New and Valid Opinions
Regina Cano
For some time now, in the newspapers we’ve been able to read the opinions and notions of many people concerning the functioning of people-institutional relations in our environment.
There was a request made by the government that people express their opinions about what ultimately hinders the aim of “everything belonging to the people. Moreover, they said that the findings would be made known.”
Obtaining or demanding justice for what limits the development of collaborative life is what many people expected. Within a society whose changes generate nostalgia for the past, there also exists discouragement among those who don’t see this as an act that will return our balance.
Is this the old 1980s concept of “rectification”? In that period, despite efforts that were made, the solid road that the bureaucracy maintained didn’t change, which rather took advantage of the changes that would come with the 1990s and today have stronger tools to entrench themselves in daily life.
That’s the truth my people! Old established and new attitudes, beliefs, behaviors and values won’t be transformed via a superficial cure. But indeed the public tribune of the “power to speak” can banish fears and restraints.
These current exhibits of hope reveal honesty, successes, small complaints and mistakes characteristic of the lack of experience in exercising opinion, errors and deviations.
The consciousness of not allowing concepts like “luchar” (struggling) —which in our context has come to mean cheating, manipulating, deceiving, prostituting, not respecting, assaulting and other attributes that touch all social groups— is what we really need to reinstitute.
I hope that a growing number of voices will decrease the space and power from those who from the smallest place of authority try to destroy us daily.
Regina: It’s a marvel that reform-minded thinkers in Cuba do not “get” the fundamental reality of what has happened in that country, and will continue to happen, as long as the “reform opposition” does not “get it.”
They think and keep screaming that the bureaucracy is the enemy, the cause of all the problems. The logical solution, given this misapprehension, is to “call loudly and repeatedly for” the bureaucracy to hand democratic power to the working people.
But, Regina, the bureaucracy is the necessary result of the real enemy: the core ideological premise that all the instruments of production should be “concentrated in the hands of the state.” This is premise state monopoly socialism.
State monopoly socialism “needs” massive economic–and therefore political–bureaucracy in order for the unnatural economy to function. You can’t get rid of the bureaucracy by criticizing it, by constantly pointing out its absurdities. You can only get rid of it by changing the core premise upon which your national experiment in socialism is based.
Socialist state power is good, and should be retained. But the present bureaucracy will never change under this present set-up because it cannot change. Your protests will only disappear into the atmosphere.
What you and others need to “get” is the realization that a new premise or hypothesis for the further socialist experiment needs to be put in place. To arrive at this new premise or hypothesis you need only look at the cooperative economic experiment that has gone on in the Basque region of Spain since 1956, beginning in the village of Mondragon.
The Mondragon industrial cooperatives minimize bureaucracy by achieving direct cooperative ownership of the instruments of production. This economic premise is the opposite of the state monopoly premise. The Basque workers self-manage the enterprises they own, and upper-level management is hired by the worker-owners.
They run their own banking system, their own research laboratories, their own technical college, their own residential and food retail cooperatives, etc., etc.
All you need to do in Cuba is to analyze the Mondragon experiment and apply its lessons to your country. Otherwise, all your protests will go nowhere.