Cooperatives: Like the Cries of the Dying

Cooperatives: Like the Cries of the Dying / Jose Hugo Fernandez
Posted on September 6, 2013

HAVANA, Cuba, August, www.cubanet.org — A very brief stop at a Havana
park, El Curita (at the corner of Reina and Galiano streets), provides
enough time to gauge the opinions of riders of the new public transport
cooperative that serves the Havana-Boyeros-Santiago de las Vegas
corridor, among the most populous in the capital. In general the
consensus is that the fleet of small buses that serve this route were
operating better before the switch to cooperative management even
though, to much dismay, there has been no subsequent reduction in fare.

Since these buses were managed directly by the state before being taken
over by the cooperative, we can already compare how good service was
just a short time ago versus how bad it is today.

In Artemesia, one of the other provinces chosen as a test site for
cooperative management of public transport, the flood of complaints from
riders attracted the attention of the independent press. Meanwhile, the
cooperative members themselves, who have been on the job barely a month,
cite basic shortages (they rent rather than own their vehicles and do
not have access to wholesale markets) as justification for the poor
service and changes in ticket prices.

Cuba's bigwigs believe these "new" cooperatives will provide the magic
formula for completing the latest phase of their totalitarian
dictatorship without embarrassment.

Looking at it from the standpoint of the world's fatuous leftists —
which is to say as a means for creating new social and economic
relationships based on equality, mutual aid and solidarity — the
cooperative movement must seem like manna from heaven. The hope is that
it will revitalize the regime's goal of being able to remain masters of
all they surmise while simultaneously making it look as though they are
seeking innovative ways of raising efficiency and productivity through a
clever process of economic decentralization.

Anyone feeling bewildered by the avalanche of prohibitions and assaults
with which the regime harasses the self-employed — taking place just at
the moment when many had hoped it would support and even promote their
activities — might well find their confusion summed up in one word:
cooperatives. The bigwigs have realized that they need not run of risk
of privatization (even on a small scale), or even of small business
development, which one way or another always leads to free thinking and
independence.

By creating cooperatives, the bigwigs hope to make everyone believe (to
use another well-worn phrase from Lampedusa) that things are changing
even as everything remains the same. And so naively convinced are they
that their plan is working that they feel they have the luxury of
dismissing and marginalizing the self-employed — the only group that,
for better or worse, was proving capable of pulling their chestnuts out
of the fire.

Like the cries of a dying man, they are now publicizing, as they
typically do, the existence of 124 cooperatives which have been
operating since July 1 in sectors such as transport, construction, trash
collection and farmers' markets.

Of course, the project is part of the charming "updating of the economic
model," which has been summed up in black and white and embalmed in what
is known as the Guidelines of the Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist
Party. One of its chief promoters is Grisel Tristá, whose position
carries the mile-long title Chief of the Group for Corporate Perfection
of the Permanent Commission for Implementation and Development. She has
charmingly and quite literally stated that cooperatives "allow the state
to divest itself of responsibilities that are not of transcendental
importance to economic development."

However, another expert — the president of the Society of Cooperatives
of the National Association Cuban Accountants and Economists, Alberto
Rivera — was talking no less charmingly about the need to train the
public to understand that the promotion of these cooperatives represents
a deceptive hoax. Rivera believes they were intended to serve somewhat
like spare tires and were given only a passive, short-term role. True
cooperatives (even as perceived by the world's leftists) would be
fundamentally incompatible with the bureaucratic, anti-democratic and
suffocating nature of the Cuban regime.

What is most laughable about this is all the clucking by the official
press over the publicity surrounding this issue. They insist that
cooperatives are being set up with the desire and support of their members.

Of the first one hundred twenty-four that have been set up, one hundred
twelve started out as state-owned businesses. This is another way of
saying they were failed, insolvent enterprises headed by corrupt, inept
administrators who later automatically became presidents of their
cooperatives. Only twelve started out in the private sector,
established, it is said, by self-employed individuals.

Rogelio Regalado, member of another organization called the Commission
for the Implementation of the Reforms, has clearly described how certain
bankrupt state enterprises underhandedly manipulate their workers by
suggesting that they "voluntarily" become partners in a cooperative,
telling them, "If there are no workers willing to become partners, the
property and assets are liable to be auctioned off."

Two hundred twenty-two small and medium sized state businesses — all
problematic, unproductive and in crisis — were converted to cooperatives
which are in theory fully autonomous. A wide range of services —
including fresh fruit markets, restaurants and even shrimp farms — will
come under this new form of management for which they have already
coined the charming slogan "economic solidarity." In other words, there
will be more of the same.

It is a ruse intended to delay access to private property while they
still can so as to hamper the country's real agents of economic
progress. This makes a mockery of consumers — in other words the public
— which cannot find alternatives to satisfy their own demands and
instead must continue subsidizing those of their exploiter, which is to
say the regime.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
José Hugo Fernández is an author whose works include the novels The
Suicide Clan, The Crimes of Aurika, Butterflies Don't Flutter on
Saturday and The Parable of Bethlehem and the Shepherds. He is also the
author of two short story collections, The Island of Blackbirds and I
Who Was the Streetcar Desire, as well as a collection of essays, Shadows
Against the Wall. He lives in Havana, where he has worked as an
independent journalist since 1993.

From Cubanet

28 August 2013

Source: "Cooperatives: Like the Cries of the Dying / Jose Hugo Fernandez
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