Superfluous Workers in Cuba's Workers' Paradise?

Last Saturday, on May 1, General Raúl Castro reviewed the International Labor Day parade at Plaza de la Revolución in Havana. In his speech, the general-president-and-brother of Fidel, said that the big turnout demonstrated the workers support for the regime and the vitality of Cuban labor unions. These are the same labor unions that for over fifty years have enforced workers discipline, making sure that there are no labor strikes or that no independent worker demands are expressed on the island.

Raúl’s speech not withstanding, Cuban workers have something else in their minds: his announcement, at a communist youth congress a month ago, that “hundreds of thousands of jobs are not needed and that some analysts calculate in one million the number of superfluous workers.” In Cuba’s workforce today, by Raúl’s calculation roughly one of every four workers is useless.

Cubans weren’t surprised to hear Raúl’s May 1 speech, filled with boilerplate tirades denouncing the “enemy to the North” and the foreign press. They’re accustomed to it and the mass demonstrations that are held for foreign consumption. They also know their country’s Labor Day drill under the Castro government. Early in the morning on May 1, Cuban workers are required to report to their work place to gather banners and placards and be trucked to the event; the same is true for elementary, secondary and university students who report to their schools and are then shipped off to march. Housewives are rounded up by their neighborhood Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), and women who do not report to factories or do not fall under the CDR’s purview report to the Federation of Cuban Women.

Read the full text of this web exclusive at www.AmericasQuarterly.org.

Frank Calzon is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba, which is based in Arlington, Va.