When self-employment is a sin

HAVANA – If there’s a problem for the foreseeable future, and problems appear to be what we can forecast on the Island for the medium and long term, it is the number of people who work without the proper documentation, without not even a verbal contract, nothing at all, and therefore, also, without social security and no retirement to count on. They are employees in private businesses, waiters, street vendors, painters, bricklayers, the so-called electricians, street artists, tour guides, designers, programmers, architects, journalists, every single one of them… truly self-employed workers.

They are those who arrived on this labor market starting in the nineties and since then, who had worked or not for some time in the state sector for a salary that was only de jure, because de facto, it was so scarce that it didn’t even create a bulge in their wallets, and with blind faith bet it all on at least a better life, if that was possible. They’d get up every morning testing everything and never surrendering, and doing it all without any safety net of any kind under them.

Those who between one thing and another, today are in their fifty-something, and also the millennials who have followed in their footsteps and who work for themselves — or perhaps as someone’s temporary employee, Cuban or foreigner, who can not or doesn’t want to hire them legally. What will become of all these people in 15 to 20 years? 

In a country that mocks planetary statistics and boasts of numbers that are the envy of the first world because of its very low birth rate and its increasing life expectancy, no one really knows what will happen when all these people become older and unproductive and find themselves without shade to shelter them.

That not so small fringe of informal workers includes the whole labor ladder: from floor cleaners to industrial designers, from gardeners to engineering professionals, elementary and university graduates with master’s and post-graduate degrees, ex-military personnel and former who knows what, people who in the middle of the crisis of Cuba’s Special Period did not want to emigrate anywhere, but in order to earn their daily bread they improvised another country next to their country, another Cuba below or above the difficult daily Cuba.

Many of them would in fact opt to return to the employment of the state, in the supposed and miraculous case that suddenly it served for more than getting bored and staring at the ceiling. But even then the damage has been done: a large part will have spent more than a decade working day to day for no one, and therefore accumulating zero years of pension. And the years of work, once they reincorporate to their state jobs, would be insufficient to retire with a worthwhile pension, if that was ever possible. Unless, of course, they are able to retire long after their 80th birthday.

So as long as the trees continue to grow upwards and the clouds insist on always raining downward, those workers — and yes, they are workers who labor every day of their lives, even if they do not punch a card or cross some sort of red line — that have committed the serious sin of pretending to be independent workers, apparently have no other recourse for now, whether they want to or not, to work for the motherland, while their bodies allow them, until death separates them from their jobs.

That’s their problem, someone might say washing their hands of them. But not really, they are all people, and all Cubans, and no one on this island should be left helpless.

But what has been said from the beginning is that this is just one of the many problems we face going forward. And to tell you the truth, it will not be the most serious one. Finding solutions, and I have no idea how, will be one of the many steps we need to take to move forward. We must be creative, and for everyone’s benefit.