In doubt lies the truth

By Luis Sexto

The newborn process of actualization of the Cuban economy has generated its first fruit: doubt, typical of everything that initiates or repeats similar and failed purposes. Some wonder and others assert that updating Cuba’s economic model is only a decision imposed by circumstances, similar to a body that, running out of air, sticks out its nose through any crack.

This commentator cannot confirm this with statistics. Rather, he perceives that trend in the debate ongoing in Cuba. Therefore, we must applaud the variety of opinions and hope that the spaces for debate will grow. At least, the Cubans are starting to learn that even the ideology of more constructive purposes needs an atmosphere of diversity to bring together the common endeavors. Unanimity is usually a smoke screen, perhaps masking apathy, hypocrisy, and complacency.

At first glance, the actualization [updating] process is a therapy that at times will have to go to the extreme. The patient – the Cuban economy and therefore the entire social body – is a teratological patient, i.e., marked by abnormality, by the almost irreconcilable knot between productive forces and productive organization. The greatest complexity nowadays relates to the rationalization [paring down] of personnel rolls, bloated by a paternalistic policy that, by overstating the number of jobs available, devalued the work.

Abroad, where people often demonize whatever the Cuban Government decides, people call the implementation of new templates “layoffs.” There is, of course, a semantic, even doctrinal difference between dismissal and rationalization. Cuba needs efficiency to meet its needs, and right away about 500 thousand workers will change the way they perform their jobs or be redirected to other areas or engage in self-employment.

Self-employment offers 178 activities for which licenses will be issued, although with a tax burden so high that it will have to be reduced soon or the strategy will fail when the legality of this type of exercise is disincentivized.

Now then, the fact that anti-Castro propaganda distorts the interpretation of the process of rehabilitating redundant payrolls – a situation common to many countries today – is a media mishap that Cuba can do nothing about. But the biggest danger is that workers will internally perceive such drastic surgery as an act against themselves.

For half a century, jobs and pensions were never lacking, at the expense of excessive state subsidies, so it seems like a diabolical act to apply a standard never before used – the necessary workers will remain, and of the necessary workers, only the fit.

Will they understand that? Will the rationalized workers understand that they will be the first to pay the costs of a process that needs to restrict what was not previously restricted?

The actualization, then, oscillates between the extremes. And having mentioned the danger that the best intentions are mistaken for what they’re not, there is truth also in the distorting threat of a very bureaucratized administrative apparatus – with its staffing charts also excessive – that is accustomed to acting without transparency, and to trim and prohibit rather than facilitate creativity.

Consider that in any process there are actors and directors. If a theatrical show fails it is because the actors did not internalize the dramatic nuances of the play, or the directors were unable to bring them out. I’m speaking of extremes. Because the same damage could be caused by those who prejudge, doubting the sincerity or the effectiveness of the play, as by those who decide and guide, believing that the script is an emergency tool, a simple temporary measure that, after being applied, will leave things as they were.

What is happening today in Cuba in the economy and the conceptual structure of its policy deserves only one name: transition. That’s because, in my judgment, Cuban society now resumes its progress toward socialism, interrupted in 1968 when the perception took hold that, in one leap, socialism would be a certainty, even accelerating that other purely theoretical, even unimaginable society called communism. In other words, the perfect society.

Today, however, one idea seems certain: with nothing to distribute, socialism will never be socialism in practice. Poverty cannot be the basis of a society that seeks well-being in equality and equity. One of its main achievements will have to be to solve the urgencies of daily life without resorting to the metaphor of a future of happiness, so often postponed due to adverse events, to justify what has become precarious.

Therefore, in order to distribute justly, wealth and values must exist. And if the model so far in place has proven to be unable to achieve efficiency, efficacy and effectiveness by vertical centralization, i.e., bureaucratic and authoritative centralization, the proper correction seeks to find unorthodox alternatives in relation to the most widespread ideology – let’s call it a mixed economy – so that society may revitalize its productive forces to advance toward what we call socialism, whose efforts have been diluted in expressions of goodwill.

Will this process be postponed or abandoned? I will not deny the right of my readers in Miami to pray for the disaster to occur. But, from this side, I would be sorry to see Cuban society foundering in the almost inevitable ruin of the desire for justice and independence that the Revolution achieved.

However, several internal opinions are convinced that the country is drifting towards capitalism, because they suspect that, by ceding economic spaces to individuals and empowering them to hire workers, the foundations would be laid for a petty bourgeoisie that would generate capital in accordance with Marxism or with the approach of some Marxists.

To this apprehension I would pose a question: What would be generated if the state continued to practice as a dispenser and controller of the most trivial and less profitable resources, or if it enabled the workers to self-manage nearly bankrupt companies?

If the current Cuban society does not resort to what most quickly secures the sources of a kind of accumulation that creates socialism (and in that theoretical assumption I agree with the Brazilian Emir Sader) there may not be time to review manuals or read the classics directly.

Perhaps the quickest way to redirect to Cuba to capitalism (a path that seems to be rejected by the majority) is to continue to support an organization where the state, as the only socializer of property, does not fulfill its purpose to fully satisfy the social needs and finds itself obliged to perpetuate a tightly centralized order that, despite invoking the concepts of democracy and democratic, was at times authoritarian and bureaucratic.

I conclude this brief approach by quoting half of a sentence attributed to Che Guevara, conceding that, in these times of crossroads and unappealable opportunities, “to have malanga” is now more urgent and important than applying theories.

Luis Sexto, a Cuban journalist, winner of the 2009 José Martí Prize, is a regular contributor to Progreso Weekly/Semanal.