The cat and the bell

From Havana

The cat and the bell

By Manuel Alberto Ramy

In Spanish, there’s a saying – phrased as a question – that describes a challenge: Who will bell the cat? Applied to the situation in Cuba, the cat, which is the economy, is lame, and the bell, which the cat doesn’t wear, rings during hard and difficult times.

According to Marino Murillo, Minister of the Economy and Planning, and vice chairman of the Councils of State and Ministers, unemployment stands at 1.7 percent, a figure that, at first glance, is a success because it indicates the very low number of jobless people. Joblessness is punishing a huge majority of the world’s nations, particularly at present. But, what is the price of that low unemployment index?

There is a discipline related to the organization of labor that determines the number of employees needed for every type of work, whether it is in services or in the production of goods. If that discipline were applied, we would see the hyperinflation of payrolls that exists in practically all of Cuba’s economic activities. Where three workers are enough, six or more are standing by.

Lowering the indices of unemployment to enviable figures by inflating payrolls has hampered production and productivity because such action impedes, distracts, distorts, retards and diverts the performance of tasks, whatever they may be. The result? Work productivity has continued to go downhill and this year has dropped to 1.1 percent. The original plan was 4 percent.

Besides, some totally unnecessary wages are being paid. If only 20 workers are needed in a lightbulb factory but 40 are hired, twice the salary required is paid and the surplus revenue (in Marxist terms) does not increase. And it is that surplus that should go to the whole of society.

According to minister Murillo, the average monthly wage rose by 2.9 percent, from 414 pesos (national currency) to 427. The planned increase was 1.4 percent. A contradiction in terms: the average wage goes up, the productivity goes down.

But we must take into account that the increase in the average wage is not real, because the population’s expenses have increased due to the rise in cost of some services, such as electricity, and products that are no longer sold at subsidized prices through the ration book. Such is the case of potatoes, whose price went up from 30 or 40 cents per pound to 1 peso per pound, and peas, which used to cost 16 cents per pound via the ration book and now cost 3.50 pesos.

According to Pavel Vidal, a Ph.D. in economics, “1 Cuban peso in 1989 was the equivalent of 9.25 pesos today,” and at the end of 2008, “the real wage was 45 pesos” in terms of 1989. If the trend, announced and reiterated, is the gradual elimination of subsidies, the real wages of Cubans will decline, unless decisions are made that will reanimate the whole of society.

Let’s go back to the payrolls. To solve the hyperinflation of personnel is an imperative to increase production and productivity, inescapable factors in the solution of other problems, such as monetary duality. But it so happens that inflated payrolls are a phenomenon that involves tens of thousands of compatriots. What to do? Put them on the street? Unacceptable. Send them to school and pay them their salaries (a step taken with thousands of sugar-industry workers when production in that sector was cut back)? Or reducing their wages to 60 percent of the norm? I don’t think the oven is hot enough for those cookies.

The answers are not short-term but strategic, urged by an integral vision. To bell the economy is an unavoidable step in the “actualization” of the economic model, a word used by President Raúl Castro on Dec. 20 during his speech before the National Assembly of the People’s Power, the Cuban parliament.

Elsewhere in this issue of Progreso Weekly, my colleague Luis Sexto writes about the likely whys and wherefores of that term, which implies not breaking away radically from the past and the present but adapting to a reality that is very different from that of 30 years ago.

I believe that “actualization” implies – in the first place – to consider as inevitable a critical repostulation of the different economic variants that were implemented in the past 51 years and a definition of a model that begins with the national reality (whose social and human composition is qualitatively different from the start of the Revolution), and the existence and impact of a severe international crisis with an unforeseeable end – a crisis that, according to specialists, is likely to repeat itself.

In addition, that repostulation must take into account our nearest horizon, a U.S. administration that seeks to revert the Cuban process and regain the spaces it lost in our Latin American continent.

However, there are several ways to safely and productively deflate the payroll balloon. One of them is to revive and expand to other activities the licenses for self-employed labor. Another option, not at all contrary to socialism, is to integrate those thousands of compatriots to new forms of production and proprietorship.

The small companies and cooperatives – I stress the latter, because they lead in terms of productivity in the agricultural sector – could take on, profitably and under the right tax structure, different sectors of the retail and construction industries.

If the question is to liberate the productive forces wherever needed, as President Castro said in his speech, there are places where to liberate them and satisfy individual and collective interests and motivations, because those motivations exist. They walk our streets and work our fields every day.

We’re living through complex times, true. Also, complex domestic realities. Cubans are much more complex, mostly because of the level of education they have reached. Complex realities require politically similar answers. There are no simple answers to any topic at present.

The process is defended with new, well-thought-out ideas that are productive. Failure to actualize will lead us into a dead-end street. Complaints about the imperial threat (a true, real threat) will lead us to take precautions of all kinds, but manipulating that threat in order to paralyze actions that must be taken and to stifle creative ideas will play right into the enemy’s hands.

Hasn’t the empire tried hard to throw a monkey wrench into the Cuban process to create an internal explosion? Or, at the very least, to undermine the social support the process requires? Heck, someone needs to bell the cat.

Manuel Alberto Ramy is Havana correspondent of Radio Progreso Alternativa and editor of Progreso Semanal, the Spanish-language version of Progreso Weekly.