Never mind I was born snub-nosed…
From Havana
Never mind I was born snub-nosed…
By Manuel Alberto Ramy
ramymanuel@yahoo.com
Never mind I was born snub-nosed; what’s important is that I breathe. An old saying in the native arsenal that highlights the importance of what’s meaningful. To be able to breathe is more important than having a beautiful nose. After all, plastic surgery does wonders.
The point is that the country, the nation, the Cuban society, the people, the revolutionary process has to breathe. The oxygen comes from the economy (not a novel statement), which is suffering from nasal obstruction and weak lungs.
Temporary measures are the equivalent of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, or the use of oxygen tanks or inhalers; they are emergency solutions, tactical moves or answers to which the country has resorted several times. The consequences? Transitory tactics or answers, if prolonged, replace strategy, substitute a global design.
I’ll get down to earth. Problems of an economic nature often receive an administrative response. For example: How many times has the ACOPIO company gone from one ministry to another? At various times, it has been part of the Domestic Trade ministry – to which it returned some months ago – and the Agriculture ministry. It proved to be inefficient in both. Purely administrative decisions were applied to a problem with deep implications.
The ACOPIO company, which regulates prices and commercializes more than 80 percent of all farm production, is the last link in the production process: transportation and commercialization. To look upon this last act as an isolated function is a mere exercise in abstraction. A punctual and administrative response does not solve the problem. What’s needed is a holistic, systemic approach that encompasses an entire process. Moreover, we need a new economic model capable of liberating the productive forces within a decentralized socialist project.
Readers may think I insist on picking examples from the agro sector. They’re right, but that’s the first sector to touch the people, and the solution and its consequences affect not only the people. By a systemic approach, the country would reduce its dependence on food imports – unsustainable because of the current prices in the world market – confront its lack of liquidity, and assume with greater ability the presence of an international panorama that, in Latin America, is witnessing the start of an imperial counteroffensive.
(Not by happenstance, Fidel Castro, in one of his Reflections, let slip a prediction that about eight governments in our region would turn to the right. He didn’t say which. Check the map yourself.)
Let me go on about agriculture. On March 15, Cuban Radar announced that more than 100 companies run by the Agriculture Ministry (MINAGRI) would disappear and that about 40,000 workers would be shifted to other activities in the economy. The announcement is the subject for much discussion.
First, they’re obviously unprofitable businesses. Lack of information about them limits any analysis in depth. I stick to one fact: the Agriculture Minister said the current situation did not permit their continued existence, which indicates their unprofitability had lasted for a number of years.
What’s positive about this is that efficiency (translated into profitability, production and productivity) was key to the decision. And the decision might also be indicative of a favorable tendency to return the ministries to their primary functions, i.e., to direct, to rule economic policy and technical assistance, etc., for their own sector, and discard any direct entrepreneurial commitments.
We are burdened by a government apparatus that is overweight, excessively centralized and plagued with bureaucrats who turn their little parcels of power into knightly feuds. And many of them, instead of adequately enforcing the decisions, have an infinite capacity for hindering, delaying and/or sidetracking them.
Second, after hearing the news I put my ear to the ground (not the ground of greens, grains and legumes) and perceived similar stirrings in other ministries and institutions that own companies. The sounds that I hear please me, not only because those institutions follow the lead of MINAGRI in terms of unloading unprofitable companies but also because they have begun to study the convenience of turning some of those companies into cooperative societies.
To me, the possibility of opening to new forms of ownership and cooperative production means that the ministries and institutions involved in this exploration have received the blessing of the political leadership of this country. This also suggests that the top circles of leadership have sketched a more flexible economic model and are willing to explore it gradually and assume the consequences.
Let’s not forget that such measures could imply an updating of the style of governance and its relation to society. Underline could imply.
My third reaction begins with a question. Is a Ministry of Sugar (MINAZ) necessary to operate 44 mills and several important scientific centers? In the light of simplifying the Central Administration of the State (ACE), does it make sense? Couldn’t the mills turn into companies and the scientific centers become self-sustaining scientific centers?
I can’t avoid mentioning a fourth reaction. The local popular administrations and the Councils of Provincial Administration (Popular Power) have production centers that are mainly devoted to the manufacture of consumer goods, many of them produced by hand or in very basic factories. Wouldn’t they qualify for a process of conversion into cooperatives?
Socialism is not at odds with the various forms of ownership and production. So, let’s give oxygen to the economy.
Manuel Alberto Ramy is chief correspondent of Radio Progreso Alternativa in Havana and editor of Progreso Semanal, the English-language version of Progreso Weekly.
