Re: Workers moving into leadership of Venezuela oil industry

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

> By SERGIO DE LEON, Associated Press Writer:
> -------------------------------------------
> PUERTO LA CRUZ, Venezuela - Thanks to President Hugo Chavez, merchant
> mariner Jose Luis Lozada now manages a key oil storage and loading facility
> in this Caribbean port city.
>
> Lozada is among those workers trying to jump-start Petroleos de Venezuela
> S.A., Venezuela's state owned oil monopoly. Some 30,000 PDVSA workers have
> been on strike since December to demand new presidential elections, nearly
> closing the world's fifth largest petroleum exporter.
>
> Chavez has fired more than 700 dissident workers and is hiring or promoting
> striker replacements such as Lozada. He vows a rapid recuperation of one of
> the world's biggest oil companies.
>
> It isn't easy, as Lozada can attest.

Edward Boorstein "The Economic Transformation of Cuba":

By October 1960 most of this administrative and technical personnel had
left Cuba. The Americans and some of the Cubans were withdrawn by the home
companies of the plants for which they worked, or left of their own accord:
they found themselves unable to understand the struggle with the United
States, unwilling to accept the new way of life that was opening up before
them.

The Revolutionary Government had to keep the factories and mines going only
with a minute proportion of the usual trained and experienced personnel. A
few examples can perhaps best give an idea of what happened.

Five of us from the Ministry of Foreign Commerce, on a business visit, were
being taken through the Moa nickel plant. In the electric power
station--itself a large plant--which served the rest of the complex, our
guide was an enthusiastic youngster of about 22. He did an excellent job as
guide, but his modesty as well as his age deceived us and only toward the
end of our tour did we realize that he was not some sort of apprentice
engineer or assistant--he was in charge of the plant. I noticed that he
spoke English well and asked him if he had lived in the States. "Sure," he
answered, "I studied engineering at Tulane." As soon as he finished, he had
come back to work for the Revolution and had been placed in charge of the
power plant.

In another part of the complex, the head of one of the key departments was
a black Cuban who had about four years of elementary school education. He
had been an observant worker and when engineer of his department left he
knew what to do--although he didn't really know why, or how his department
related to the others in the plant. Now to learn why, he was plugging away
at his minimo tecnico manual--one of the little mimeographed booklets which
had been distributed throughout industry to improve people's knowledge of
their jobs.

And so on throughout the Moa plant. The engineer in charge of the whole
enterprise, who had a long cigar in his hand and his feet on the desk as he
gave us his criticisms of the way our Ministry was handling his import
requirements, was about 28 years old. His chief assistants were about the
same age and some of them were obviously not engineers.

Yet Moa was made to function. Even laymen are struck with its delicate
beauty--a testament to American engineering skill. 'Es una joya'--it's a
jewel, say the Cubans. It is much more impressive than the larger but older
nickel plant at Nicaro. Shortly after the nickel ore is clawed out of the
earth by giant Bucyrus power shovels, it a pulverized and mixed with water
to form a mixture 55 percent and 45 percent water. From then on all
materials movement is liquids, in pipes, automatically controlled. The
liquids move through the several miles of the complex, in and out of the
separate plants, with the reducers, mixing vats, etc. Everything depends on
innumerable delicate instruments, and on unusual materials, resistant to
exceptions high temperatures and various kinds of chemical reaction. The
margin for improvising in repairing or replacing parts is small-much
smaller than in the mechanized rather than the automated Nicaro plant. Yet
the Moa plant was in operation when we were there: two of the main
production lines were going-and all four would have been going jf it had
not been necessary to cannibalize two lines to get replacement parts for
the other two.

Except that Moa was an especially complex and difficult operation, jt was
typical of what happened throughout the mines and factories, and far that
matter in the railroads, banks, department stores, and movie houses that
had been taken over. The large oil companies had expected that the Cubans
would not be able to run the oil refineries. But they were wrong. When a
co-worker and I talked to the young administrator of the now combined
Esso-Shell refineries across the bay from Havana, he said, only
half-jokingly, that he was about two lessons ahead of us in his
understanding of how the refinery worked--and I wondered how it was kept
going. But we had been around the ten minutes earlier and there it was--going.

A textile plant was placed in the charge of a bearded young man of about 23
who had impressed Major Guevara with his courage and resourcefulness in the
Rebel Army. The former Procter and Gamble plant, which each year turns out
several million dollars worth of soaps, and tooth paste, was run by a
former physician who, besides being generally able, knew some chemistry.
For many months, the Matahambre copper mine was in the charge of an
American geologist, a friend of mine. After coming to Cuba to work for the
Revolution, he had been pressed into service, though he was not a mining
engineer and had never run a mine, because he was still the most qualified
person available. He had to educate himself rapidly in mine ventilation;
this was one of Matahambre's biggest problems at the time. I went through
the mine with him once end it was obvious from the way the men treated him
that he had gained their respect for the way he was handling his job.

Once an economist from the Ministry of Industry and I visited a large plant
near Matanzas that produced rayon for tires, textiles, and export. We
sensed at the plant that the harassed, outspoken administrator, almost the
only engineer left, was all but sustaining the whole operation by himself.
We got into a conversation about him with one one of his assistants. It
turned out he had a bad leg of some sort which was giving him trouble; his
father, who had owned valuable property in the nearby swanky bathing resort
at Varadero was out of sympathy with the Revolution; and his brother, also
an engineer, had left for Venezuela or some such place. But there he was,
holding a meeting with his staff at 11 P.M., using all his energy to help
keep the rayonera going.

When you walked through a Cuban factory, you didn't need to be told that it
was under new management--you could see and feel it everywhere. In the
Pheldrake plant for producing wire and cable, formerly owned by Dutch and
American interests, the whole office of administration was filled by men in
shirt-sleeves who were unmistakably workers; the engineers had gone and the
workers had taken over. On the main floor, a group of them were
struggling--using baling wire techniques--to repair one of the extrusion
machines so that the wire required by the Cuban telephone industry could be
kept coming. In a large tobacco factory, the administrator was black; in
the metal-working plant formerly owned by the American Car and Foundry
Company, the head of a department turning out chicken incubators was black.
Black people had not held such positions before the Revolution.




Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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