The Communist Party of Cuba (CPC) is reading the riot act, as the old saying goes, to its tens of thousands of members through an internal document that should be the object of thorough analysis, discussion and, most importantly, strict compliance.
It deals with no less than self-employment, that irreversible move toward the implementation of the private sector. Similarly, it addresses other issues of top priority for the Cuba of today and soon hereafter.
This is a turn of the screw, not to tighten it even more but to expedite a movement that is just beginning.
The reader need not believe me, but the document I have in my hands is like a very light whiff of what once meant to the Chinese and Vietnamese communists to study the work of the American futurist Alvin Toffler.
As some very reliable people have told me, many Chinese and Vietnamese young people who read“The Third Wave” began to think about the importance of these small and medium private enterprises.
What the CPC is telling its members right now, among whom there are some micro-mini-private entrepreneurs, is that when it comes to the “cuentapropistas” (self-employed workers), both the party and the government must “first of all facilitate their activities and not create stigmas or prejudices against them, much less demonization.”
“We must defend the interests of self-employed persons just as we do with all other citizens, provided they act in compliance with the established laws,” the document says.
Farther on, it insists that the schools begin to create a tax culture with its basic concepts, just the way they teach spelling and grammar.
The 50-year-old ration book has definitely been sentenced to death. “Many of us Cubans mistake socialism for entitlements and subsidies, equality for egalitarianism, and many of us consider [the ration book] a social achievement that should never be terminated.”
In this regard, the document offers incentives to subsidize not products but “Cubans who for one reason or another really need it.”
Measures like that and “others that will be necessary to apply, though we know they are not popular, are obligatory in order to maintain and improve the free services of public health, education and social security for all citizens.”
Returning to Toffler, the Vietnamese people with whom I've talked to over the years have told me that both in the countryside and in the city, small and medium private entrepreneurs attribute their success to the policy implemented by the Communist Party of Vietnam.
Such praise comes equally from farmers who are free to market their products and entrepreneurs in the cities, who have set up restaurants or other businesses with the obligation to pay social security for their employees.
Because it copied a system – and copied it poorly – Cuba became an anthology of fumbling and mistakes. And the problem lay, in my opinion (and allow me the metaphor), in adopting the double-window system used to avoid the harsh and unforgiving winter elsewhere, not the single window that can protect us from a benevolent tropical rain or a wind storm.
If anywhere else in this world people drink coffee from cups of various sizes at any time of day or night, but cups after all, why should we decide that the brew should be administered rectally and while fasting?
To be honest, I do not think that is the way of the Cuban communists after so many experiences that were not always encouraging. The document says so, even though many outside the island may scream to the heavens or hell itself.
To use a trite expression, ladies and gentlemen, let time sort everything out.
