Bureaucracy Hinders Pork Production
HAVANA TIMES, March 29 — A lack of coordination between four different Cuban state offices is the main cause for the stagnation in pork production in Havana, stated members of the Small Farmers Association (ANAP), reported IPS.
A front page article in Granma, the Communist Party daily stated on Monday, “The farmers criticized the ‘diabolic’ mechanisms that hold back production in the capital.”
The report from an assembly held over the weekend points the finger at the Hydraulic Resources Institute, the Public Health Ministry, the Physical Planning office and the Veterinary Medicine Institute.
The problem of low pork production, & agricultural production in general, is not a lack of “power” to so-called “workers & farmers councils.” It is a lack of legal ownership of land for the farmers; & a lack of respect for the socialist trading market.
If farming families were allowed & assisted in obtaining legal ownership of small plot farms, agriculture in Cuba would burgeon overnight. With ownership comes workplace power, dignity and democracy, and with these comes enormous productivity.
All this sectarian talk about “power to the workers” is just rhetoric. The workers, whether individual farmers or industrial workers, need ownership–cooperative corporate ownership for industrial and commercial workers; individual land ownership for small rural producers.
With state power in the hands of a sincere socialist political party–the PCC–all that is needed is the “Danish model” in agriculture; & the “Mondragon model” in industry & commerce.
Wake up, PCC!
Clearly, these farmers are not in the bureaucratic planning loop — let alone get a vote on what gets done. But at least they get to speak out on the matter.
It has long been a given that the command-bureaucratic methods of “actually-existing socialism” never were so socialist at all — just bureaucratic. So the cuban government should have moved away from this model long ago — in spite of the understandable tendency for them to ‘circle the wagons’ while under constant imperialist threat. But if the functions of these ministries do directly affect the livelihood of the farmers, as well as basic food production for society, then they simply must be restructured to be appropriately & immediately responsive to the concerns of the farmers & of that wider society — obviously by democratic, socialist means.
& so who is taking responsibility for devolving State power to the workers & farmers councils, as should have been the revolutionary goal long ago..?