IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 3 ENGLISH | Page 101

and people really enjoyed it. They’d hold dances
in the park…[Here], now, when evening falls at
the sugar mill, this becomes a ghost town. There
is absolutely no one on the streets. When there
was a harvest, you’d see cars, people going to and
fro, lights, and you’d hear car horns.”
It is very shocking to know that many of these
people, if not most of them, got news of the closing of the sugar mills when they were over fifty
years old, an age at which it would be tough for
them to start anew with overly specific jobs impossible to grow into, outside the sugar factories.
The Cuban technical mill in the new industrial
scene after 1959
The break in relations between Cuba and the
United States in 1961 cut of commercial exchange between the two countries. The consequences were dramatic for our country. There was
no longer any importing of replacement parts or
new machinery. The crisis also brought with it the
out migration of the Cuban engineers and technicians who made up the islands intelligentsia.
They were essential for keeping our industrial
parks running. Those who ended up running our
mills, which where expropriated from the nation’s and foreign bourgeoisie between 1959 and
1960, ceased being their employees and went on
to become directly responsible for them. It was a
new kind of responsibility; it never had anything
to do with ownership. Had they been owners, they
would not have demolished the mills without first
looking for plausible work alternatives for so
many thousands of workers.
Given its technological backwardness when compared to the United States, it was impossible for
the Soviet Union to give Cuba an industrial blueprint such as the one that had been in place prior
to 1959. What was required then, was an enormous amount of inventiveness to keep our factories functioning. From an institutional point of
view, this endeavor materialized thanks to the inventors and innovators movement that held its
first national conference in June 1965, and was
the precursor to the National Association of Innovators and Streamliners (ANIR), created in 1976
and still exists. What was wanted was for the
technicians and engineers that had remained in

Cuba to find the needed solutions for keeping up
our productive capacity. This also involved the
new promotion of specialists much more in tune
with the Soviet-style technology that had been
implanted in our country.2
Alberto Perret Ballester is one of Álvarez
Rodríguez’s interviewees. His family used to own
the Perret Foundry, founded in 1869, confiscated
by the revolutionary government in 1963, and
since then, till its definite demise after the closure
of the mills by Castroism, known as the Primero
de Mayo. Perret Ballester got his training at the
University of Missouri, where he got a degree in
mechanical engineering in 1953. As part of his
course of study, he got to know other large industries such as the Fulton Factory, which was responsible for “most of the mills built in Cuba between 1920 and 1930.”
Luckily for Cuba, Perret Ballester did not leave
the country, and when the mobilization began by
the mid sixties, for the Harvest of the Ten Million
tons, he took control of the foundry that had belonged to his family.
“They also put me in charge of the bronze foundry
in Guanabacoa. I had to create two workshops,
no, three workshops… [I] thought I’d die. I’d
wake up in the middle of the night jumping and
giving orders. It was too much tension. Ah! And
they gave us control of eight mills from Havana
on over this way, because they’d say we have a
much greater capacity for work…
[They] had commissioned us to produce a million
tons and we did it. No one else was able to do it…
[We’d] make valves, I would forge them here and
machine them in the mill workshops. We had to
solve our problems because there were no replacement parts being imported.
There was once called a filter backup… [I] designed a machine for making it; models of it were
sent all around the country. We also made pumps
for the mill liquids… [I] designed a perforator…
[It’s] still called the Perret Perforator.”
The fact that Alberto Perret stayed in Cuba, together with his willingness to take on responsibility for the Foundry that had belonged to his family, enriches this analysis of our recent history, a
story that has been all together too simplified by

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