Cuban Workers Apathetic

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32119, 15 October 1969, Page 12

Cuban Workers Apathetic

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) MIAMI, October 12. The Cuban Government has acknowledged the existence of widespread worker apathy bordering on passive resistance, the New York Times News Service reports. Admitting that indifference and indolence have seriously affected the country’s production and services, the Government has launched a 20-day “National Guerrilla Campaign” in all Cuban factories and farms.

According to a Havana announcement, the principal object of the drive is “to combat absenteeism and other forms of labour indiscipline, shoddy work, low labour productivity, disorganisation and carelessness with equipment.” Directed by Communist Party officials, meetings are being held throughout the country “to analyse and overcome the existing difficulties.’’ At the same time, in an effort to tighten its control over the country’s 2.8 million workers, the Government has

enacted legislation which could result in the virtual immobility of the country’s labour force.

The new law, which becomes effective on Wednesday, directs all Government agencies to prepare a complete labour record for each Cuban worker, including personal details data and a regular evaluation of his performance.

Under the legislation a Cuban might find it practically impossible to change jobs at will, because without the official transfer of his dossier to a new place of employment, no money would be allocated for his wages. Although the Castro Government has been trying for years to reduce absenteeism, the crescendo of denunciations against this and other forms of work-dodging indicate that Cuba’s labour situation has deteriorated in recent months.

Several weeks ago, the Minister of Labour (Captain Jorge Risquet), stated: “The worker’s lack of discipline is a growing problem against which an intensive battle has to be waged.” Havana has conceded that low productivity is affecting both industrial and agricultural output

Ten days ago, the official Cuban newspaper, “Granina,” said that, according to a survey conducted in 187 factories, people who did show up at work were engaged in production during only five hours and 44 minutes of their eighthour working day, and that they were working at a very slow pace. The situation in agriculture is reported to be even worse. Some time ago, Dr Fidel Castro criticised farmers for working less than four hours a day, and “Granma” recently reported that absenteeism on State farms had reached a critical point Disciplinary measures against peasants who seem to prefer tending their small plots to working on Government farms have failed to arrest absenteeism.

According to reports from refugees, the lack of monetary incentives, the ninth year of strict rationing of virtually all foods and manufactured goods, and the shortage of housing are the principal economic motives for the workers’ apathy and low productivity. Material incentives have been officially denounced by Cuban leaders, and workers have been urged to “selflessly

produce for the glory of the Socialist revolution.”

Recognising that at least some of the workers’ grievances are not unfounded, Mr Armando Hart, a Communist Party official, conceded in a recent speech that many farm labourers lacked clothing, shoes and protective garments. Many workers have apparently become unresponsive to repetitious propaganda campaigns urging them to make a greater productive effort; but more disturbing for the Government is the reported lack of receptiveness of young Cubans—the first generation to be brought up under the revolutionary regime to Communist slogans and propaganda drives. In his speech, Mr Hart observed that young workers were producing less than older Cubans, whom Communist officials regard as “incurably contaminated with bourgeois mercantile ideas.”

“Granma” complained recently that young Cubans were shunning the virtuallyimportant sugar industry. There was, it said, practically no “generational replacement” at the sugar mills, where the average age of 100,000 workers, which some time ago was 44, had now reached 53.