Underground Bakeries
By Osmel Almaguer
HAVANA TIMES, June 26 – Yasser Gonzalez Prieto (a baker by profession) is 36 years old and lives in the Alamar community, on the outskirts of Havana. This is also where he works, though in a way that is somewhat atypical. He has been on the payroll of one of the bakeries in this neighborhood for about a year.
In Cuba, all bakeries are state-owned, because bread —as well as symbolizing food in many religions— represents the government’s concern that citizens don’t go hungry. That is why, flour is considered a sensitive rung official policy, and is not sold to any private entity or to cuentapropistas (self-employed workers) for the making of this basic food item or any derivative of it.
Yasser, what’s your job in the bakery where you work?
Well, that’s kind of a difficult question to begin with. The fact is, I don’t work in the bakery. I’m only listed on the payroll and receive a wage. The work is actually done by someone else. What I do in it is to buy and sell products on the side, under the table.
Is that legal?
Of course not. It’s an arrangement with the bakery’s manager. He looks the other way and assumes the risk. But just imagine what type of risk it is be when he’s seen stealing sacks of cookies in the neighborhood police cruiser. They have a clan. The police themselves sometimes work making bread, and he pays them. They do it on and off their normal work hours.
And with what money are they paid?
With the day’s income. Each establishment has two shifts of workers that each work 12 hours every other day. Each shift has a boss who is the master baker. He distributes the money. The first cut goes to the manager, who gets something like five hundred pesos (about $25 USD, or over the average monthly wage in Cuba) from each shift daily. The workers come next; each gets between 150 and 300 pesos ($7.50-$15 USD) every day.
But where does that money come from?
From taking a little of each ingredient that’s used for making bread. This is how they end up with sacks of flour, yeast, salt and sugar that they sell under the table to clandestine bakeries, to those who make fried food and to other people who use those ingredients.
But you didn’t mention cooking oil…
What oil? That’s a bunch of crap. They stopped assigning us oil a long time ago. We have to make the bread with what they give us, and from that try to skim our money from off the top.
I’ve heard it said that the State often provides the ingredients necessary for selling bread of the highest quality…
I don’t know about other bakeries, but not in ours. Sometimes the ingredients are even delivered at less than the weight indicated on the invoice, but when we ask about this to La Empresa (the company that supplies the ingredients), they tell us that it comes that way “from above.”
Is your bakery ever inspected, audited, etc.?
Like I said, it’s a clan. So if even if the police themselves are involved —the same ones who spend the day asking to see people’s IDs for whatever reason and checking the bags of folks walking down the street— what do you expect from the rest of them?
The father of the manager of my bakery is also a manager of another bakery. This guy has stolen so much, according to what they tell me, that he went into a restaurant in Old Havana with his friends, paid manager a hundred CUCs ($100 USD) to “get rid” of the customers, and then they started eating like they were foreigners.
To tell you the truth, our manager, who’s a little crazy, is possibly one of the most inoffensive around. He has “ripped off” bakeries and gotten caught maybe ten times and he always gets another position, for example, the one he has now. Once they kicked him out of a bakery because he dropped two concrete blocks in a tank of oil so he could steal the difference in weight. Can you imagine?
There is something that we didn’t clarify at the beginning. What need does the manager have for another person working in your place while you collect their money without working?
It’s because the person who works in my place is his nephew, who isn’t a certified baker or anything. So my miserable wage doesn’t matter to him if he can hustle in one day what I get paid in one month.
But aren’t you looked down on by the other bakers for getting paid without working?
Like I said, what they’re interested in is the “hustle.” Of course, since I’m not around them a lot, there’s not much chance of bumping heads with them. I can tell you, I know that the life there inside isn’t easy, like in any place where there’s “hustling.” There’s temptation, envy, gossip, and a “get rid of him for me” attitude that’s not at all easy.
How is it inside a bakery?
Man, I’m even embarrassed to tell you about it. It’s a good thing that it’s required that the bread goes in the oven. Because I swear, if it didn’t, I wouldn’t eat it. There’s no hygiene there – none! There’s always a lot of heat; people sweat a lot and no matter how much they want, it always ends up getting into the bread. Plus a lot of them are “pigs”; sometimes they do things like working when they have a cold, and on and on.
If you had to define Cuban bread in a few words, what would you say?
They are two kinds of bread: bread that is sold in hard currency and is relatively good, and bread that’s supplied in domestic currency and is terrible.
The bread sold in domestic currency can be divided into two kinds. One kind is sold by the pound, and is long, hard or soft. It costs five pesos (25 cents USD). The other kind is provided through one’s ration book and is subsidized down to a price of only five centavos (a fraction of a penny) a piece; these are round, small, hard or soft or crumbled, without a marked flavor, and sometimes have things inside, like a chicken feather or a piece of coal, etc.
People buy all of them. I don’t know of a people who are greater bread consumers than Cubans, not even the tourists.
Ah, another thing, to talk about Cuban bread you also have to mention La Empresa (the State management). I think that with the sole word “corruption,” I wouldn’t run the risk of overlooking any of its characteristics.
So how do you feel about being a part of the Cuban bread industry?
Look, the fact is that I’m taking care of my problem. If I start thinking about everybody else’s, I’d go crazy. So it’s better to just “close your eyes” and keep on keeping on. Now if they gave me the opportunity to work in a better place, a clean one with the appropriate conditions and a descent wage, I wouldn’t think twice about leaving this place. The thing is that right now it allows me to feed my three kids.
Julio, I just responded to you on the later article “battle of ideas” etc. I wish I’d read your latest post here before chiding you a bit harshly.
You’re an interesting guy. You seem to have the heart and guts that ought to have made you a socialist. If the reputation of socialism had not been so damaged by bureaucratic Marxian nonsense, you might have been.
I believe in free enterprise, but not monopoly capitalism or state monopoly socialism. The answer is not either of these, but a cooperative form of socialism that is natural, entrepreneurial and democratic. Private property rights are essential, and the market–if most people own their own enterprises of work–will then perform in a truly free manner and be non-exploitative.
If you have the time, please go to video.google.com and review two films: 1) The Mondragon Experiment, and 2) Democracy in the Workplace. They are in English. You should find them very interesting.
Best wishes.
Grady
Thank you so much for your nice comments!
How about a society that does not impose on people any form of government ?
Where those that are communist can pursue that live style and those that are socialist can also do it and those that are capitalist too!
Why can they not coexist on the same country?
My opinion is that we must try to live in peace and we all can help each other.
Injustice and abuse is what we should fight against. I definitelly believe that socialism or communism are doom. Because their economy does not work but they should get to that conclusion on their own. They should never try an impose what they think on everyone else.
As for the economical system in Cuba I was very clear that it was Capitalism and not socialism. But it is the worst kind of capitalism the one we should always avoid. Monopolistic capitalism of state.
Where the state as you say becomes the mayor corporation that controls everything. Bureocrats run the place they become the new class with power.
Their system is broken but they will not fix it, I reason that they will not because that is the system that has keep them in power and that seems to be the most important thing to them.
You could asked then Why are they so afraid to loose power?
I think because during these last 50 years they have done too much injustices and they are very afraid when justice really come back and knock at their door!
Julio: Even though you are not a socialist of any sort, you seem to have a genuine love of the people. I’ve followed your thoughts with great interest and must say that you make more sense than many of those who claim to be partisans of socialism.
In particular you make more sense than the sectarian Marxists who, in the face of failure in country after country, continue to dish up the old rhetoric of Communism. You, at least, can use your head for something other than a hat rack.
What you do not and perhaps cannot understand is that the failed socialism of the Cuban Revolution is not authentic socialism, at all. It is only socialist in that a political party that flies the banner of socialism has state power in its hands, and still professes to be in the process of building a socialist society.
As an economic system it is not socialist, but more like a giant capitalist corporation that owns everything, exploits wage labor and rules society through one-party social and political absolutism.
I personally cannot understand why the sincere leaders at the top of the Cuban government and leading political party can’t see that state ownership of the means of production does not work and must therefore be modified.
I, representing our nascent movement for a socialist cooperative republic in the U.S., have hammered the ideas of cooperative, entrepreneurial socialism for many months, but there is no indication than any political minded Cuban will let go of the Marxist religion.
What I can say for certain is that the present non-socialist economy will collapse eventually, and then we will see many of the old communist bureaucrats becoming millionaires–as has happened in every other Soviet-style “experiment.” Too bad Fidel and Raul cannot see where the country is going, even though it’s a plain as the noses on their faces.
My hope is for every country in the world to progress to a different kind of socialism, a modern socialist cooperative republic. Such republics are the only hope for “democracy and freedom and the respect of the fundamental human rights” of which you speak. Then we will see the flowering of truly free enterprise.
Grady
Whenever you site an example it comes from countries like Spain or the US where people are allowed to organized themselves as they like while we can see that people in systems like the one in Cuba are unable to do so, always under the pretest that they will try to undermine the sanctified revolution
Nothing is worst that much to keep specially with the suffering that all Cubans had to endured.
There is no family in Cuba that does not have someone who is on exiled.
There are so many families struggling and just trying to make a living
many are force into prostitution by this level of poverty and the regime seems to be encouraging this as long as some of them get their fat pockets full of money.
I wonder how my country would have being if not for these greedy for power individuals. I do not ignore the fact that they are not the only dictators of my country. Before them Cuba had other dictators and more corruption too but they really top everyone else when one compare.
Why are some people so selfish?
I guess that honey of power must be very sweet!
I hope and it is the hope of many Cubans that Cuba will return to democracy and freedom and the respect of the fundamental human rights.
To Sam re your first comment: The Communist Manifesto–in the second chapter and especially in the last several pages of that chapter–lays down a programmatic formula for a future socialist economy. The core of this formula is “concentration of all the instruments of production in the hands of the state.” What is this but the design for a state-owns-everything form of socialism?
You and others like you–unfortunately including such revolutionary comrades as Pedro Campos–continue to ignore the text that is right before your eyes. Engels and Marx designed the state ownership of all the instruments of production, and that is that. If you don’t see it, and if you will not face it, there is something fundamentally wrong with your approach.
Bottom line, Sam: When the socialist state concentrates all the instruments of production in its hands, per the Communist Manifesto formula, this concentration immediately abolishes the institutions of private property and the trading market. Having thus abolished the historically evolved institutions that are able to run a modern industrialized economy, the only way to keep the new economy going is by having persons employed by the state to plan production. These state employees, in every known case, have become a stratum of alien potentates–a bureaucracy.
You and others need to stop treating Marxism like the true religion, and Marx like an infallible Pope, and go at this thing with a scientific frame of mind. State ownership does not work; it has never worked; it cannot work. Scientific Conclusion: The formula submitted by Engels & Marx in the second chapter of the Communist Manifesto is incorrect, and a new hypothesis for the future socialist experiment needs to be formulated.
Formulated by whom? By us!
Your–and others’–idea of such a new hypothesis is merely loud bellyaching about those horrible Stalinist bureaucrats. That’s all you have to say. It is in no way scientific, and it is in now way relevant to reform of the Cuban process.
To Julio de la Yncera: I believe you are correct. The people who post in HT will not be listened to by the Cuban government. But certain people in Cuba who are sincerely interested in the progress and well being of their nation and their Revolution may listen. All that is needed in Cuba is for one leadership-type person to break with the quasi-religion of Marxism and formulate a program for workable socialism, and true socialism may be accomplished in that brave country.
Only “one” good person! Then the days of the bureaucratic rulership are numbered.
Good luck to us all. We’re going to need it.
Transparency would be a good means to prevent this. The problem is the consumer in this case has no say or ownership in the direction of the bakery. This situation presupposes aspects of capitalist style exchange, in that the produce remains alienated from the consumer (thus the workers can sell crap), and because EVERYONE needs to steal to survive or live well, the system stagnates as surplus labour gets stolen by corruption instead of reinvested or distributed democratically and fairly.
Grady-The Communist Manifesto doesn’t mention creating a corrupt bureaucracy that owns the means of production and skims the surplus labour for itself. It mentions a people’s democracy. The point is that the state seizes the means of production for the sake of democratizing it. That Cuba merely seized it, and never democratized it, is no condemnation of Marxism, but instead of Stalinism.
Grady
The people that post articles here at Havana Times may put forward theories or even thesis like the one you describe but nothing will happen any way. The reason is because the regime in Cuba does not listen to people.
They (The leadership) does whatever they think is best for them without listening to the will of the people.
I guess the only way they will listen will be when they get 1 million people protesting their regime in Havana streets.
A truly enlightening article. Thanks, Osmel Almaguer.
In Berkeley, Oakland & San Francisco, California there are three or four “Arizmendi” bakeries–named after the Catholic priest who inspired the Mondragon, Spain cooperatives. They are worker-owned cooperatives, and they bake great bread and other bread products.
They got their start from the well-known “Cheseboard” in Berkeley, a worker-owned cooperative deli that had started out as a privately-owned deli. The Cheseboard workers acquired it legally (I don’t know exactly how) and it has made a good living for them. Plus their successful experience has helped inspire our modern cooperative socialist movement (they are not affiliated with us).
Why am I saying these things? To show how what Julio de la Yncera is saying is corroborated by real-world experience. Those who do the work in any enterprise need a meaningful equity position in it, whether it is big like General Motors, or small like an Arizmendi Bakery.
Workable socialism must be based on direct employee ownership of the instruments of production.
The socialist state surely should take a partial, non-controlling share of ownership–in order to get its necessary revenues without taxes and massive tax bureaucracies–but “concentration of all the instruments of production in the hands of the state” per the Communist Manifesto–is not the correct basis for workable socialism.
When will someone in Cuba (Osmel? Pedro Campos? Alberto Jones?) put forward a socialism re-organization program that can transform Cuba into a socialist cooperative republic?
If someone in that brave country does not develop a workable socialist reform program, the Revolution is toast.
I am not a baker but I have used up a lot of Bread in my professional life as a Owner of Restaurants. What you lack is the knowledge how to do things, and naturally money. Will work for free, train people that they are selfsupportive for one year, sent me the Visa and Permit and a Store and I will volunteer my time in Havana, “do not blame others”, change it by yourself, nothing is free in life anywhere in ties world, a strong Cuba supporter with a neutral mind, yours Hans
No Julio, that wouldn’t ‘magically’ solve the problem. They would keep stealing from whomever provides the commodities. This is not a ‘clan’, but a mafia, and it would still be a mafia even if the bakery was legally owned by Don ‘bread’ Corleone there – once in my neighborhood the local bakery was bought by a drug dealer lord for their money laundering routines. Result: horrible over-phosphated bread and one guy killed.
Have a nice day.
Wow this is just jaw dropping!
Solution to the problem. Make them owners so that the produce bread. Once they are owners they will realize that stealing is equivalent to them loosing money!
They just do not see that by them stealing from The state they are stealing themselves. Maybe I should rephrase that into they are taking what belongs to them without work!
This state of affairs has to stop because all end up losing. The solution is not more surveillance or more police or anti corruption. Let them sell bread and make the profit and then pay tax on the profit and whatever remains belongs to them!