Rusty mentalities

HAVANA – In today’s reality tin cans are not the only things that rust — depending on how they are stored, their due dates and a number of other causes. But that’s not what I’m referencing in this column. No…

The most dangerous oxidation is that of people’s minds: a lack of imagination and an adherence to the old ways of interacting when facing a complex reality; a diverse social fabric that has “rotated” and looks for solutions to its aspirations, needs and desires. 

Socialism can provide this as long as it is dialectical, dynamic, creative, and imaginative socialism, of which we have successful examples, precisely thanks to the briefly annotated characteristics.

Rusty mentalities have stopped in time and tend to respond in an antiquated way, out of context. Expiration date exhausted, in other words. It’s a delicate problem, they might say. And I do not mean issues of the superstructure, but those of the base: the economy, the macro and the micro. (Just days ago, Raul Castro, First Secretary of the PCC, said something in the order of, if we solve the economy we solve everything else. I will allow you to interpret that).

With mentalities imprisoned in the past we run the risk of doing as much damage as the one that causes corruption, certainly as part of the social structure, and damaging the socialist process. The combination of these two, to which you can add the daily problems of high prices that help empty our pockets, and the instability of supplies, produce fissures that tend to create distances between society and its institutions.

It is necessary to unleash the productive forces controlling the essential, and to rotate them, moving them from the essential control to the urgent seduction, with acts that speed up that process.

So that socialism does not rust.