The tiger we need to tame

By
Luis Sexto                                                                        Read Spanish Version    

In
Cuba, people say, bureaucratic attitudes respond with a problem for
every solution, with a "no" to a "yes." They
dilute every initiative in papers and meetings. And they see reality
through the color of their windowpanes, or from their balconies,
usually high and distant from the street or the factories. Or through
reports that are usually adulterated by those who do not wish their
errors to be known.

Therefore,
any project to renew and improve socialism in Cuba — in addition to
facing the opposition generated in Miami, Washington and Madrid, and
by those inside the country who try in various ways to push Cuba into
capitalism — will first have to annul bureaucratic resistance.
That’s because everything that appears to be a limitation of the
bureaucracy’s interests, its privileges, its ability to delegitimize
every constructive decision and every freedom will meet with
bureaucratic hostility, in the form of indifference, extremism or
distortion. There is more than enough proof of this.

For
example, why did the countryside fill with government offices after
Fidel Castro once denounced (and President Raúl Castro condemned
again) the spread of the marabú
weed?
Not long ago, a Havana newspaper published a complaint from a reader.
A train and a truck crashed at some railroad crossing and, to prevent
a repetition of the accident, the local functionaries shut down the
crossing with two concrete barriers. Now, if sick people need to
drive to the clinic on the other side of the former crossing, 30
yards away, they’ll have to make an 8-kilometer detour. Sounds like a
joke, but it is an administrative decision.

We
see it clearly: the greatest danger of the bureaucratic mentality and
norms may be that they impede the self-regulation of socialism.
Usually, we do not speak about that mechanism, which we attribute to
capitalism. Why does any rectification cost so much and take so long?
Living organisms tend to persist in their existence; therefore, to
reject reshaping and correction implies the probability of that
purpose. And recent history confirms this.

The
so-called real socialism was born with the bacteria of
self-destruction buried deep in its structure. And those corrosive
germs are essentially related to the vertically rigid organization
that facilitated the birth and hierarchy of a bureaucracy that,
according to Marx scholars such as the Mexican Adolfo Sánchez
Vázquez, became a system of class — if not in itself, then for
itself, I might clarify — and politically fed from the surpluses
produced by the workers, who, paradoxically, received their salaries
in the socialist organization that followed Red October.

Soviet
and European socialism, therefore, dissolved thanks to the
bureaucratic distortions that forced political discourse to float in
the air, dazzled by its own vision of itself, even as it didn’t
recognize reality on the streets. It will not be necessary to
continue to invent enemies other than those we already recognize.

In
summary, the principal causes of the extinction of 20th-Century
socialism, the socialism that failed, were within itself. It
incubated the mentality (not to say the class) that discarded the use
of power that was truly exercised by the workers in socialism by
using an unbridgeable dichotomy: verticality vis-à-vis a democratic
horizontality. And, let’s admit it: where democracy is absent and
centralism expands at the expense of both sides, bureaucracy
prospers. And with it, dogma and corruption grow.

Definitions
of the term "bureaucracy" have filled huge books. No need
to recall them all. Let us restrict ourselves to the most basic
definitions. According to the Spanish Dictionary of the Royal
Academy, bureaucracy means an ensemble of public servants; always the
excessive influence of functionaries in public affairs; and lastly,
inefficient management, hampered by paperwork, rigidity and
superfluous formalities.

José
Martí foresaw the dangers of an uncontrolled bureaucracy that had
taken over the reins of power. He branded "the bureaucratic
life" as "a danger and a scourge" and hoped to see the
Cuban republic free from the "plague of the bureaucrats."
Evidently, the Apostle of Independence and Unifier of the Nation
suspected that bureaucracy, as a representative of the people’s
interests, might at some time ignore those interests and protect its
own interests as a group or caste. In that sense, Martí anticipated
the opinions of Sánchez Vázquez and other theoreticians.

Today
in Cuba, the rigidity, red tape and inefficient management attributed
to bureaucracy by the Royal Academy dictionary has been a sort of
Fairy Godmother in reverse: everything her magic wand touches becomes
a caricature of socialist aspirations. It mistreats and infects every
creative achievement Fidel Castro’s Revolution brought to Cuba.
Adapting an image by the acerbic Italian writer Giovanni Papini,
bureaucracy — transformed into a mentality, an ideology — holds the
secret of an alchemy that turns gold into excrement. In that sense,
it has been an unconscious or involuntary accomplice of the U.S.
blockade. Maybe, also unconsciously, it is to bureaucracy’s advantage
that the blockade will endure, as a guarantee of bureaucracy’s
interfering and anarchical existence.

In
Cuba, then, an ideological and political confrontation also seems
inexcusable. On the table are two cards: the survival of the
Revolution, with its string of goals and aspirations still not
fulfilled or deteriorated by almost 20 years of limitations; or its
detour along paths that will denaturalize it. Because they are
improvisational, cumbersome, limiting and alienating, bureaucratic
indifference and inefficiency tend to liquidate the cause of
socialism in the heart of the people. And the antidote would be the
same people using more democratic spaces and controls, even in the
economy.

Formulas
don’t exist, of course, except for the now-useless ones. Socialist
solutions in Cuba will have to find their own way. And, in these
circumstances, that is almost paradoxical. Can bureaucracy, with its
pseudo-revolutionary affectations, its reluctance to consider any new
idea, execute and support a process of readjustment that is careful
but bold and timely?

It
seems that, first, it will have to be reduced to the dictionary
definition: an ensemble of public servants. That’s its ideal state.
But will we be brave enough to oblige it — like the tamer to a tiger
— to walk, head low, to the corner where it belongs?

Luis
Sexto is a journalist and professor at the School of Communications
of the University of Havana. Last week he was named recipient of the
2009 Jose Marti National Journalism Award. He writes for several
national publications and has contributed to foreign publications.
Now he contributes to Progreso Semanal.