Bureaucracy in Cuba; between distortion and rigidity

By
Luis Sexto                                                                        Read Spanish Version
From
Insurgente digital

HAVANA
— "The most common judgment defines bureaucracy by the item of
furniture that distinguishes it — the bureau, the work table — and
by the material usually utilized to record its decisions: paper.

"But
those metaphors are eminently simplistic. Einstein may have cogitated
while leaning over a table and made his calculations on paper, but we
couldn’t call him a bureaucrat for that reason. And if we wanted to
extend that description to a doctor who listens to his patient’s
complaints while seated at a desk, or a writer who drafts his novel
seated also at a desk, we would be just as mistaken.

"That’s
because bureaucracy finds its definition in an attitude that is
little related to its palpable attributes. Rather, it is an
intangible evil, almost untouchable because it is tortuous […]"

To begin
to understand bureaucracy, we would have to turn to Max Weber, the
author of a voluminous book that carried certain sociological
certainties for the interpretation of that entity that pervades
capitalism.

I shall
not now review its chapters. This article hopes to present democracy
as a practical problem, although it transcends what’s purely
technical and injects itself into the ideological sphere and, within
it, the political arena. I prefer to turn to another book and tune
into your wavelength without philosophizing too much.

Here,
then, I give the three definitions given in the dictionary of the
Royal Academy of Spain: "Bureaucracy: (1) Public servants as a
whole. (2) The excessive influence of functionaries in public
affairs. (3) Management that becomes inefficient because of
paperwork, rigidity and superfluous formalities." The third
definition is closest to that which experience has allowed me to
deduce.

My
experience in Cuba, not anywhere else. Because it is the role of
bureaucracy in my country that I am interested in elucidating and
warning about its dangers to the improvement of socialism. From the
viewpoint of a journalist, of course, who is an observer and
sometimes the pained object of bureaucratic attitudes.

The best
definition of bureaucracy, or the bureaucratic mentality, I read in a
short article by Eduardo Galeano. It was a kind of evangelical
parable. Although our Greco-Latin culture is not as narrative as the
Hebrew culture of Biblical times, sometimes a tale illuminates the
encapsulated concepts of analysts so we may understand them in all
their transparency.

The
author of "The Open
Veins of Latin America" says
that, in a military garrison, the officer of the guard punished a
soldier by ordering him to stand guard next to a bench on the parade
grounds. For hours, the soldier guarded the bench, which did not need
any protection.

The
officer finished his tour of duty and forgot to revoke his order. The
officer who replaced him, having no knowledge of the circumstances,
relieved the punished soldier but replaced him with another. So, the
"bench detail" went on for 20 years, until finally someone
asked what its purpose was — and nobody could provide an answer.

Therefore,
bureaucracy — which is necessary in many aspects of public
administration — becomes dangerous when it loses the sense of its
objective. 

José
Martí, a liberator and thinker for all times, foresaw the
dangers of an uncontrolled bureaucracy that would hold the strings of
power. "Bureaucratic life" was to Martí "a
danger and a scourge and he wished for the Cuban republic to be free
of the "plague of the bureaucrats."

Evidently,
Martí suspected that the bureaucracy, as a representative of
the interests of the people, might at one point jettison those
interests and take into account only its own, as a group or caste.

Today,
the rigidity, paperwork, the inefficient management that the
dictionary attributes to bureaucracy has "mediocresized"
and decontextualized the prerogatives of the Cuban socialist state.

It has
been a sort of Fairy Godmother in reverse: everything that
bureaucracy’s magic wand touches becomes a caricature of the
socialist aspirations. It mistreats and upsets every creative
endeavor that Fidel Castro’s revolution brought to Cuba.

In the
words of the sharp-witted Giovanni Papini, bureaucracy — when turned
into a mentality, an ideology — holds the secret of a "copropherous"
alchemy, that is, it can turn gold into excrement.

In this,
bureaucracy has become an unwitting or involuntary accomplice of the
U.S. blockade. Maybe, also unconsciously, it is to bureaucracy’s
advantage that the blockade continue, as a guarantee of
bureaucracy’s interferential and anarchic existence.

In Cuba,
vox populi says,
bureaucratic attitudes respond to each solution with a problem; with
a "no" to a "yes." And they dilute every
initiative with red tape and meetings. And they see reality through
their tinted glasses, or from their balconies, which are usually in
high towers away from the streets and the workshops. Or through
reports that are usually adulterated by those who do not wish that
truth be known.

I do not
exaggerate. And if I say it here, in this leftist space, it is
because the Left needs to know about people’s experiences, and
because I have often said it in my country’s newspapers. Enough of
explanations — if indeed the reader needs a justification for what
he is reading. 

European
socialism dissolved like Alka Seltzer in water thanks to bureaucratic
distortions. Distortions that forced political discourse to hover in
the air while the people’s reality became bogged down in the mud.

Let’s
not invent enemies. The principal causes of the extinction of
20th-Century socialism, the socialism that failed, were within it: a
mentality (not to say a caste) was incubated that jettisoned the
predominance of the working class.

Who
profited from the ruination of the Soviet Union? Who are the rich in
today’s Russia? The bureaucrats, who — long before Gorbachev,
Yeltsin and their ilk — replaced the floor of the socialist state
with quicksand. The bureaucracy, of course, emerged from a society
that had been frozen by its vertical structures, to the detriment of
a horizontal, democratic structure.

This
should be clear to us: where democracy is missing and centralism
expands, reducing the sides, bureaucracy prospers. With it, dogma and
corruption prosper, too.

Any
project to renew and perfect socialism in Cuba will have to face and
quell the resistance of the bureaucracy — not to mention the
opposition of the United States and its permanent war, and the
efforts of those people in our country who try to push Cuba into
capitalism, one way or another.

The
bureaucracy will oppose anything that seems to limit its interests,
its privileges, its ability to delegitimize every constructive
decision. Any legitimate freedom will face the bureaucracy’s
hostility, in the form of indifference, extremism and distortion.

There’s
more than enough facts to confirm this. Why did the Basic Units of
Cooperative Production, a political decision of the Communist Party
in 1993, become paralyzed and failed? The answer is well known by
those mighty business people who held (like generous feudal lords)
power over the farm and cattle production.

They
prevented the consolidation of this basic principle of farm
production: the autonomy to utilize the means of production that the
state sold to the workers’ collectives and to utilize the land that
had been granted to the workers by the state.

The
entrepreneurial structures continued to impose their command,
breaking laws, rules and procedures and limiting the relative
independence of the cooperatives. As Raúl Castro denounced on
July 26, our agriculture has been overcome by the marabú,
the almost indestructible weed that covers and chokes every nearby
plant. Many years earlier, Fidel charged that the countryside had
been filled with office buildings.

Even in
stores, bureaucracy introduces its narrowness of vision. Stores with
numerous doors keep only one door open, for entrance and exit.
Inside, depending on the merchandise, the buyers have to pay at
different cash registers, thereby wasting their time.

And what
about legal paperwork, particular the paperwork needed for housing
construction? Or the paperwork needed to become self-employed? An
image comes to mind: the Stations of the Cross, with Pontius Pilate
dispensing red tape at every stop. In a word: hermetism. Immobility.
Sometimes, corruption.

The same
(or worse) may occur in other countries. But ideological and
political confrontation in Cuba seems to me to be inexcusable.
Unthinkable. The survival of the Revolution is at stake. Because
bureaucratic actions are time-consuming, limiting and infuriating,
they tend to extinguish the cause of socialism in the hearts of the
people.

The
antidote is the people. By expanding the democratic uses, spaces and
controls and by making economic structures more flexible we can
reduce bureaucracy to its first definition in the dictionary: public
servants as a whole. That is its ideal status.

However,
shall we be brave enough to order the bureaucrats — like the tamer
orders the lions — to slink, heads down, to the corner of the stage
where they belong?

Luis
Sexto, a Cuban journalist, writes a regular column in the daily
Juventud Rebelde.