Most likely, we need leaders who at least make an effort to guide or stimulate administrative and technical solutions.
By: Miguel Alejandro Hayes
During the pandemic, Cuban television is watched more; especially the eleven o’clock news reports, the roundtable discussions, and the news.
The speeches I see there by Cuban leaders confirm something for me: a blurred line separates management practice (1) from political practice (2). Sometimes it seems that the latter is emphasized.
It is not at all unusual to find a bigwig (almost always the adjective is literal) speaking in certain contexts about how we must … Yes, that we must increase productivity, we must work with more enthusiasm, we must reinforce the work in…, we must achieve…
They have a strong sense of duty, I say. Not all are like that, but these lines are about those who are.
Like modern work songs (the ones sung by slaves), their public speeches clearly contain calls to obtain greater benefits from their efforts: sometimes referring to direct labor, other times, they have an implicit message of changing the organization of labor itself. That is, there are cadres who encourage us to produce more and achieve things that are only possible by changing productive structures (which are never in the hands of the workers).
Someone has to say these things, of course. But if a high-ranking national or provincial party official, sometimes even a Minister, stands before an audience and says that we must , where is the executive branch of a country divided between the two parties? Suddenly, some leaders speak like mere harangue-mongers, agitators of the masses. Who leads then? Or, in these cases, do they not lead and limit themselves to the traditional ones who, instead of saying “we are going to,” or “we are working on?”
Beyond the legality of the positions held, it is necessary to evaluate whether we need Cuban politicians (translated into the PES nomenclature of cadres) to go to some province or to the congress of any organization to say what needs to be done .
Everyone knows that there are leaders who are the same as they were years ago (and that way of agitating no longer works, at least not as it used to). Most likely, we need leaders who, if they cannot legally change much (although changes here do not depend precisely on legality), at least make an effort to guide or encourage administrative and technical solutions to the problems of the functioning of the Cuban productive fabric (which goes beyond consumer goods).
Curiously, there are those who appear in the face of unresolved problems and are not usually used as a prelude to the empowerment of organizations (the usual ones and potentially emerging ones), groups, or citizen initiatives of any kind.
Grades
(1) Management in the strict sense, even associated with its four functions.
(2) Political practice understood as the explicit position or discourse toward the political sign of the state. That is, political practice understood in a narrow sense of ideological-political work.