¡Bureaucrats Si!
by Gary Phillips
While the hubbub over the leaked diplomatic cable exchanges by WikiLeaks continues, and no doubt secret discussions are ongoing whether or not a U.S. strike team will be sent into the British countryside to put the snatch on its founder Julian Assange (I think Daniel Day-Lewis or Paul Bettany should play him in the big budget biopic), covered very little in the mainstream or even alt press has been Cuba’s reaction to these divulgements. More than 2,000 missives released by WikiLeaks mention the island nation, with some 500 of those messages having originated in the interests section we maintain there. Given these messages portray the U.S. as meddlers, Raul Castro’s government is enthusiastically posting those cables on the state-run Cubadebate site—often an organ for his brother Fidel, one of the fathers of the revolution.
Among the tidbits gleaned from the cables, according to several news reports: Jonathan Farrar, head of the Cuban Interests Section’s assessment of the Cuban opposition leadership is that it’s aging, divided, concerned with making money and disconnected from the day-to-day reality of Cuba. Presumably this refers to the old heads like those in Florida, ex-Alpha 66 members still fuming decades later about the failed Bay of Pigs attack and whatnot, but not internal dissidents. For not surprisingly, there’s support by the U.S. for, in the words of the government, “counter-revolutionary bloggers in its attempts to organize networks of young people to subvert the Cuban revolution.” According to a lefty blogger named Nik Nikandrov, there’s members of the interests section who are the handlers for the internal opposition groups and get them money, propaganda materials and cell phones. among other items.
These shenanigans come at a time when Cuba is undergoing a period of austerity we at FourStory only got a hint of on our trip there this past March. They’ve cut subsidies for needed items such as soap (25 centavos for a rationed bar to five or six pesos, a big jump) and toothpaste. In mid-December the Cuban parliament held a series of discussions and debates over the country’s socioeconomic direction. This past November the government rolled out a new five-year plan that called for more cuts in social spending and simultaneously upping attempts to attract more private capital. Seems like the Castro regime and the GOP are singing from the same damn hymnal. Plans in Cuba also call for equal pay subsidies to be done away with, resulting in workers’ salaries pegged to performance rather than merely the status of the job. Between this past October and March, there will also be 500,000 state jobs cut. Apparently also up for examination at the upcoming Cuban Communist Party Congress in April (the first one since 1997), is doing away with the two-tiered currency system several of us wrote about previously.
Certainly back in the early ’60s, in the days of heady heat when the overthrow of the dictator Batista and chucking out the Yankees was fresh and a tangible thing for the populace, it made proletarian sense to pay a sugar cane cutter better or at least the same as say a doctor or lawyer. The idea being to elevate the lowest to the highest, that all had value in building this new society—an attempt to destroy bourgeois pretensions of superior white collarism. But how do you keep that fervor and fire alive the more time passes? The more institutional memory dies out. And frankly you reach a point where if you don’t have incentives, money or otherwise, for students to be the new professional and technocratic class, then you’re invariably going to have a problem. Somebody has to dig the trenches and frame the apartment buildings, but somebody else better know how has to patch up the body should there be an accident on the site.
Cuba has had a shaky infrastructure, particularly post the demise of the Soviet Union, their largest subsidizer. Yet their economic planners and pols aren’t stupid. They must realize that this rolling elimination of half a million jobs from the public sector in no way automatically translates into those people finding jobs in a growing but hardly a vibrant or big enough private sector to absorb them—no matter how much France or China might be salivating to build vacation condos and hotels along the Malecón. Urban planners as bellhops? Tank mechanics hustling bootleg Che faced fuzzy towels on the street outside the Caribbean Ritz?
Raul Castro has emphasized notions of self-employment as a solution to the phasing out, but that’s empty rhetoric and will only foster even uglier expressions of hustling for the tourista Euros and pesos. I should hope Cuba’s leadership understands that even if their economic maneuvers have a rosy end, there’s going to be more homelessness and rootlessness in the short term and possibly longer. I’m not about to speculate if these are the ingredients for unrest, but it’s damn sure not a social experiment in zen and the art of not eating.
But then maybe like here, if the Cuban honchos can keep the people mollified with the games on their iPhones, free porn on the Internet (and let’s not take this lightly) and worry about when those 3D TV sets will go on sale, they just might go along with the okey-doke. After all, there hasn’t been much made of an accusation in the States by Reuters’ money and politics columnist James Pethokoukis. He claims the GOP wants to push legislation so that states can declare bankruptcy—cities and counties can as New York and Orange County have done, but not the state itself. He posits the effect of this would be for say deficit-strapped California and/or New Jersey to do this and thus be able to gut public employees’ benefits, pensions and health coverage, or simply to bust out these unions like Reagan did PATCO, the air traffic controllers union.
Pethokoukis also points out the Build America Bonds program, initiated by the Obama administration in 2009 as part of the recovery act, was killed in the recent tax compromise measure. According to Tami Luhby on CNNMoney.com, state leaders had hoped this program would go on for a year or two more, given their usage. Almost $180 billion in debt has been issued under the program—the feds essentially rebated 35% of interest costs on these bonds obtained by local municipalities.
Though, as Maeve Reston wrote in the L.A. Times on December 26, L.A. has yet to spend the full amount of federal stimulus dollars we’re entitled to get. Due to early retirements of public workers which the city encouraged, along with various furlough days imposed on current city workers, there’s not enough hands at the wheels of the bureaucracy to operate the machinery to take in the dough.
Infuckingcredible.
You would think there would be these limousine liberals leading the charge to invest in Cuba. ’Cause I’m ready to work the bar at the new, upscale La Bodeguita del Medio II, a copy of the famous Old Havana bar where Ernest Hemingway, Nat King Cole and other luminaries hoisted a few back when ... dispensing mojitos and doing nightly readings from my latest work in progress, “The Death by a Thousand Cuts Blues.”
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very interesting article. i remember years ago taking a class in which the professor explained how important a good bureaucracy is to a modern day society. bureaucrats make the whole thing go.
i feel sad about cuba.
2011-01-5 by donna