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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