BY LUIS MADRID
AGUACATE, Havana Province, Cuba - "We cannot talk about reviving the production of sugarcane unless we keep in mind the people who would have to carry it out," said Pedro Ross at a meeting here of the Central Organization of Cuban Workers (CTC).
"As long as there is not a sufficient workforce settled in the sugarcane regions, we are not going to plant sugarcane.... We cannot count on the high level of mechanization we used to have. Nor can we count on it in years ahead. So we have to rely on what we have, which is human beings." Ross, the CTC general secretary, was speaking to trade union leaders from the Madruga municipality gathered here June 25.
The Madruga event was one of the first conferences in preparation for the 17th national congress of the CTC to be held next April. Out of the experiences and challenges discussed at these meetings, which will take place in all 169 municipalities in Cuba between June and September, the CTC national leadership will prepare a draft resolution. That document will be discussed by workers in every factory before the end of the year and delegates will be elected to prepare the national congress.
Assemblies like the one in Madruga, however, are themselves the product of weeks of work. The 134 delegates of this predominantly agricultural area had organized several commissions to discuss the most pressing challenges facing them - productivity and efficiency in agriculture, housing, health care, and more - and prepare reports. The findings and proposals were presented at the municipal gathering.
The concerns Ross raised at the meeting here regarding sugarcane production parallel those laid out in the congress call, and address one of the biggest challenges facing Cuba today.
Throughout the period of congress preparations, the call states, "our permanent priority remains increasing food and other production, and reviving sugarcane."
This is underscored by the fact that the 1994-95 zafra, or sugar harvest, unofficially reported to be 3.3 million tons, is the lowest since 1943. At the end of the last decade and into the early 1990s, Cuba's main industry was producing 8 million tons a year.
Trabajadores, the weekly publication of the CTC, pointed to the vicious circle Cuba finds itself in due to the severe decline in sugar production and the resulting loss of hard currency from sales on the world market. "To produce 8 million tons of sugar," a June 5 editorial noted, Cuba would have needed to invest $900 million in agricultural implements, fertilizers, pesticides, fuel, and spare parts. But only $150 million was available. "How can our country" afford the needed raw materials and supplies, Trabajadores asked, "if we cannot produce more sugar?" While Cuba has secured $200 million in foreign investment for the next harvest, the loans have been granted under harsh terms.
Despite the continued drop in sugar production, last year the gross domestic product grew 0.5 percent, and initial reports for 1995 indicate a growth of 2 percent in the first half of this year. These are signs that the measures adopted by the government, along with the efforts by workers to increase productivity in industry, have put a stop to the economic free-fall that began in 1989 when aid and trade at preferential prices with the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries came to an abrupt halt.
Although the crisis is far from over, there is a slight sense of relief among working people as electrical blackouts decrease, food becomes more accessible, and the purchasing power of the Cuban peso begins to recover. A little over a year ago the dollar traded on the black market for 120 pesos or even higher; the exchange rate on the street has been holding around 35 pesos to a dollar since April. This has a particularly salutary effect on the purchasing power of workers with the lowest incomes, and of the big majority of Cubans who have no access to hard currency.
`No sloganeering'
At the Madruga meeting, attempting to address the
challenge to increase sugarcane production, Isora
Rodríguez, first secretary of the municipal union, proposed
the meeting adopt as a goal a yield per acre that presumably
would insure every farm's profitability. CTC general
secretary Ross took the microphone to argue against the
motion made by Rodríguez. "We cannot fall into the type of
sloganeering we've fallen into before," Ross insisted.
Instead of adopting goals that have little foundation,
workers should "press hard and conquer a working method. And
we shouldn't propose anything different until we have
achieved this method, until we have systematized it," he
added.
Referring to the campaign initiated a year ago by the trade union leadership aimed at increasing production and efficiency levels in all sectors of industry but especially in agriculture, he remarked, "We must seriously fight to achieve the five points of the star.
"We must produce the housing people need; we have to produce the food that workers and their families must have; we need to maximize the use of draft animals; there must be a link between every worker and the product of his labor; and we must have the labor force adequate to the work to be done," stressed the Cuban leader. "These are the five points of the star."
Discussion by delegates at the Madruga meeting helped to illustrate how serious a challenge the question of the workforce in the countryside remains.
"Since most of the labor now has to be done manually, it is vital that massive numbers of people get integrated into agriculture," argued Nicolás Chavarría. "This is a serious problem. We must see it from the standpoint that what's at stake is the country's subsistence," he continued. "The five points of the star seek to stabilize the workforce. But what we have done so far isn't enough. People don't come to the countryside simply because they like it."
To encourage workers from the urban areas to move to the countryside, construction of housing using materials locally available is being promoted. The housing crisis in Cuba is acute. Shortage of construction materials in general means an almost complete absence of building maintenance, not to mention new construction. During recent heavy rains, for example, thousands of houses and other buildings either collapsed or were seriously damaged across the island, affecting thousands of families.
Mindful of the problem, an outraged Chavarría underscored, "No one can afford to receive a bag of cement in the agricultural sector - or, for that matter, in any other area involving social distribution - and let it go to waste. Nor can we allow the violation of the principles for which houses are being built." His criticism that some people go to the countryside simply to try to resolve their housing problem but refuse to work in agriculture met the enthusiastic applause of the other delegates.
Whenever the shortage of workers in the countryside comes up, it leads to discussion of the restructuring of industry in Cuba today and the relocation of workers currently employed in overstaffed enterprises. This involves not only workers in factories closed or running at reduced capacity for lack of raw materials, but especially the inflated payrolls in administrative and management layers everywhere. The call to the CTC congress points to the need to "create a more efficient and competitive economy," a task which will require among other measures "the unavoidable rationalization of the workforce." Nevertheless, it also underlines that meeting agricultural production needs must be done on the basis of a "voluntary relocation."
Challenges similar to those raised in Madruga came up as well during the CTC municipal conference in Bauta, also in Havana Province, Trabajadores reported. The "Antonio Maceo" Basic Unit of Agricultural Production (UBPC), for example, still faces a workforce shortage. Of a plan to build 28 houses, only one has been built. Even though the UBPC's sugarcane production remains low, it happens to be profitable because it charges high prices for the use of its machinery to cooperatives and private farmers in the area. "When are we finally going to understand that the objective of the UBPCs is to produce and cut cane with their own resources?" the CTC's weekly publication pointedly asked.
On the other hand, the article noted that such practices are one way in which the profits from produce sold at high prices on the unregulated agricultural markets are spread more broadly. These markets began operating in October 1994, and have helped ease some of the worst food shortages prevalent a year ago. Prices, nevertheless, remain high. A pound of pork, for instance, costs 35 pesos, or about 15 percent of a high-paid worker's monthly earnings.
At the Madruga assembly, Fermín Valdés explained that in the Cayajabos, one of three UBPCs that grow sugarcane for the Boris Luis Santa Coloma Sugar Refinery, they had not been able to attract more members either. In fact, they have lost workers. In addition, he indicated, "we have lost the seed bank, and we are using seed of real bad quality," pointing to another of the key problems of the agricultural unit where he works.
In contrast, Oscar Martínez from the Rubén Martínez Villena, the other sugar refinery in the area, reported on their success in increasing the workforce in his UBPC from 65 workers to 120. He also talked about their initial efforts to produce a cement substitute made with alter native - locally available - raw materials. The Sugar Ministry (MINAZ) promotes home construction by the UBPCs by pledging one ton of regular cement for every ton of locally- produced, or "low-cost" cement as it and other such materials are known in Cuba today. Some areas, though, have not received any real cement in months.
"When it comes to the Province of Havana, the MINAZ is the country's champion in sluggishness," protested Ross upon learning that not only was the "Martínez Villena" the first refinery capable of producing its own low-cost cement, but the ministry had practically ignored this effort. "They could care less that yours is the first refinery in the province that has a grinder for providing a cement substitute. There are provinces where almost all their refineries have grinders - Matanzas, Las Tunas, Holguín, Santiago de Cuba, or even Villa Clara that has 28 sugar refineries." In this and other areas, Ross congratulated and further encouraged the initiatives taken at the local level.
"If you want workers in the cattle industry," said Rodrigo Infante joining the discussion, "you have to build houses for them." Addressing one concern shared by many at the Madruga meeting, Infante suggested that houses not be given to individuals. "The house must always belong to the farm itself."
Drop in meat and dairy products
Fernando Santiesteban, from the "José Armando
Castellanos" dairy farm, explained that a six-month drought
coupled with a severe shortage of animal feed had prevented
them from meeting their production goals during the first
four months of the year. The same factors also contributed
to a high mortality rate in cattle, Santiesteban reported,
with 524 calves and 599 cows dying in the opening months of
the year.
The shortage of meat is one of the most acute indicators of the economic crisis in Cuba, and is aggravated by high levels of cattle rustling and black marketeering. Tele Rebelde reported early in June that 21 people had been arrested at the Chichi Padrón Slaughter House, in the Province of Villa Clara, for stealing meat. In a perriod of four months they stole more than 13,000 pounds of meat, which sells for 35 pesos, or about a dollar a pound at the agricultural market. Radio Progreso reported that losses in the livestock industry in Granma Province had quadrupled in recent years.
The defense of the social conquests of the revolution has occupied an important place in the discussions of the CTC municipal assemblies. The call to the congress explicitly rejects "the neoliberal recipes and the so-called shock therapies, alien to our revolutionary concept," as a way of solving the crisis, noting that this is what is being done by governments in capitalist countries the world over.
In her intervention in Madruga, Marisol Arias, representing health-care workers, reported on the efforts to safeguard social conquests in spite of the current hardships. It is difficult to get medicines from the nearby city of Guines, Arias explained, because of gasoline shortages. Nevertheless, the infant mortality rate, she went on to say, "a quantifiable achievement," remains below the national average of 9.9-per-one thousand live births.
"We must see to it that people are not simply there to milk cows or to weed the fields," said CTC secretary Ross. "We must strive to provide them with the best conditions possible. A worker is not a piece of machinery," Ross concluded.
At the end of the conference the delegates elected a nine-member municipal secretariat, five of them women, which will lead the work of the Madruga CTC until the congress.