Cuba's Official Media Blasts Slackers, Bad Management

Cuba's Official Media Blasts Slackers, Bad Management

HAVANA – The official newspaper of Cuba's Communist Party blasted Monday
the frequent blunders by managers of state-owned enterprises, using
quotes from Fidel Castro and Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

After saying that shoddy work "was not decreed either by Marx or Lenin,"
the daily Granma says that as early as 1963 Fidel Castro complained in a
speech about cases of nationalized companies beginning to function badly
after the 1959 revolution because of lazy managers.

"When the owner was removed and they put a manager there, they put a
perfect slacker on the job that didn't bother about anyone; the other
was a capitalist who defended his own interests but this is a bum
unwilling to defend the interests of anybody; and since his salary is
assured, he doesn't worry about serving the people," the Cuban leader said.

"Let nobody believe that this is revolution, let nobody believe that
this is socialism. That's confusing shoddiness with socialism,"
continues Castro's quote that the paper still considered valid 46 years
later in the hemisphere's only state-dominated economy.

The publication also cited a letter written by Che Guevara and published
in the Uruguayan weekly Marcha in 1965, in which he acknowledged that
"socialism is young and has its errors."

Since then, Granma continued, a little less than half a century has
passed and we still suffer from certain vices and distortions that have
nothing to do with the socialist ideal."

"For example," says the author of the article, Felix Lopez, "I know a
building in Havana that has a diploma in its reception area that honors
'administrative excellence' in its construction."

"Some steps of the staircase threaten to fall down, there are leaks and
cracked walls, the floors of the outside corridors were never finished
and maintenance isn't a fashionable concept there. In this case alone,"
he adds, "there are a series of loafers: the construction crew, their
bosses and the bosses of their bosses, responsible for awarding the
so-called 'prize' for laziness and shoddy work."

He mentions "a growing bunch of slackers who are behind all this bad
service. And those who have made shoddiness a way of life, like the
driver who goes for a run in a brand new bus and plasters the windshield
with three photos of half-naked women, a charm against witchcraft and
whatever other item in bad taste" he can find.

"You mean that driver doesn't have a boss who gets on the bus sometimes
to see how he's taking care of that equipment that cost the country so
much money? And that boss doesn't have a superior who is paid to
supervise the work of the other who isn't doing his job? And will the
child who grows up amid all this shoddy work escape being an apprentice
of that shirker some day?" the article asks.

Granma also says that "the world's media dictatorship is dedicated to
categorizing socialism as synonymous with ugliness, a lack of aesthetics
and beauty. And that opportunism hides the greatest shoddiness that has
existed in the history of the capitalist system: poverty, inequality and
the obscene wealth of a minority."

In recent days several articles have been published in the official
press to criticize the defects and errors of the Cuban system, currently
sunk in its worst economic recession since the collapse of the Soviet
bloc almost two decades ago. EFE

Latin American Herald Tribune - Cuba's Official Media Blasts Slackers,
Bad Management (4 September 2009)
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?CategoryId=14510&ArticleId=342738