Translating Cuba

HAVANA, Cuba , September, www.cubanet.org – Out of every ten members of the Communist Youth League, when they get to the age when they should become members of the Cuban Communist Party (CCP), or, on the contrary, become politically deactivated, only two are willing to maintain their membership; and of those two, only one ends up joining the ranks of the CCP. It’s an open secret racing through Havana these days. Meanwhile, other classified information, that also passes through the gossip chain, makes it clear that the Party is down to a conga step, whether by old age or the death of its members, or the numerous requests to step down for family reunification abroad, or simply because of disappointment.

At this rate, soon the regime’s chieftains will have to order their followers to take to the streets to collect aspiring communists, just as they now stockpile little cans of beer from the trash to recycle them for industry. They should also remodel that bubbly slogan according to which men die but the Party is immortal, because although it’s not dead yet (and it just may not die on time, the Party is rotting alive.

This is a double oxymoron, I know, because in some sense if can’t die because it was born dead, nor can it rot because it was born rotten. But the fact is that its old self-image as the revolutionary vanguard of the people has been hopelessly hurled over the precipice. And despite how much they try to hide their surprise, it is a well-known secret that the chieftains are losing the very few hairs remaining on their heads realizing the way in which the number of 800,000 Cuban communists (as per Raul Castro’s own declaration in April, 2011) keeps getting smaller day by day.

Sean Penn, who has proven to be as good an actor as he is a stupid idiot in politics, said recently that in free elections in Cuba the Communist Party would win eighty percent of the vote. As soon as we stop laughing, perhaps it’s worth clarifying that, judging by the good news we hear, not even eighty percent of the remaining members would now vote for their own party, even if they do represent an insignificant number.

What’s more, if before 1959 the Communist Party earned five percent of Cubans’ votes, that percentage seems an exaggeration this days. And at the rate it’s going, it will be one as well, even in the Party nuclei.

Not that the chieftains need a party to dominate Cuba. And much less so now, when the strength of having existed so much time virtually, it is passing from a solid to a gas. However, although it no longer has any influence among the population, it continues to serve as a mask to disguise their system of monarchical power, especially to their friends and accomplices abroad, like Sean Penn, socialists from the belly button down, who insist on seeing our dictatorship as a beacon, and the people as animals in the zoo, who are attractive only when viewed from afar and behind the bars.

Certainly it is a source of embarrassment when those who, from Hollywood, or from American universities, or from their sanctums in Europe or Latin American, or even from some prestigious international organizations like the United Nations, persist in giving credit to a tyrannical edict like that which orders us, through the fifth article of the Constitution of the Republic, to see: “The Communist Party of Cuba, following José Martí and Marxist-Leninist, the organized vanguard of the Cuban nation, is the highest governing force of or our society and of the State…”

Are they really ignorant, these gentlemen, of the historic and deeply rooted lack of influence of the Party among our ordinary people? Not now, not even in what we could call its better times. Meanwhile, the more its membership expanded, the less effective and influential it was. The more it is promoted by propaganda as the vanguard of the masses, the less able it has been to attract by its virtues and examples. What the Communists here should be to the leaders of the Revolution, with regards to popular recognition and assimilation (not acclamation), has had to be paid with a fictitious existence as a political party while serving as a repressive instrument of power, more antagonistic as it becomes more omnipresent. Don’t Sean Penn and his gang know this?

Are they also unaware that always, but particularly so today, the ideas, the plans, the dogmas of the Communist Party represent the most orthodox and backward, schematic, rigid, intolerant, incontestable, sectarian, the most obsolete of our contemporary history? Do they not also know that, for most Cubans it does not and never has represented real power, but rather nothing more than the uselessness and long and tedious harangues with no substance?

I speak, of course, of the Party as an institution, as well as its representatives in government, which have little to do with much of the rank and file, usually unaware of the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin… simple ideologized game pieces, who acted and act from inertia, following orders from above, and apparently only just now, in a rush, perhaps, to reclaim their guts, having begun to think with their own heads.

From Cubanet

About the author

José Hugo Fernández is the author, among other works, of the novels El clan de los suicidas, Los crímenes de Aurika, Las mariposas no aletean los sábados and Parábola de Belén con los Pastores, as well as the story collections La isla de los mirlos negros and Yo que fui tranvía del deseo, and the book of chronicles Siluetas contra el muro. He lives in Havana where he has worked as an independent journalist since 1993.

4 September 2013

HAVANA, Cuba, August, www.cubanet.org — A very brief stop at a Havana park, El Curita (at the corner of Reina and Galiano streets), provides enough time to gauge the opinions of riders of the new public transport cooperative that serves the Havana-Boyeros-Santiago de las Vegas corridor, among the most populous in the capital. In general the consensus is that the fleet of small buses that serve this route were operating better before the switch to cooperative management even though, to much dismay, there has been no subsequent reduction in fare.

Since these buses were managed directly by the state before being taken over by the cooperative, we can already compare how good service was just a short time ago versus how bad it is today.

In Artemesia, one of the other provinces chosen as a test site for cooperative management of public transport, the flood of complaints from riders attracted the attention of the independent press. Meanwhile, the cooperative members themselves, who have been on the job barely a month, cite basic shortages (they rent rather than own their vehicles and do not have access to wholesale markets) as justification for the poor service and changes in ticket prices.

Cuba’s bigwigs believe these “new” cooperatives will provide the magic formula for completing the latest phase of their totalitarian dictatorship without embarrassment.

Looking at it from the standpoint of the world’s fatuous leftists — which is to say as a means for creating new social and economic relationships based on equality, mutual aid and solidarity — the cooperative movement must seem like manna from heaven. The hope is that it will revitalize the regime’s goal of being able to remain masters of all they surmise while simultaneously making it look as though they are seeking innovative ways of raising efficiency and productivity through a clever process of economic decentralization.

Anyone feeling bewildered by the avalanche of prohibitions and assaults with which the regime harasses the self-employed —  taking place just at the moment when many had hoped it would support and even promote their activities — might well find their confusion summed up in one word: cooperatives. The bigwigs have realized that they need not run of risk of privatization (even on a small scale), or even of small business development, which one way or another always leads to free thinking and independence.

By creating cooperatives, the bigwigs hope to make everyone believe (to use another well-worn phrase from Lampedusa) that things are changing even as everything remains the same. And so naively convinced are they that their plan is working that they feel they have the luxury of dismissing and marginalizing the self-employed — the only group that, for better or worse, was proving capable of pulling their chestnuts out of the fire.

Like the cries of a dying man, they are now publicizing, as they typically do, the existence of 124 cooperatives which have been operating since July 1 in sectors such as transport, construction, trash collection and farmers’ markets.

Of course, the project is part of the charming “updating of the economic model,” which has been summed up in black and white and embalmed in what is known as the Guidelines of the Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party. One of its chief promoters is Grisel Tristá, whose position carries the mile-long title Chief of the Group for Corporate Perfection of the Permanent Commission for Implementation and Development. She has charmingly and quite literally stated that cooperatives “allow the state to divest itself of responsibilities that are not of transcendental importance to economic development.”

However, another expert — the president of the Society of Cooperatives of the National Association Cuban Accountants and Economists, Alberto Rivera — was talking no less charmingly about the need to train the public to understand that the promotion of these cooperatives represents a deceptive hoax. Rivera believes they were intended to serve somewhat like spare tires and were given only a passive, short-term role. True cooperatives (even as perceived by the world’s leftists) would be fundamentally incompatible with the bureaucratic, anti-democratic and suffocating nature of the Cuban regime.

What is most laughable about this is all the clucking by the official press over the publicity surrounding this issue. They insist that cooperatives are being set up with the desire and support of their members.

Of the first one hundred twenty-four that have been set up, one hundred twelve started out as state-owned businesses. This is another way of saying they were failed, insolvent enterprises headed by corrupt, inept administrators who later automatically became presidents of their cooperatives. Only twelve started out in the private sector, established, it is said, by self-employed individuals.

Rogelio Regalado, member of another organization called the Commission for the Implementation of the Reforms, has clearly described how certain bankrupt state enterprises underhandedly manipulate their workers by suggesting that they “voluntarily” become partners in a cooperative, telling them, “If there are no workers willing to become partners, the property and assets are liable to be auctioned off.”

Two hundred twenty-two small and medium sized state businesses — all problematic, unproductive and in crisis — were converted to cooperatives which are in theory fully autonomous. A wide range of services — including fresh fruit markets, restaurants and even shrimp farms — will come under this new form of management for which they have already coined the charming slogan “economic solidarity.” In other words, there will be more of the same.

It is a ruse intended to delay access to private property while they still can so as to hamper the country’s real agents of economic progress. This makes a mockery of consumers — in other words the public — which cannot find alternatives to satisfy their own demands and instead must continue subsidizing those of their exploiter, which is to say the regime.

About the author

José Hugo Fernández is an author whose works include the novels The Suicide Clan, The Crimes of Aurika, Butterflies Don’t Flutter on Saturday and The Parable of Bethlehem and the Shepherds. He is also the author of two short story collections, The Island of Blackbirds and I Who Was the Streetcar Desire, as well as a collection of essays, Shadows Against the Wall. He lives in Havana, where he has worked as an independent journalist since 1993.

From Cubanet

28 August 2013