miste]]&gt;</eins>
  <zwei><![CDATA[Eene & meene <und> miste]]></zwei>
</Urmel>

Supposing this error is predictable and reliable, can't this be safely
undone using one simple d-o-e attribute for the element in question?

 <xsl:template match="description">
  <xsl:copy>
   <xsl:value-of select="." disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
  </xsl:copy>
 </xsl:template>