Fidel And The Queen

[C Ruiz <Cseniornyc@xxxxxxx>]

The future of the revolution in the hands of  teenage pump attendants
Like the Queen, Fidel Castro is in his 80th year, but  he knows the legacy of 
his rule depends on its constant  reinvention

Richard Gott
Tuesday April 18, 2006
Guardian

At  a petrol station outside the provincial Cuban town of Cienfuegos, half a 
dozen  teenage girls stand languidly by the pumps, jumping to attention when a 
car or  lorry pulls up. They work the pumps efficiently, take payment and 
enter the  transaction on to a large official form. They are dressed neatly in 
T-shirts and  jeans and a slogan across their backs proclaims their identity as 
trabajadores  sociales, or social workers. They are Fidel Castro's latest army 
of guerrillas,  deployed in the struggle against corruption, the scourge to 
which state-run  economies have always been peculiarly vulnerable. They are 
also the vanguard of  the generation upon whom the future of the Cuban revolution 
will depend.On  earlier visits to Cuba I have observed, indeed participated 
in, the petrol  problem. Driving through the countryside you could always find 
a willing  accomplice to direct you to a tank in someone's back garden, where 
petrol would  be sold at an advantageous price, or simply off-ration. It had 
been siphoned off  the state's supplies. The practice seemed harmless enough. 
Yet it had begun to  create a large hole in the economy. Castro complained that 
"as much petrol was  being stolen as sold", and last year his government 
stepped in with a novel  solution. Some 10,000 young activists, more than half of 
them women, have taken  control of the country's pumps, while the usual 
attendants have been sent home  on full pay.

The social workers' jobs do not stop at the petrol stations.  They also go 
from house to house to hand out low-energy light bulbs, to check  that everyone 
has the new electric pressure cookers provided by China and to  prompt the 
exchange of old, gas-guzzling fridges from the 50s for something more  energy 
efficient. Others will move on to examine financial practices in bakeries  and 
the construction industry. Some 30,000 of these youthful revolutionaries  have 
been deployed across the country, aged between 16 and 22. Identified some  
years ago as a potentially counter-revolutionary class, they are now trained in  
accountancy and helping to keep alive the revolution's mystique.

One of  the revolution's endearing features has been its ability to reinvent 
itself.  Castro was originally a guerrilla revolutionary with a utopian 
programme to  create a new society; later, in the 70s, he became a Soviet placeman 
with a  traditional communist blueprint; then in the 90s (after the collapse of 
the  Soviet Union) he was a simple hand-to-mouth survivor, regardless of the  
ideological cost. Finally, in the 21st century, with the economy recovering 
from  years of disaster, he still describes himself as a socialist but is also 
a fully  paid-up green campaigner. Efforts to curb corruption, save energy and 
promote  organic farming are all part of a new struggle to put revolutionary 
fire into  the bellies of a younger generation that doesn't remember the palmy 
days of the  Soviet-subsidised era, let alone the revolutionary excitements 
of half a century  ago.

Castro, in his 80th year, is the same age as the Queen of England.  He has 
been Cuba's ruler for almost as long and is still apparently as active as  ever. 
Last November, he spoke for five hours at the university and then talked  to 
the students until dawn. Yet he doesn't look well. People close to him report  
that he sometimes finds it difficult to sustain an argument. His intelligent 
but  sometimes rambling speeches tend to get well edited before they appear in 
print.  While I used to think he could go on for another decade, I now 
suspect he may  not last much beyond the celebrations of the revolution's half 
century in  2009.

Castro may well be of the same opinion. Speaking to the university  students, 
he addressed the problem of what might happen after his death, and  asked a 
series of rhetorical questions: "When the veterans start disappearing,  to make 
room for new generations of leaders, what will be done? Can the  
revolutionary process be made irreversible?" He gave warning that although it  was 
difficult to imagine the revolution being overthrown from outside, it would  be 
possible for the country to self-destruct. He argued that it would be up to  the 
new generation to see that this did not happen, admitting that his own rule  had 
hardly been perfect. "After all, we witnessed many mistakes that we simply  
did not notice at the time."

One such mistake was the failure to notice  that sugar production had become 
dramatically uneconomic. "The country had many  economists and it is not my 
intention to criticise them, but I would like to ask  why we hadn't discovered 
earlier that maintaining our levels of sugar production  would be impossible. 
The Soviet Union had collapsed, oil was costing $40 a  barrel, sugar prices 
were at basement levels, so why did we not rationalise the  industry" - instead 
of continuing to sow thousands of hectares a year. "None of  our economists 
seemed to have noticed any of this, and we practically had to  order them to stop 
the procedure." In practice, many economists knew exactly  what was going on. 
All they lacked was a free press in which to argue about  their findings. 
Although private discussion is often well-informed and sometimes  explosive, 
public debate about economic strategies is almost entirely  absent.

Cuba, which once produced 8m tons of sugar a year, has now all  but left the 
sugar business, dispensing with 300 years of its history. Barely 1m  tons are 
now produced, enough for home consumption. Today's income is derived  from 
tourists, the sale of nickel and the export of doctors and sports  instructors to 
Venezuela. This latest project, coupled with the local production  of 50% of 
its own oil needs, has put oxygen into the economy for the first time  since 
the Soviet collapse 15 years ago. Although the cities remain in a sad  state of 
repair, plenty of food finds its way (at a price) into the private  markets. 
People complain less than they did a couple of years ago, although poor  
transport remains amajor difficulty.

The girls at the pumps are part of a  project designed to tackle youth 
alienation. Now Castro is trying to tackle the  growing inequality of incomes that 
has been a feature of the past decade. He has  criticised the "new rich" who, 
securing dollars from relatives in Miami or from  work in the tourist industry, 
can earn 20 to 30 times more than a doctor or  teacher. He is not moving 
towards a market economy but to a society that is made  more aware of the value of 
what it consumes. While health and education will  remain free, subsidies on 
electricity and housing will be lowered, and food  rationing will eventually 
be phased out.

These are substantial changes,  though wages and pensions have been increased 
to soften the blow. They form part  of Castro's desire to safeguard his 
revolutionary legacy. "Are revolutions  doomed to fail?" he asked the students last 
year. "Can society prevent them from  collapsing?"

No one knows the final answer, although Castro's personal  place in history 
looks assured. Europeans sometimes seem to feel that Castro is  well past his 
sell-by date, a dinosaur from the long-gone Communist era. Yet  with the 
current leftist mood in Latin America, Cuba has become re-attached to  the mainland, 
enjoying diplomatic and trade links unimaginable in the past half  century. 
Castro himself is regarded by Latin Americans as one of their most  popular and 
respected figureheads, recognised by new generations as one of the  great figu
res of the 20th century.

· Richard Gott is the author of Cuba:  A New History. rwgott@xxxxxxx