Cuba Ready to Celebrate International Workers’ Day

By Jancel Moreno

HAVANA TIMES — For days now, the official Cuban media hasn’t stopped telling us how the country prepares to fill the streets on May 1st, International Workers’ Day.

Programs such as the Cuban TV news, show footage of workplaces full of flags, signs and banners where you can see the slogans that are repeated year after year with messages that have nothing to do with the choice of many of those who carry them in the crowded march.

However, the most ironic thing is when we hear workers reciting short speeches that they’ve learned by heart in front of rolling TV cameras.

If we take a step back from what’s being depicted by Cuban government media to the rest of the world, and we ask any worker away from the TV cameras, we’ll find answers which are very hard to listen to such as that which Juan Orlando Perez, an employee at the Nico Lopez Refinery, told me.

“I have to go because they warned me early this morning that those who don’t go might as well kiss their bonuses goodbye and I have a daughter who I have to support.”

Yolanda Puig took a similar attitude, a lady who forms part of the Etecsa telephone company’s commercial office union local in the Alamar neighborhood, when she said: “I really don’t want to go, because it doesn’t make any sense, but believe me, I prefer to walk around the square a little bit than bear the pressure from my boss and much less lose a part of my salary.”

However, a young member of Cuba’s Union of Young Communists (UJC), Angel Manuel Martinez, a resident in the town of Regla, assures me that he will attend the march wholeheartedly, because it’s his first workers’ march.

Without a doubt, all of the country’s squares will be taken over by diverse herds of people on the morning of Monday May 1st, made up of workers, students and other sectors of society, some of whom are apparently being forced while others, like Angel Manuel, will celebrate the occasion.

Divided into 16 groups in Havana, those who will march soon through the square are ready. They will be led by the UJC bloc, under the slogan: “Our Strength is in Unity.”