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By Bill Van Auken
5 August 2010

President Raúl Castro Sunday outlined plans that could eliminate the jobs of some 1.3 million Cuban state workers, while promoting the growth of private enterprise in the country’s service sector.

In his speech to the opening of the biannual session of the Cuban parliament, Castro insisted that the measures are merely an “updating” of the Cuban economic system, and not “market reforms” based on “capitalist recipes.” Nonetheless, the proposals pose among the most sweeping social and economic transformations in Cuba since the overthrow of the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

The country has faced a protracted economic crisis, exacerbated by the global financial meltdown. The main export, nickel, has seen prices drop from $24 a pound in 2008 to just $7 a pound last year. Tourism, the biggest source of income, has been hit by the global recession, as have remittances from Cubans abroad, particularly in the US, who are facing unemployment and falling wages. A series of three hurricanes in 2008 combined with a drought in the eastern portion of the island ravaged much of Cuba’s crops.

Compounding these difficulties is the 48-year-old US embargo first imposed by the Kennedy administration in retaliation for the Cuban government’s expropriation of US corporate property on the island.

The measures outlined by President Castro are aimed at imposing the full burden of this crisis onto the backs of the Cuban working class.

Those to be purged from what Raúl Castro described as “bloated” state payrolls comprise up to one quarter of the economically active population on the island. It is anticipated that virtually every family in the country will be affected, and the proposed economic changes are creating growing social and political tensions.

“We have to wipe out forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where you can live without working,” Castro told the Cuban parliament members.

The official unemployment rate in Cuba was 1.7 percent last year and has not risen above 3 percent in the previous eight years. Full employment, one of the guarantees of the Castro regime, is being abandoned.

“We hope to eliminate 200,000 jobs annually, some 100,000 of them over the next year just in the capital,” a government economist told the Reuters news agency. Lists of those slated for firing have reportedly already been drawn up in factories, hospitals and offices.

Those first to be targeted are workers who have already been laid off from state-owned enterprises. Beginning in the first quarter of next year, Castro said, “[T]he labor and salary treatment of workers who are idle and laid off from a group of administrative bodies of the central state will be changed, overcoming the paternalistic emphasis that discouraged the necessity to work for a living and with it reducing unproductive spending which is rooted in egalitarian pay, independent of years of employment, in a salary guarantee over long periods for people who do not work.”

Castro gave no details about the nature of the change that would be implemented—whether pay for unemployed workers will be eliminated, reduced or shortened in duration. The specifics of the plan will be laid out to a session of the official trade union body, the Confederation of Cuban Workers. Like the parliament itself, it has no independence from the state apparatus that has devised these measures and serves merely as another rubberstamp for decisions taken at the top.

What was unmistakable about Castro’s remarks, however, is that unemployment is being viewed increasingly within official circles as a necessary tool for disciplining the Cuban working class.

Employment conditions in the key tourism sector have already been altered, according to reports from the island. Workers are being laid off, without salaries, during the off-season. In some cases, they are being offered reduced compensation to take courses or work in construction or the agricultural sector.

The clear aim is to compel workers to work harder for less. This was made explicit in a report last month in the official daily Granma about the “positive” development that labor productivity in Cuba had risen 4.3 percent in the first quarter of this year, even as the median salary fell by nearly 1 percent. Over the previous year, the government has sought to tie wages to productivity

The median monthly income has fallen to 429 pesos, the equivalent of $17. While these salaries have been supplemented with various state services, ranging from subsidized housing to free education and health care to food ration cards, these subsidies are also being targeted as part of the Cuban government’s drive to close deficit gaps and meet payments to its foreign lenders. Already, living standards in Cuba are far lower than they were in 1989 and the liquidation of the Soviet Union, which had heavily subsidized the island’s economy.

It was during this so-called “special period” proclaimed after the end of Soviet aid and the resulting 35 percent drop in Cuba’s GDP that the government last encouraged a growth in private enterprises.

Already, the government has closed down dining halls in state-owned enterprises that previously provided Cuban workers with a free meal. There is also reported discussion of eliminating food ration cards in favor of means-tested assistance to the poorest sections of the population. Meanwhile, the government has raised the retirement age, while forcing workers to contribute more to their social security.

Castro combined the threat of mass layoffs with the announcement of measures that would facilitate the expansion of the so-called cuentapropista sector, made up of barbers, hairdressers, taxi drivers and similar services that are allowed to operate privately, while obtaining licenses from and paying rent and taxes to the government.

The idea that this sector—which currently consists of less than 145,000 licensed enterprises—can absorb 1.3 million redundant state sector employees is absurd on its face. Nonetheless, Castro promised to create greater “hiring flexibility,” allowing for small proprietors to exploit labor for profit.

A more significant expansion of the private sector was announced on the margins of the parliamentary session by Minister of Tourism Manuel Marrero, who announced that the government is negotiating with foreign capital for the building of 16 golf courses as well as a string of new hotels on the island. He also said that by January the government would lift restrictions on the sale of houses to foreigners.

The net effect of these measures will be to widen already growing social inequality in Cuba, which is determined in large measure by access, or lack of it, to foreign currency. Those with high government posts, jobs in the tourist sector or receiving foreign remittances have such access, while the great majority of the population does not.

Significantly, the Western media largely dismissed Raúl Castro’s speech. This reflects the real concerns of US and European capitalism, which has no problem with taking away a million workers’ jobs, but wants to see more sweeping privatization of core areas of the Cuban economy and a dismantling of remaining restrictions on foreign direct investment.

Fidel Castro, 83, did not appear at the opening of the Cuban parliament. He had led the Cuban government for 47 years until 2006, when, because of ill health, he ceded the reins to his younger brother, Raúl, 79.

Nonetheless, Fidel has been increasingly in the public eye, making eight appearances in the last month. Among the most recent was his reception of Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi. China has extended desperately needed credit to the Cuban government, and there is growing speculation that Havana may emulate the path taken by Beijing, combining an embrace of capitalist economic relations with the maintenance of the current political regime, based on the ruling Cuban Communist Party and the military.

In his speech to the parliament, Raúl Castro also gave the first public explanation of his decision to release and exile 52 imprisoned “dissidents.”

Castro explained that those who were released had been arrested and jailed for working for the US government under conditions in which Washington was openly promoting “regime change” in Havana. “The revolution can be generous because it is strong,” he said, while cautioning that there would be “no impunity for enemies of the fatherland.”

The release was brokered by the Catholic Church and the Spanish government in return for Spain’s agreement to push for the European Union to lift sanctions against the island. The Cuban government is anxious to regain access to European credit and also hopeful that Washington could reciprocate with a loosening of the trade embargo.

Raúl Castro also stressed in his speech that the advent of Obama had brought no substantive change in US policy toward the island. He noted the maintenance of the economic blockade as well as the continued imprisonment of five Cuban agents who had been sent to the US to monitor terrorist Miami-based exile groups. One of them, Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, 45 and in ill health, was recently placed in a punishment cell in a California prison.

Castro insisted that unity in Cuba’s ruling party was “stronger than ever.” He dismissed speculation that there existed divisions over economic policy, including between the Castro brothers themselves.

Since permanently assuming the presidency in 2008, Raúl Castro has replaced a number of leading officials with his own confidantes, drawn for the most part from the senior brass of the Cuban military.

A number of these changes have been accompanied by rumors of official corruption. Most recent in this category was the sudden removal of Rogelio Acevedo, longtime head of the state agency that directs Cuba’s airlines and airports.

A prominent intellectual in the ruling Cuban Communist Party called attention to the danger posed by the increasingly open corruption within ruling circles. Esteban Morales, who served as director of the US Studies Center at the University of Havana and was a regular commentator on the Cuban television’s political analysis program “Mesa Redonda,” wrote an article in April entitled “Corruption: the true counterrevolution?”

“When we closely observe Cuba’s internal situation today, we can have no doubt that the counter-revolution, little by little, is taking positions at certain levels of the State and Government,” Morales wrote.

He continued: “Without a doubt, it is becoming evident that there are people in positions of government and state who are girding themselves financially for when the Revolution falls, and others may have everything almost ready to transfer state-owned assets to private hands, as happened in the old USSR.”

He stressed that corruption within the ruling elite was far more dangerous than the US-backed “dissidents,” which he described as isolated and lacking any program, any leadership and any significant following.

Pointing to the case of the recently sacked airlines chief Acevedo, he said that there had been no real public explanation of the affair, in which “the people’s money and resources were squandered amid an economic situation that’s quite critical to the country.”

The case was not unique, he said, but rather typical of top officials who “are receiving commissions and opening bank accounts in other countries.” He added that US intelligence knew far more than the Cuban people about who these officials were and would seek to use this information to recruit them.

While Morales’s article appeared on an officially sanctioned website, he was soon taken off of the television program, and it was announced in June that he had been expelled from the ruling party. Apparently, the regime believed the commentary revealed far too much about the real political and class character of Cuba’s ruling stratum.

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http://www.internationalnews.fr/article-cuba-s-raul-castro-unveils-plan-for-massive-job-cuts-55011364.html

Counter Currents

29 June, 2010
Mycatbirdseat.com

Juan Manuel Santos, notorious Defense Minister in the regime of outgoing President Alvaro Uribe and closely identified with high crimes against humanity “won” the recent Presidential elections in Colombia, June 2010. The major electronic and print media CNN, FOX News, Washington Post, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the once liberal Financial Times (FT) hailed Santos election, as a great victory for democracy. According to the FT, “Colombia not Venezuela is (the) best model for Latin America” (FT 6/23/2010 p. 8). Citing Santos “overwhelming” margin – he garnered 69% of the vote, the FT claimed he won a “strong mandate” (FT 6/22/2010). In what has to be one of the most flagrant cover-ups in recent history, the media accounts exclude the most egregious facts about the elections and the profoundly authoritarian policies pursued by Santos over the past decade.

The Elections: Guns, Elites and Terror

Elections are a process (not merely an event) in which prior political conditions determine the outcome. During the previous eight years of outgoing President Uribe’s and Defense Minister Santos’ rule, over 2 million, mostly rural poor, were forcibly uprooted and driven from their homes and land and displaced across frontiers into neighboring countries, or to urban slums. The Uribe-Santos regime relied on both the military and the 30,000 member paramilitary deathsquads to kill and terrorize entire population centers, deemed “sympathetic” to the armed insurgency, affecting several million urban and rural poor. Over 20,000 people were killed, many, according to the major Colombian human rights group, falsely labeled “guerrillas”. Santos as Defense Minister was directly implicated by the Courts in what was called “false positives”. The military randomly rounded up scores of poor urban youth, shot them and claimed a resounding victory over the FARC guerrillas.

Several of the most important captured paramilitary deathsquad leaders testified that over 60 of the congress people backing Uribe – Santos were on their payroll and they “ensured” votes from regions under their control. Faced with damaging testimony, Uribe-Santos double-crossed their narco-deathsquad comrades and “extradited” them to the U.S. where the judicial process excluded evidence linking them to the mass killings at the behest of Uribe-Santos.

Over two thousand trade unionists, human rights activists, journalists and congress- people critical of Uribe-Santos were murdered by deathsquad hit-men serving the regime. The world’s major trade union confederations have sent missions and published reports condemning Colombia as the most dangerous country for workers’ representatives.

In other words all the social sectors with social and political grievances against the regime were terrorized, many of their local opinion leaders, killed, displaced or driven into exile … undermining the possibility of sustained independent socio-political organization.

Pervasive state terror led to few local leaders surviving, undermining the electorate’s capacity to exercise a free and independent organization.

On election day, the regime mobilized over 350,000 military and police officials, many involved in the decade long repression, to “oversee” the elections and to remind the voters of the force behind the “official candidate” (La Jornada 5/30/2010).

The electoral outcome was far from the “mandate” of the Colombian people as claimed by the mass media. The ‘winner’ was the “abstentionists” with 56% of the electorate, the position advocated by the FARC. Now clearly the majority of the abstentionist vote did not reflect support or sympathy for the FARC; rather it reflected disaffection with the regime’s violent repression, massive dispossession of millions and its total failure to deal with the under and unemployment affecting 40% of the economically active population.

In fact Santos received 30% of the vote of the electorate, hardly a mandate. If we examine the social-ecological background of the voters, it is clearly a mandate from the elite. The highest levels of abstention were among several distinct groups. Among the shanty towns and rural areas suffering from repression and neglect, abstention rose to over 80%. In contrast, in the middle and upper class sectors of the major cities, over 60% voted for the candidate of the regime. Uribe-Santos tried to explain away the massive abstention by citing the weather (rain) and the World Cup soccer matches .However the low turnout took place throughout the country, in dry and inclement weather.

And the games did not occupy the entire day of voting. The mass media systematically ignored the horrendous crimes under Defense Minister Santos, his indictment in the “false positive” murders, his long term large scale association with the death squads and with the Uribe regimes promotion of narco trafficking. They ignored his support for de-regulating the financial system, resulting in the defrauding of hundreds of thousands of Colombian small investors.

Comparing Colombia to Venezuela

Yet the Financial Times (6/23/2010) favorably compares Colombia under Uribe-Santos against Venezuela under Chavez, “Crackers about Caracas? Latin American should be bonkers about Bogota instead”. According to the FT Venezuela under Chavez is said to be unsafe, authoritarian and economically in decline. The editors of the FT, echoing the rest of the media, claim Colombia is a prosperous democracy, with a system of checks and balances; with safe and peaceful neighborhoods … except when the neighborhoods of the poor protest unemployment or the rural villagers march against land grabs by the landlord funded gunmen. The FT fails to mention the resurgence of paramilitary gangs terrorizing the Colombian countryside, (La Jornada 5/28/2010) but instead they focus on street crime in Caracas.

The Venezuelan government, contrary to the US media, promotes community based social movements which would be targets of military raids in Bogota.

The only “paramilitary” groups in Venezuela are cross-over’s from Colombia, pursued and punished by the Venezuelan National Guard. In Venezuela trade unions participate in the management of major industrial plants, unlike Colombia where they are murdered including workers in the major Coca Cola,coal, oil and banana industries.

Behind the media lies and falsifications abut Colombia’s election and its political leaders are several basic considerations.

1.) Uribe-Santos are fervent free market advocates, eagerly pursing a free trade agreement held up in the US Congress because of their killing fields.

2.) Uribe-Santos are unconditional clients of the Pentagon, receiving $6 billion in aid and handing over 7 military bases, under US jurisdiction to threaten Venezuela, Ecuador and any other country the Obama regime deems a hostile to US domination.

3.) Uribe-Santos recognized the Honduras regime, product of a US backed military coup in mid 2009 – contrary to the rest of Latin America.

The fact that the mass-media have so enthusiastically embraced a regime with the worst human rights record since the fall of the military dictators of the 1970’s – 1980’s (La Jornada 6/17/2010) is indicative of the right turn under the Obama Wall Street regime. According to the White House and media, deathsquad democracies like Colombia now qualify as “role models” for Latin America. The problem is that neither the vast majority of Latin America citizens, nor most of the democratic parties in the region are buying: they prefer democracies without deathsquads, foreign military bases and narco-dealing Presidents. At present, the White House’s three leading allies in the region, Colombia, Peru and Mexico produce and sell 80% of the cocaine in the region. Will this appear in the media’s salutations to newly elected presidents?

James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. He is the author of 64 books published in 29 languages, and over 560 articles in professional journals, including the American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Social Research, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Journal of Peasant Studies. He has published over 2000 articles.

Source: http://www.countercurrents.org

Url of this article: http://www.internationalnews.fr/article--leader-of-deathsquads-wins-colombian-election-by-james-petras-53359641.html

IPS  Apr 20

Franz Chávez

COCHABAMBA, Bolivia, Apr 20 (IPS) - The philosophy of "Living Well" enshrined in Bolivia's new constitution is being put forward by the government as the basis for a global movement against consumerism, depredation of natural resources for profit, and current models of development.

Presenting the results of indigenous President Evo Morales' four years in office, Raúl Prada, vice minister for strategic state planning and a former member of the constituent assembly that rewrote the Bolivian constitution, exalted the virtues of the new charter, which arose from a social and political process with extensive grassroots participation.

Prada, a sociologist, proposed expanding the Bolivian government programme because it "protects biodiversity, respects the indigenous right to land and territory, and preserves water resources.

According to its proponents, the indigenous concept of "Living Well" contrasts with "living better" because it means having all basic needs met while existing in harmony with the natural world instead of seeking to amass more and more material goods at the expense of the environment.

"It is a proposal that incorporates the traditional indigenous worldview and combines well with anti-capitalist and environmental movements defending the planet," Prada said Tuesday, the first day of the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, which runs through Thursday in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

The Bolivian constitution is the ultimate horizon, and is linked to the aim of "Living Well" and economic models that are alternatives to capitalism, he said.

After taking office in January 2006, the leftwing Morales administration promoted the creation of a new constitution that would reclaim the country's natural resources for Bolivians and strengthen the rights of the country's impoverished indigenous majority, workers and women.

One of its pillars is "Living Well", which reflects the interest of indigenous people in preserving nature.

"Living Well" is a fine-sounding phrase, "but we need to define what it means, and how it works in practice," Trond Norheim, a Norwegian environment expert with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), who listened attentively to the speeches by Bolivian government officials, told IPS.

"Although many indigenous communities epitomise 'Living Well', there are a range of different lifestyles in society and we need to know what it means for city dwellers. We need to put more flesh on the bones, not just make speeches," he said.

In spite of this caveat, Norheim is observing the Bolivian model with interest, because it gives low-income sectors the opportunity to demand their rights instead of "leaving everything to the government."

Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, an active promoter of the World Social Forum, said that in his view the validity of the new Bolivian constitution is based on three elements of democracy: representativeness, participation by all social actors, and the recovery of community values.

"The concept of the plurinational state will be long-lived" and will improve harmonious coexistence between peoples, he said Monday night at a lecture organised by the Centre for Socio-Environmental Knowledge and Care of the La Plata Basin.

The Bolivian government's proposal attracted the attention of delegates from the United Left of the city of Jaén, Spain: Olga Jiménez, Ana Alcántara and journalist Francisco Sánchez, who writes for the party's magazine "Comunes".

Jiménez emphasised the opportunity the conference offers to learn about the kind of "Living Well" the Bolivian government supports, making economic models compatible with indigenous lifestyles, while Alcántara said she had confidence the administration would ensure "great strides forward for the majority, if the opposition allows Evo Morales to govern." Prada described the Bolivian model as a coming together of the indigenous peoples' demand for "decolonisation" and the renationalisation of natural resources, and cited the October 2003 "gas war" - a month of protests against plans to export Bolivia's natural gas that toppled the right-wing government of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (1993-1997 and 2002-2003) - as the moment the two demands came together.

The renationalisation of gas reserves and the convening of the constituent assembly, which recognised the right of indigenous peoples to exercise social control over the extraction of natural resources were highlighted by Carlos Villegas, head of the YPFB state oil and gas company.

He stated that indigenous communities are now being consulted before companies are allowed to exploit fossil fuel resources in their territories, in accordance with international conventions, and that compensation is being paid, in coordination with the government's oversight mechanisms.

Villegas was talking about people living in the oil and gas belt in southeast Bolivia, containing South America's second largest natural gas reserves - after Venezuela's - with an estimated volume of 49 trillion cubic feet, which provides the Bolivian state with its main source of revenue. (END/2010)

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Url of this article: http://www.internationalnews.fr/article-bolivia-living-well-in-harmony-with-the-environment-49117543.html

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