>Specifics, please on the "anti-popular and anti-worker legislation"! Or at
>least some reference so we know what you are talking about.
There are many. I'll list just a few in point form:
- 1990, law promulgated for the tourist sector (Cuba's fastest-growing)
releasing management from the requirement to follow the Labour Code;
workers in tourism could be made to work overtime, and country-wide
grievance procedures were not available to tourist sector workers.
- 1992, law passes allowing foriegn individuals and enterprises to buy
property and housing in Cuba, despite chronic shortage of housing for Cubans
- indeed, a few years later Cuba actually had to open homeless shelters!!!!
- also 1992, a constitutional ammendment allowing for privatization of state
property
- free trade zones were established; these are open to 100% foreign-owned
enterprises, and wages and conditions are set by 'competitive market
standards' rather than Cuban laws and regulations (what is more, the foreign
companies themselves are responsible for determining those 'competitive
market standards'.
- Cuban government has helped Plyaboy seek models for a 'Girls of Cuba'
pictorial
- austerity has been imposed in areas of basic subsistence -- food,
medicine, gasoline -- while all of these are avaialable in abundance to
tourists, visiting business people etc.
- unemployment has become a reality; what is more, unemploymt benefits have
been capped and time-restrictions applied
- the state has blamed its crisis on 'excessive egalitarianism' of socialism
; such egalitarianism has had an 'anti-economic and anti-efficient
connotation' - these are our revolutionary heroes??
- the state has actually advertised its "labour discipline" as a selling
point to potential foriegn investors
>Increasing yields is the ONLY way to overcome material poverty in
>Cuba. And the accounts of the recent union congresses and CPC convention
>are dominated by discussion of how workers can better organize to do this
>- themselves, in their own organizations, not waiting for some state
>bureaucrat to tell them what to do.
Lest we forget, the Cuba Workers Confederation is not an autonomous workers
organization - it is a state body! It's newspaper, Trabajadores, is a state
paper! Throughout the crisis, the Union position has been indistinguishable
from other state bodies. Indeed, the union has demanded that workers
develop 'discipline, efficiency and a new mentality', as this is what is
required in the new partnership with global capital. So what the Union
Congress says is one thing; what you will hear speaking with displaced
workers on the street corner is something very different.
.. Some state farms
>have been turned into co-ops in order to get rid of a layer of
>functionaries who were unproductive, and to promote more control by and
>higher incomes for the actual producers. This is a good thing, not bad.
State farms were officially named co-ops, yes. You are referring here to the
'basic units of cooperative production'. Here's the deal with these. Workers
collectively 'own' the machinery and the harvest; land, however, remains in
state hands, production quotas are set by the state, and the coop can only
sell its produce to the state, at government-set prices. The country's
established pay scales do not apply, but rather wages vary according to
productivity, a measure intended to establish a subsistence-based incentive
to labour - sounds alot like pieve-work/ commission to me! The state
privatizes machinery, so workers now have to pay for repairs and
replacements themselves; the state privatizes the harvest, so a bad year is
the responsibility of the workers, and so that workers are responsible for
their own subsistence. But the state retains control over land, and over the
price produce will be sold at? Over all, the state has simply renounced its
responsibility for the subsistence needs of farmers without surrendering its
control over production quotas, market prices, and land use.
>the inevitable NEP-type stages necessary to overcome economic crises, but
>it is no solution to ignore the crisis, which is what it seems to me you
>are arguing.
I'm not arguing that crises don't exist. I'm arguing for 'a critique which
doesn't shirk', and which challenges us to find solutions to crisis which
do not rely on a retreat into capital.
>
>>
>Fidel Castro says this in EVERY speach he gives.
I'm not concerned with what he says, but what he does.
And I think all the above is too much to ignore in good conscience.
-----
Brian Green |
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
