http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=82551&d=22&m=5&y=2006&pix=opinion.jpg&category=Opinion
Monday, 22, May, 2006 (24, Rabi` al-Thani, 1427)
Castro's New Army of Guerrillas Against Corruption
Richard Gott, The Guardian
LONDON, 22 May 2006 - At a petrol station outside the
provincial Cuban town of Cienfuegos, half a dozen teenage girls stand languidly
by the pumps, jumping to attention when a car or lorry pulls up. They work the
pumps efficiently, take payment and enter the transaction on to a large
official form. They are dressed neatly in T-shirts and jeans and a slogan
across their backs proclaims their identity as trabajadores sociales, or social
workers. They are Fidel Castro's latest army of guerrillas, deployed in the
struggle against corruption, the scourge to which state-run economies have
always been peculiarly vulnerable.
They are also the vanguard of the generation upon whom the
future of the Cuban revolution will depend. On earlier visits to Cuba I have
observed, indeed participated in, the petrol problem. Driving through the
countryside you could always find a willing accomplice to direct you to a tank
in someone's back garden, where petrol would be sold at an advantageous price,
or simply off-ration. It had been siphoned off the state's supplies.
The practice seemed harmless enough. Yet it had begun to
create a large hole in the economy. Castro complained that "as much petrol was
being stolen as sold", and last year his government stepped in with a novel
solution. Some 10,000 young activists, more than half of them women, have taken
control of the country's pumps, while the usual attendants have been sent home
on full pay.
The social workers' jobs do not stop at the petrol stations.
They also go from house to house to hand out low-energy light bulbs, to check
that everyone has the new electric pressure cookers provided by China and to
prompt the exchange of old, gas-guzzling fridges from the 50s for something
more energy efficient. Others will move on to examine financial practices in
bakeries and the construction industry. Some 30,000 of these youthful
revolutionaries have been deployed across the country, aged between 16 and 22.
Identified some years ago as a potentially counterrevolutionary class, they are
now trained in accountancy and helping to keep alive the revolution's mystique.
One of the revolution's endearing features has been its
ability to reinvent itself. Castro was originally a guerrilla revolutionary
with a utopian program to create a new society; later, in the 1970s, he became
a Soviet placeman with a traditional communist blueprint; then in the 1990s
(after the collapse of the Soviet Union) he was a simple hand-to-mouth
survivor, regardless of the ideological cost. Finally, in the 21st century,
with the economy recovering from years of disaster, he still describes himself
as a socialist but is also a fully paid-up green campaigner. Efforts to curb
corruption, save energy and promote organic farming are all part of a new
struggle to put revolutionary fire into the bellies of a younger generation
that doesn't remember the palmy days of the Soviet-subsidized era, let alone
the revolutionary excitements of half-a-century ago.
Castro, in his 80th year, is the same age as the queen of
England. He has been Cuba's ruler for almost as long and is still apparently as
active as ever. Last November, he spoke for five hours at the university and
then talked to the students until dawn. Yet he doesn't look well. People close
to him report that he sometimes finds it difficult to sustain an argument. His
intelligent but sometimes rambling speeches tend to get well edited before they
appear in print. While I used to think he could go on for another decade, I now
suspect he may not last much beyond the celebrations of the revolution's half
century in 2009.
Castro may well be of the same opinion. Speaking to the
university students, he addressed the problem of what might happen after his
death, and asked a series of rhetorical questions: "When the veterans start
disappearing, to make room for new generations of leaders, what will be done?
Can the revolutionary process be made irreversible?" He gave warning that
although it was difficult to imagine the revolution being overthrown from
outside, it would be possible for the country to self-destruct. He argued that
it would be up to the new generation to see that this did not happen, admitting
that his own rule had hardly been perfect. "After all, we witnessed many
mistakes that we simply did not notice at the time."
One such mistake was the failure to notice that sugar
production had become dramatically uneconomic. "The country had many economists
and it is not my intention to criticize them, but I would like to ask why we
hadn't discovered earlier that maintaining our levels of sugar production would
be impossible. The Soviet Union had collapsed, oil was costing $40 a barrel,
sugar prices were at basement levels, so why did we not rationalize the
industry" - instead of continuing to sow thousands of hectares a year. "None of
our economists seemed to have noticed any of this, and we practically had to
order them to stop the procedure."
In practice, many economists knew exactly what was going on.
All they lacked was a free press in which to argue about their findings.
Although private discussion is often well-informed and sometimes explosive,
public debate about economic strategies is almost entirely absent.
The girls at the pumps are part of a project designed to
tackle youth alienation. Now Castro is trying to tackle the growing inequality
of incomes that has been a feature of the past decade. He has criticized the
"new rich" who, securing dollars from relatives in Miami or from work in the
tourist industry, can earn 20 to 30 times more than a doctor or teacher.
He is not moving toward a market economy but to a society
that is made more aware of the value of what it consumes. While health and
education will remain free, subsidies on electricity and housing will be
lowered, and food rationing will eventually be phased out.
These are substantial changes, though wages and pensions have
been increased to soften the blow. They form part of Castro's desire to
safeguard his revolutionary legacy. "Are revolutions doomed to fail?" he asked
the students last year. "Can society prevent them from collapsing?"
No one knows the final answer, although Castro's personal
place in history looks assured. Europeans sometimes seem to feel that Castro is
well past his sell-by date, a dinosaur from the long-gone Communist era. Yet
with the current leftist mood in Latin America, Cuba has become reattached to
the mainland, enjoying diplomatic and trade links unimaginable in the past half
century. Castro himself is regarded by Latin Americans as one of their most
popular and respected figureheads, recognized by new generations as one of the
great figures of the 20th century.
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