Читать книгу Fidel & Religion - Fidel Castro - Страница 14
ОглавлениеOn Monday night, Fidel Castro received the small Brazilian delegation in his office in the Palace of the Revolution. Around the table were shelves full of books, there were cassettes and a transistor radio. On the table were papers, a crystal container full of candy, a round box with small short cigars, those preferred by the comandante. Underneath an enormous portrait of Camilo Cienfuegos, painted with soft strokes, were leather armchairs and a marble table from the Isle of Youth. In the background was a large conference table with four chairs on each side and two at each end. There was another huge oil painting of young students doing agricultural work. The office was large, comfortable, and air-conditioned but not luxurious. Fidel, wearing an olive-green uniform, invited us to sit at the table. He was especially interested in talking with Joelmir Beting, who had to go back to Brazil before the rest of us. He asked about Joelmir’s work, how he apportioned his time, how much time he had for study, and how he managed to keep so much economic information in his head. He also asked about our trip to the Isle of Youth and Cienfuegos, commenting, “The Cienfuegos nuclear power plant is being built with all the requirements for absolute safety — to withstand tidal waves, earthquakes, even a passenger jet crash.”
My mother praised Cuban cooking, especially the seafood. Fidel, who is also a chef, agreed. “The best thing is not to boil either shrimp or lobster, because boiling water reduces the substance and the taste and toughens the flesh. I prefer to bake or broil them. Five minutes of broiling is enough for shrimp. The lobster takes 11 minutes to bake or six minutes on a skewer over hot coals. Baste only with butter, garlic, and lemon. Good food is simple food. I think that international chefs squander resources; in a consommé many of the by-products are wasted by including the egg yolk; only the white should be used, so the leftover meat and vegetables can be used in a pie or something. One very famous chef is Cuban. Not long ago, he was preparing fish with rum and some other things for a visiting delegation. The only thing I liked was the turtle consommé — but, as I said, there was waste.”
Turning to Joelmir Beting, he asked, “What’s your daily work schedule like?”
“An hour and a half of radio programs every morning, half an hour of television in the evenings, and I write a daily column of economic commentary that’s published in 28 Brazilian newspapers.”
Fidel addressed him again: “How do you find the time to read and keep up with things? I spend an hour and a half every day reading the wire services, the dispatches from almost all the agencies. I receive them typed, in a folder, with a table of contents. The dispatches are in order by topic: everything related to Cuba, then sugar — which is basic for our exports — US politics, etc. If I read that a new pharmaceutical product has been discovered or a very useful new piece of medical equipment has been developed in some country, I immediately send for information about it. I don’t wait for the specialized medical journals that take from six months to a year to publish the information. This week I found out that a new device had been developed in France to destroy kidney stones by means of ultrasound. It’s much more economical than the one produced in West Germany. Two days later a compañero left for Paris to get the information. We’ve also asked for information about a new pharmaceutical product that was discovered in the United States that halts infarction. Public health is one of the sectors I follow closely with great interest, as are scientific research in Cuba and abroad and national and international economic matters. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough time to gather and analyze all the information I’m interested in. I wanted to be more up-to-date for this conversation with you, and I sent for all the important international economic news items from the last two months. I got four volumes of 200 pages each! It’s not easy to keep up with the dynamics of events, the adventures of the US dollar, and the consequences of the nefarious US economic policy on the world economy.”
Joelmir Beting said, “The dollar is a currency of intervention — armed intervention in our countries — rather than a reference currency. The rise of the dollar reflects the ruin of the US economy. The ruble is tied to gold. The ruble has backing, the dollar doesn’t. This is why the Soviet Union has been adversely affected by the increased value of the dollar since Nixon — over the phone — suspended the US currency’s gold backing. In a way, the currency that is buying the world today is counterfeit. The number of dollars circulating outside the United States is a mystery.”
Fidel leafed through the folder containing the transcript of Monday’s international dispatches. He commented that the folder wasn’t very thick because politicians and journalists weren’t used to working over the weekend.
“No one knows the computer that man has in his head,” he said, “I often wonder why so many people go into politics. It’s a hard job. It’s only worthwhile if it’s done as a function of something useful, if some problem can really be solved. In conversations such as this one, with visitors, I try to learn. I try to find out what’s going on in the rest of the world — especially Latin America.”
“As commander-in-chief, you are responsible both for the administration of Cuba and for its international relations,” Joelmir Beting observed. “Might two commanders be necessary?”
“Everything here is decentralized and follows well drawn-up plans. Moreover, there’s a central group that facilitates the administration. It used to be a Roman circus, with each agency, each ministry struggling with the planning board, squabbling over appropriations. Now everyone is responsible for everything. The Ministry of Education also participates in the main decisions concerned with the plan, as do the Ministry of Public Health and the other service and economic agencies. Decisions are made quickly, without bureaucracy. Decisions can be made without talking to me, except when there’s something very important or when it has to do with an area that I follow closely, such as health.”
“Or special projects, such as the nuclear power plant?”
“I realized that that project was lagging behind. It was a matter of supervision methods. The team responsible for the project held quarterly assessment meetings. I found out, for example, that the workers’ food, transportation, and other living conditions weren’t getting all the attention they required. Together with some of my staff I went to the site and asked about the living conditions, the quality of the shoes and other work clothes, the transportation that took the workers to visit their families, the material supplies for the project, the lack of construction equipment, and other aspects. What interests me is taking care of the workers. A worker will feel more interested in the project if they have decent conditions and see that their work is appreciated and that there is constant concern about their human and material problems. I saw that they were taken to their home provinces in trucks. I asked, ‘How many buses are needed — 30? We’re going to try to get them. We’ll use the ones we have in reserve.’ I made some suggestions. I even gave them the idea of building a campsite near the project so their families could visit them and rest with them near the job site. Of course, the agencies responsible for the project needed resources and more direct support; they got it.”
Fidel lit his small cigar with a chrome-plated cigarette lighter. He ran his slender fingers over his beard and continued: “I work directly with a team of 20 compañeros, 10 of whom are women. They form a coordination and support group. Each one tries to find out what’s going on in the country’s main production and service centers by maintaining contact with them. Without clashing with the ministries, this team makes decision-making more dynamic. It is composed of people, not departments. When I visited the nuclear power plant and found out about the quarterly meetings, I pointed out that the development of the project couldn’t wait even one month, much less three. The meetings were an inventory of difficulties that had to be solved quickly. Now, representatives of the job site must report to the team office every day on how the work’s progressing, what difficulties they have, etc. One of the team members who specializes in this task visits the site systematically. The problems can’t wait; they must be solved immediately. We do the same thing with other important, decisive projects.”
“In Cienfuegos,” Joelmir Beting interrupted, “I realized that knowing that the comandante is keeping an eye on the work is a great incentive.”
“No office in the world has fewer people than mine. How many people do you work with?” Fidel asked Chomi, secretary of the Council of State and former president of the University of Havana, who works closely with him.
“Six,” he replied.
The Brazilian journalist asked, “Which agency assigns priorities for resources?”
“It used to be the Central Planning Board. Now it’s more decentralized. People’s Power, for instance, administers the schools, hospitals, transportation, trade, and practically all local services. For example, in a province such as Santiago de Cuba, People’s Power selects the hospital director. Logically, this is done in consultation with the Ministry of Public Health, which provides the professional cadres and is in charge of the work methodology in the hospital.”
“Is this decentralization something new?”
“No. We’ve always shared functions and responsibilities here.”
“Is that the Cuban model?”
“There is a lot that is Cuban in the model. The electoral system, for example, is completely Cuban. Each election district — consisting of around 1,500 people — elects a delegate to People’s Power. The voters nominate and elect the candidates without any intervention by the party. They are the ones who nominate the candidates — from two to eight of them in each district. The party isn’t involved; it simply guarantees that the established standards and procedures are observed. On election day — they’re held every two and a half years — whoever gets more than 50 percent of the vote is elected; if no one does, then there’s a runoff election. Those elected are delegates to the Municipal Assembly and elect the members of the Municipal Executive Committee. Immediately after this, these delegates, together with the party and the mass organizations, draw up a slate of delegates to the Provincial Assembly and the 500-member National Assembly. More than half of the members of the National Assembly are elected at the grass-roots level of People’s Power. Meetings are held periodically in each election district. In them, in the presence of the delegates who were elected, the voters discuss the delegates’ work and if they decide to, can revoke their mandate.”
“When I visited a hospital, I noticed that the mothers had the right to accompany their sick children,” Joelmir Beting observed.
“For a sick child,” Fidel Castro explained, “the best nurse in the world is its mother. Before, they weren’t allowed in, and they stayed at the hospital door anxiously awaiting news about their children. The concept was that since the mothers hadn’t had medical training, they might interfere with the medical treatment. Many years ago, we adopted another system that has had excellent results. In any pediatric hospital, the mother has the right to accompany her child; she’s provided with the appropriate clothes to wear while in the hospital and is given meals free of charge. In the latest congress of the Federation of Cuban Women, which was held last March, the mothers asked for fathers to be given the same right. Frequently a mother is busy with her other children and can’t be at the hospital with the one who’s sick. That petition is already being studied. We’re even studying the possibility — also because the women have requested this — of having a son, a brother, or the father of any other hospitalized patient accompany them. So far, only women have been allowed to do this, but they feel that this puts all the family burden on them, thereby limiting their possibilities for fulfilling their duties at work and obstructing their social advancement. Nowadays, women constitute 53 percent of the technical work force.”
“Does the new five-year plan for 1986–90 contain innovations in its methodology?”
“Yes. It’s more rational. The emphasis is on the economic aspects — mainly on export products. For example, even though a certain province may want to build a new sports stadium or a theater, building a factory that will help to increase exports has priority. The stadium and the theater will be built when it’s possible but never at the expense of a priority economic objective. No aspect of the plan is a result of disputes among state agencies; rather, a global, rationalized policy is followed and accepted by all agencies. Thus, for example, we avoid struggles between the Ministry of Education and the Central Planning Board. The plan sets the standard for planning; it establishes priority sectors and organizes the distribution of resources. The fact that during the past 26 years we have built almost all the social projects we need in the fields of education, health, culture, and sports allows us to assign most of our investments to economic projects without sacrificing social development. Growth in social services will be mainly in terms of quality and not so much in new installations, although some new facilities will also be built.”
Calmly and clearly, Joelmir Beting asked, “Is what you’re projecting socially being achieved in Cuba?”
“Yes, in its essential aspects,” Fidel replied.
“Are there idle capacities in the health sector?”
“As I said, we’re investing to improve quality; this is the case, for example, with the building of pediatric hospitals. We have created family doctors, each of whom looks after a group of families directly in the neighborhood. They aren’t the doctors who cure diseases; rather, they protect health by giving the families orientations regarding preventive measures. On the Isle of Youth, which you visited, there are junior high schools with students of 22 different nationalities. In the beginning, we were afraid they would bring in diseases that had already been eradicated here or even ones that were unknown here. We’ve been completely successful in confronting this possibility and have proved that all of the diseases that are scourges in Africa or other continents can be controlled by medical science and modern medicines. All foreign students are given medical examinations before they come from their countries, but if a sick person does slip through, they are never sent back home. Rather, they are looked after and cured in Cuba. Fortunately, the vectors for most of those diseases don’t exist in Cuba. Our Institute of Tropical Medicine has made great progress in this field, which also serves to protect Cubans working in other Third World countries. Nutrition on the Isle of Youth is higher on the average than in the rest of the schools. Thanks to these initiatives, as I said, we’ve never had to send a student back to their country of origin for health reasons. Those students are very strong and healthy.”
“Having achieved quantity, you are investing in quality.”
“The revolution has created the material base. Some sectors still have deficiencies and require large investments; this is the case of housing, though we are making progress. More than 70,000 housing units are being built each year.”
“What about transportation?”
“During the first 10 years of the revolution, we didn’t import any cars. Both the economic and trade blockade to which we were subjected and our own priorities channeled resources to other sectors, such as health and education. Whatever automobiles we import mustn’t adversely affect social needs. About 10,000 are coming in every year now, and specialists, technicians, and outstanding workers have priority.”
“What about public transportation?”
“We import the motors and some other parts and build the rest of the buses here. Now, we’re working on the production of motors. Two out of every three automobiles that are imported are assigned to workers directly linked to production and services; they are sold almost at cost, to be paid for in installments over periods of up to seven years, at minimal interest. The workers’ assembly in each work center decides who deserves them. Some of the imported cars are, of course, used for car rental services and for state administration.”
“Does private property still exist in the rural areas?”
“Yes. We still have nearly 100,000 independent farmers. They plant coffee, potatoes, tobacco, vegetables, a little sugarcane, and some other products. So far, more than half of the independent farmers — there used to be 200,000 of them — have joined production cooperatives and have been very successful. Their incomes are high. Joining a cooperative is entirely voluntary. This movement is progressing on very solid foundations. It frees the state from mobilizing manpower to help them with the harvest, as used to be the case. Moreover, cooperatives bring improvements to the farmers’ lives. It makes it easier to provide them with schools, new housing, safe drinking water, electricity, etc. More than 85 percent of the homes in Cuba are supplied with electricity. Credits and prices are fixed by the government at levels that encourage production. Production surpluses bring even higher prices and are sent to the parallel market. The farmers don’t pay taxes, and like all other Cubans, their families are entitled to free health care and education. Members of cooperatives have annual incomes that range from $3,000 to $6,000 — more than those of individual farmers, whose production costs on their isolated plots are higher and whose work is more difficult to mechanize. Ever since the beginning of the revolution, we’ve been creating credit and service cooperatives. The services cover everything in the field of work implements, such as tractors, silos, trucks, and cane harvesters. Now the production cooperatives own that equipment.”
“May farmers contract labor?”
“Yes, in accord with the laws of the land that protect the workers. Nowadays, thanks to progressive mechanization, it takes only 70,000 cane cutters to bring in a harvest of more than 70 million tons of sugarcane. Fifteen years ago, 350,000 were needed. Most of this manpower is supplied by the agricultural workers themselves. For many years now, we’ve had to mobilize very few volunteers, and we haven’t had to mobilize any soldiers or high school students for these tasks. Unemployment isn’t a problem in Cuba; to the contrary, most of our provinces have a labor shortage.”
“Don’t students participate in productive activities any more?” I asked.
“In the schools in the countryside they do. We have about 600 schools of that type and about 300,000 students in them. They’ve been a tremendous success. In the cities, the junior and senior high school students may go voluntarily to the countryside for 30 days each year. More than 95 percent of them do. They help to harvest vegetables, pick citrus fruit, and bring in the tobacco and other crops. If a society universalizes the right to study, it should also universalize the right to work. Otherwise you might create a nation of intellectuals who are divorced from physical work and material production. The schools on the Isle of Youth are one example of that work-study combination. Much of what has been done there was based on my own experience. I spent 12 years in boarding schools. I could go home only once every three months. We weren’t allowed out of the school, even on Sundays. There was no coeducation. Now we have boys and girls in the same schools on the Isle of Youth. They are out in the open with no walls around them; they can leave the school every day for their productive, sports, or cultural activities. They don’t just study, as we did in my time; that was tedious — sometimes unbearable — and produced much lower academic results. In any case, the main purpose of having the students work is pedagogical, not productive. We now have a million junior and senior high school students. Ninety-two percent of all the young people between the ages of six and 16 attend school. Enrollment at the middle level is already equal to that at the elementary level where practically all of the children between six and 12 are enrolled.”
I made a brief comment: “By eradicating economic antagonisms, socialism does away with the social classes. This is an objective phenomenon, but it doesn’t necessarily reduce social differences from the subjective angle. Those who do nothing but intellectual work may feel superior to those who do direct work.”
Fidel said, “Yes, that’s why it’s important for everyone to do manual labor. In addition to thinking, people also have to know how to do things. ‘Doing is the best way of saying,’ Martí said. That’s why the students from the cities go to the countryside for 30 days. They used to go for 42 days, but now there are too many students and not enough places to send them. The ones who go do so voluntarily. But, as I said, 95 percent of them go. More than 600,000 workers are employed in education and health — in a country with a population of 10 million. It’s as if eight million people were employed in those activities in Brazil. Most of them are women. That is, six out of every hundred citizens are employed in health or education.”
“Is there an oversupply of doctors in Cuba or a shortage of patients?” Joelmir Beting asked.
“Before answering, I’d like to add that we have a total of three million workers. There’s a teacher for every 12 students, more or less. There are 30,000 students in the schools that specialize in training elementary schoolteachers. Fifteen years ago, 70 percent of our elementary schoolteachers had no degrees; now, they are all graduates. We have created a reserve of elementary schoolteachers. Ten thousand of them aren’t teaching; they are being paid their salaries while receiving further training at the university. A Cuban elementary schoolteacher has studied for nine years at the elementary level and four at the secondary level and now has the opportunity to study for six years at the university level when he begins to work. He does this through independent study courses for part of the time and full-time study with pay for two years, winding up with a B.A. in elementary education. Our plan is to have all the elementary schoolteachers get university degrees.
“We already have 20,500 doctors and will graduate 50,000 more in the next 15 years. We already know where each of them is going to work. We also plan to introduce a sabbatical year for doctors: one year of full-time study for every seven years of work. There will never be too many doctors if there is an ambitious health program and adequate planning of services and training of technicians.”
“Is bureaucracy a congenital disease of socialism?” the Brazilian journalist asked a little ironically.
“Bureaucracy is an evil of both socialism and capitalism. Since we can use our human resources better, I think we’re going to win this battle. As I see it, the most irrational feature of capitalism is the existence of unemployment. Capitalism develops technology and underutilizes its human resources. It may be that socialism doesn’t yet make the best possible use of human resources, but it doesn’t subject human beings to the humiliation of unemployment, and we are making steady progress in increasing efficiency and work productivity.”
It was already past 1:00 in the morning. Fidel rose and began to walk back and forth, thinking out loud about how he was going to arrange things the next day — Joelmir Beting’s last in Cuba — so he could continue talking with his Brazilian visitor. They agreed to have one interview in the afternoon and another in the evening.
