Values, attitudes and changes of mindset

By Manuel Alberto Ramy

HAVANA – The relationship between the established power and society is extremely important for any country. When that relationship begins to fall apart, some serious thinking is required.

In Cuba, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp, a change in attitudes and ways of thinking began to develop in society. The scale of values and the means of improvement began to change significantly.

In that era (the 1990s), a citizen’s means of social improvement went from political-ideological adhesion to the quest for, and ownership of, dollars. Before then, if a Cuban obtained an automobile, it was the result of his conduct according to the established standards: political militancy, etc. And his level of political adhesion not always matched his economic, scientific or any other ability.

“Tin tiene, Tin vale.” This old popular saying – meaning that as long as you have money you’re worth befriending – synthesizes the moment of change. It spread through the enactment of narrow, short-lived measures to open spaces that were halted in the past 20 years.

Associated with the domestic economic crisis, a lifestyle based on the black market, theft and illegalities began to spread. The laws, the State and the government were on one side, the ordinary Cuban’s daily practices were on the other. It was a dangerous moment that widened the distance between the established powers and the whole of society.

For some years now, the process of actualization has been reducing that distance, as it takes steps recommended by the people’s participation in the Guidelines for the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba.

Several of the accords have been made into law, some with greater impact on the new economic policy, such as agricultural reform, the restructuring and decentralization of the State apparatus, the new banking dynamics, and the transfer of small stores and local industries to the workers, who then form cooperatives. Other measures, such as the open sale of houses and cars, legalized illegalities committed in the past century.

All this is good, because the law is restored and institutionality regains stature, two developments that are vital to the new scenario coming to us soon. Seen together, such accords are a clear acknowledgment that the channels for societal improvement have changed and that personal effort and initiative are valid ways, within a process that seeks the greatest possible socialization on a national stage that is just as complex as the international stage.

Today’s Cuban is different from the Cuban of the past, and many new actors are appearing in the economy and society because the national film is now being shown in Technicolor. An important sector – numerically and qualitatively – is being informed (and also disinformed) through the new technologies that, although with little access to the population, allow Cubans to interconnect, exchange, debate and criticize.

Also, people must become familiar with the new attitudes and move in a different environment of values, a different social conduct, a different way to move through the national maze. I stress this, because I don’t believe that mindsets have been sufficiently changed at any level.

But did the aforementioned measures bring the reality-government-society triad into harmony? Will the brevity of some measures reflect the persistence on old schemes, on ways of thinking that have been overtaken by life itself?

On several opportunities, and also during his speeches, President Raúl Castro Ruz has reiterated the need to change mindsets and attitudes, to discard “obsolete dogmas” and “psychological barriers.” Some of these were discarded by much of the population during the 1990s.

The Communist Party Congress was a good step forward and no about-face has occurred. On the contrary, any deficiencies in the enacted laws have been addressed with corrective flexibility as a response to reality.

While it is urgent to change the mindset of everyone – the leaders and the led – and this change is closely associated with the economic realities, the State and government have the tools to promote, contribute, compel, debate, teach and strengthen the changes in the perception of reality, with an eye to what is hoped and what is being done.

One such tool, the communications media, maintains a line that is little different from the one it maintained decades ago, showing very little rapport with the ever-changing reality. From the use of words – such as the media’s preference for referring to the emerging private sector as “non-State” – to the non-use of its capabilities to prepare the new socio-economic actors in the existing forms of ownership, as is the case of cooperatives, the media are not marketing the new national product.

Who do they work for, if they’re anchored in the past? Cuban TV has broadcast Esperanto lessons. When will it broadcast courses on accounting, or the history, organization and management of cooperatives? Why not report sufficiently and adequately on how successful cooperatives are in terms of production and productivity in comparison with other forms of production and administration?

To change our mindset we don’t have to wait for the impact on society of the transformations in the economic structure. And that change is urgent, especially in the leadership at various levels, as well as in the way the leadership conceives and promotes the spread of economic and social transformations. That would enable us to see more clearly what we currently are and what we want to become.

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