Not In The Name Of Socialism. Another Sign Of Contempt For Cuban Workers 
By Pedro Campos
Translating Cuba - 14ymedio
July 25, 2016

Several news reports confirm that there is a contingent of Indian workers in Cuba… Yes, you read that right: workers from India, from the other side of the world, working on tourist projects for foreign companies. A French company brought them over here and is paying them first world salaries.

Can anyone in the State-Party-Government explain what is happening? Are there no Cuban workers to employ in these construction projects?

Is the state-run Construction and Specialized Installations Company (ECME), which builds and remodels hotels, luxury buildings for foreigners and hospitals, among other projects, which has seen the most brilliant contemporary Cuban engineering and architecture, unable to undertake this work?

Does the remodeling company under the Office of the City Historian of Havana, which has rescued wonders of Cuban architecture, not have the capacity for these commitments?

I originally found it hard to believe the news, because no one could explain to me the reasons why foreign companies prefer to contract for Indian workers instead of Cubans, but it was even harder for me to understand why the “socialist” government, “representative of the Cuban working class,” accepts it when there are thousands of professionals, specialists, technicians and workers who are unemployed or under-employed in this kind of work, eager to exercise their professions and receive good remuneration for their work.

I don’t pretend to have found the reasons. Something that only the Government-Party-State can understand, one god in three persons like the holy trinity, although nobody explains it, nobody knows, they believe that nobody cares and ultimately nobody agrees.

Several media reports address the issue, and there is no shortage of information and speculations about the interests of the company run by the Cuban military that is charged with these works, in allowing this contracting on the part of a foreign firm because “Cubans can’t do the job,” “they are not good workers,” “the boys in the military service don’t know how,” and other things of this style.

Whatever the explanation might be, one thing is clear: workers from very far away are being employed in Cuba, they are being paid good salaries, while there are hundreds of thousands of Cuban workers who are trying to invent a life without adequately paid jobs, who have no other option in order to improve their and their families’ lives other than to leave Cuba, if they can, risking everything.

At the very least, this is another example of the contempt the bureaucracy has for Cuban workers, who decide nothing and receive little.

But it is no coincidence that such a barbarity is happening right now. The bureaucrats who have appropriated the country, who manage “their state enterprises” as if they were the owners, seem desperate to please the few foreign investors who have accepted their conditions to try to resolve the crisis, the disaster, of what they want to continue calling socialism in Cuba.

And because the Cuban government does not allow foreign companies to freely contract for Cuban labor, but requires them to go through the state-run intermediaries who authorize the selection of the personnel and who keep around 90% of what the foreigners pay for each worker, the foreign capitalists who want to select and control their own workers have adopted this method of importing labor to be able to do so.

The desperate rulers, in their eagerness to produce joint venture companies, have accepted this nonsense, as usual, without considering all the consequences.

Of course, they do not care about the reactions of the Cuban workers and the Cuban people. Anyone who doesn’t agree can leave, and if they protest they can go to jail. All very democratic.

It is no wonder that since the late nineteenth century this kind of state-socialism as been called a prison or a barracks. No wonder, as our José Martí wrote, “It goes badly for a people of bureaucrats! All the power which would be gradually acquired by the caste of public officials, bound by their need to remain in a privileged and lucrative position, would be gradually lost by the people, who lack the same reasons for complicity in hopes and profits to confront the public officials fettered together by their common interests.”

It is left to us once again, from the positions of democratic socialism, to condemn these anti-national, anti-labor and counterrevolutionary practices of the centralized statist-wage economic and political model, of the semi-feudal court, imposed in Cuba in the name of socialism.

No, no. No more in the name of socialism.
 

Video published by Ciber Cuba July 22, 2016