Cuba Retools

Oct 13, 2010 Editorial

Last September, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic magazine created quite a stir when he interviewed Fidel Castro and reported that the old revolutionary said that the Cuban model “does not work for us anymore” and therefore there was no question of exporting it to other countries. Castro quickly claimed that he had been misunderstood and rushed to clarify. What he meant, he claimed, was that the “capitalist model” had failed everywhere and was not suitable for any country to emulate.
But he cannot gainsay that the moves that his brother and now President Raul Castro has made since 2008 to expand the economy is challenging some of the most sacred dogmas of the revolution of 1959. Expressing admiration for China’s amazing economic growth following his visit there in 2005, Raul has lowered many barriers and offered significant concessions in an effort to attract investment from foreign firms away from the tourism sector that they had opened up some years ago.
But the most significant change has been in the area of full-employment that the revolution had guaranteed. Even as Fidel was “clarifying” his statement, the National Secretariat of Cuban Trade Unions (CTC) announced that half a million state employees would gradually be laid off in the next six months.
The CTC said that the move was necessary as “inflated payrolls” in state enterprises were “burdening the economy and ending up being counterproductive”. The decision was essential, the CTC statement said, “to increase production and the quality of services”.
But the massive retrenchment should not have come as a surprise. A few weeks before Castro made his confession about the exportability of his revolution, Raul had declared to parliament that in fact some 1.3 million state workers would have to be eventually retrenched. The state employed more approximately 90 percent of the workforce and Raul argued that if they were to deal with the global recession (and the US blockade) streamlining the economy meant reduced employees. His blunt comment, “We have to wipe out forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where you can live without working,” told a different tale about the socialist experiment.
The CTC emphasised that the changes would percolate through all sectors of the economy. To deal with the problem of unemployment, in addition to redeploying some, most would be encouraged to enter the private sector. “Renting, usufructo (working on land leased to farmers), cooperatives and self-employment are where hundreds of thousands of workers will be moved in the coming years,” the CTC statement said.
Added to the encouragement already offered to foreign firms, the facilitation of so many private entrepreneurs is sure to qualitatively alter economic relations in the country. But Raul had insisted that the reforms the government was undertaking was not in any way “connected to market reforms” based on “capitalist recipes”. This even as he railed that the system had to be “updated…to overcome the paternalistic emphasis that discouraged the necessity to work for a living and with it reducing unproductive spending which is rooted in the egalitarian pay, independent of years of employment, in a salary guaranteed over long periods for people who don’t work”.
Even though through herculean efforts (and the fortuitous help of Chavez), the Cuban economy survived the dislocation occasioned by the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989, the last two years have been tough. Cuba now imports 80 percent of its food and great emphasis is now given to agricultural reform.
Last year, at the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, Raul soberly noted that producing food was a “national security” issue as billions of dollars in scarce hard currency is being drained from the country’s coffers by food imports.
“It is not a matter of shouting ‘homeland or death’, ‘down with imperialism’, ‘the blockade is hurting us’, while the land is lying there, waiting for our sweat. There is no other remedy for us than to make our land produce.”
In Guyana we would do well to heed Raul’s words and support our own drive for food self-sufficiency.

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