Meditating on the numbers

From Havana

By Manuel Alberto Ramy

I was writing my column when I received the article by my friend Luis Sexto (“Cuba, the smoke and the wheat”) where he meditates about the speech made by President Raúl Castro Ruz at the closing of the Cuban Parliament. It was the topic I was working on, and, although there is plenty to write about, I decided to defer some of my other comments and dig deeper into a point made by Sexto.

“Cuba does not benefit from surviving perennially as an ideal or system. Therefore, the first thing to change is the technique of resistance to being subjected and subjugated,” he writes. And that’s the road I take.

Cuba has demonstrated its capacity to resist, something inconceivable for any empire but beneficial for the whole of countries in our region, which to a great degree are freer, precisely thanks to that capacity to resist, TO BE there, as proof that it can be done.

But we have to take a leap toward a productive resistance, toward the creation of a socialist model capable of maintaining its own essential achievements. Into it we must integrate the various interests and legitimate aspirations of the whole of society. Politics is the art of conciliating a majority of the population into a common project, agreed to as a group, without breaking its unity, which has nothing to do with a frustrating and mendacious unanimity.

For many years now, the country has poured the foundations for a novel project that will allow the progression from just BEING there to BECOMING an authentic, original and genuine state. From pure resistance to a model of participative efficacy that will develop us in an acceptably sustained manner. Cuba has the indispensable resource, something that most other societies and governments can only wish for — the human resource. Let’s look at it, in terms of simple numbers.

The island has a population of 11 million 243 thousand and, according to the National Statistics Office, its economically active population is 5 million 27,900 workers. But hold on. Fourteen point 47 percent of that segment, that is, 727,600 workers, have a college-preparatory degree. Look in the Internet for the number of countries in our region that have that many active workers with that kind of education.

And that’s not all. Two million 545,900 workers have either a tech-school diploma or a high-school diploma; that’s 50.6 percent of the working population. If you add up the tech-school and high-school diploma earners, you’ll find that 65 percent of Cuba’s workers have respectable qualifications that allow them to compete comfortably on the worldwide stage.

So, the next question is obvious. Why are our productivity and output so low? Why don’t the nation and society take full advantage of the multimillion-dollar investment made in technical and profession formation and training?

There are no definitive answers, but there are several with a determining weight. For now, I cite three: structural, administrative and conceptual, all intimately intertwined.

To survive and defend itself (to BE), the government nationalized and centralized the economy. We saw it manage, rule, control from the center pretty much everything, from the late project of the Cienfuegos thermonuclear plant to the barber shops, even the ice-cream vendor’s pushcart.

What resulted from this? A stifling of initiative (everything comes from above), lack of motivation, inefficiency and bureaucratic hypertrophy, the bureaucracy that in Cuba, as in any other country, will defend its little fiefdom of power against any change; the bureaucracy that has an impish ability to derail the rules it has been told to follow. Those bureaucrats have been the feudal lords of a by-the-book socialism and a Marxism-Leninism that have been applied dogmatically and concealed with justifications. The exact opposite of the great theoreticians.

Wherever possible, the country needs to open to new forms of production and socialist property. It must launch new structures and institutions as it dismantles the old ones, but must do so as it evolves away from them; it mustn’t turn around and come back to the same place. It is not a question of asking the State to give up its guidance or abandon the path to socialism, but of opening economic and service sectors to small groups of workers, in the context of new relations.

I insist, the problem with any kind of property lies in the capacity for decision-making bestowed with the property and in the social role of the workers. Don’t confuse socialism with statism. An expert on agro economy once said to me: “What’s the use of your handing me a shirt, telling me it’s mine, and then telling me that I can only wear it on Sunday? What kind of ownership is that?”

Thinking about these and other realities, I think of the Cuban centers devoted to leading-edge sciences, such as biotechnology. Economically, they represent revenues of up to $400 million, but the conversion of the research into pharmaceutical products accounted for 9 percent of Cuba’s exports in 2008. The relationship between the State and government with this scientific community — composed of 73,525 highly specialized scientists and technicians — is to define the investigative priorities so the research can later be turned into pharmaceutical products. Nothing more.

In view of this, why not consider the centers of economic or sociological or agricultural research as sources of valuable information and give them their due when the time comes to make policy decisions? It’s not a question of following their recommendations blindly but of acknowledging their true worth when decisions are formulated. I am not in favor of the rule of technocracy but of the rule of the humanism within technocracy, in terms of civilization — and that’s the art of grand politics. It is also the path of the new defensive system of the Cuban process.

In my opinion, these ideas are part of the debate in high political circles. The postponement of the Communist Party Congress, among other factors, may be related to the search for a consensus on some of those ideas, within the framework of a greater guarantee of the permanence of the socialist process, once the historical generation has passed on.

I would add that the call to a Party General Conference and the people’s participation in the debates can help to consolidate a consensus on sensitive and worrisome issues.

The new resistance inevitable goes through changes that will help to mold a model that is economically viable, agglutinative and participative.

Manuel Alberto Ramy is Havana bureau chief for Radio Progreso Alternativa and editor of the Spanish-language version of Progreso Weekly.