Reinaldo Escobar, Translator: Unstated
One of the few controversies we've seen among the supporters of the
socialist system in Cuba has been the contention over moral and material
stimuli. I say it can in some way be called a controversy, because in
reality the defenders of moral stimuli raised their voices as if they
were arguing, but they were doing it with someone whose arguments they
didn't know or simply didn't even listen to.
"It is about creating consciousness with wealth but about creating
wealth with consciousness," the Maximum Leader said then, contradicting
in some way the Marxist tendency to put the material over the spiritual,
and this was how Socialist Emulation became rooted in our reality. To be
a practitioner of this emulation, an advanced worker, or an accumulator
of those merits that were identified with the letters A through K,
constituted "the driving force of production" that managed to meet the
goals and allowed the workplace to claim the Heroes of Moncada banner.
At a year-end assembly each worker was given a certificate that
specified the number and quality of the merits obtained, which could be
presented in the coming year to support an application for domestic
appliances.
These union committees were frequently held in which we had to determine
if the refrigerator would be given to Karitina, who had merits A, B and
C, or to Sarria, who had earned B, C, E and H, and on more than a few
occasions cumbersome technical ties occurred in which we had to decide
whether to give the television to the lady who had a mentally retarded
child or to the one whose elderly mother had terminal cancer.
One fine day European socialism was shipwrecked, and those subsidized
items stopped arriving in the country, and another fine day the economy
was dollarized and "the Shopping" appeared, where there was no need to
show up with a bonus certificate handed out at a union meeting, rather a
wad of greenbacks had the miraculous ability to turn itself into goods
and services.
People began to understand that to obtain those dollars, which later
metamorphosed into Cuban Convertible Pesos (CUC), you had to do the
opposite of what was one required to earn merits. Then prostitutes
looking for tourists returned, and the grandmother who survived a cancer
that wasn't terminal had to move into a corner of the living room
because it was necessary to rent her room (the only one with a window
onto the street).
Even the government understood that everything was changing and among
distrust and suspicion it opened up opportunities for self-employment,
where surviving the cruel laws of the marketplace required neither
diplomas nor medals but rather efficiency and profitability through pure
and simple competency.
That extra effort that the entrepreneur puts into her kiosk to sell more
is the most important change that has occurred in Cuba in recent years.
This need to be competitive is the best therapy to begin to heal the
anthropological damage caused by the crazy whims of certain
manufacturers of utopias.
14 November 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment