Who’s the best?

By Rubiel de la Cruz Rabí

From La Joven Cuba (The Young Cuba)

The meeting ended in violence. Despite the years spent at the university, collegiate friendship – often demonstrated – seemed reduced to a frenzied struggle to make clear who was first. It was normal, because almost at the end of the race someone realized that “bringing out the skeletons in the closet” works well when the rival is superior but it just isn’t right.

To analyze the merits and faculties of members of any collective in Cuba has become the preferred task of those who act as bureaucratic inquisitors. What at one time was an effective way to recognize the ones who sacrificed the most has become a tired, routine and obtuse assembly.

The inquisitor’s main symptom is the failure in his face. He jabbers about everything and doesn’t specialize in anything. He navigates between the mediocre and the ridiculous, because his need to be the center of things turns him into the accusing eye of everyone, against everyone.

The problem basically lies in the lack of stimulus for the outstanding people. To applaud and reward with a simple certificate only meets the expectations of a certain group of forward-thinkers. To some, the assembly debates constitute the only way to feel at the top, facing the threat that implies a real conflict between them: the rigorous doers and the true leaders in school or professional endeavors.

The inescapable reduction of bloated payrolls in the state sector, announced before the Sixth Party Congress, brought with it a rigorous process of suitability where only the more “capable” ones are honored with a job. The inconveniences have repercussions everywhere, from the elimination of the gratuities (which included trips for the outstanding workers and vanguards) to an unbalanced grant of jobs to university graduates.

Such steps in the necessary actualization of the Cuban economic model allow for a tense competition, inclined in the past to political requirements, rather than to expertise. Maybe for that reason, the basic document of the First National Party Conference, set for January 2012, calls for being mindful of the personal qualities of the cadres, be they militant or not, in addition to their political-ideological training.

“For so many years, we focused so much on the materialism that we forgot the spiritual,” a party leader acknowledges. Far from surrounding ourselves with shouters of political slogans and people who justify wrongdoing, hiding behind the alleged defense of the Revolution, the country needs believers in the sacred duty of being more Cuban, more human and revolutionary in the most profound and actualized sense of the word.

The fundamental title is being human, without labels, as Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wished. Of course, socialism, an imperfect system under construction in Cuba, must be corrected to cast light on this “first-line” group that boasts of a solid ideology but denies its meaning through its behavior.

Authentic phonies, Truman Capote might say, but the truth is that such a situation seems not to have an immediate solution. Meanwhile, “the superior ones,” who presume less, speak little but are much too good in their work, hope that in the old-fashioned assemblies the stimulus will be more consistent than only recognizing who is the best among many.

Rubiel De la Cruz Rabí is a journalism student at the University of Holguín.