IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 8 ENGLISH | Page 126

structurally helping to compensate the
needs of an increasingly unproductive
society. If we add the external debt
(Cuba is the second most indebted
country in the world after Indonesia),
the Cuban economy could be declared
in bankruptcy and the country survived
because the in-coordinated emerging
capitalisms of Russia, China and Venezuela came to the rescue. Now the
American capitalism opens other options. The labor country collapses. Its
economic and ownership structures do
not enhance productivity and profitability. Working with the State is neither a
source of social wealth nor a condition
to meet the needs of the families. It is
not a social motivator. Both the amount
and the structure of the wages do not
cover the prices of essential goods in
the most dynamic and stable markets:
the hard currency market and the informal market. Neither the state nor the
rationed markets provide stability to the
basic living expenses. Cubans are
forced to seek incomes out of the state
economy and to develop their work
ethic outside the official economic
system. The government's approach
towards work reproduces the Creole
mentality and sees the workers in autonomous and independent activities
only as a complement to the bureaucratic economy, although they actually
promote freedom and horizontal mobility of the labor market and thusly innovation, profitability and wealth. For the
government, these workers are proletarians at the borders of the state. Moreover, they are limited in two additional
ways: the legal uncertainty of their
property and the inability to accumulate
assets.

The government intends to continue
endorsing the workers to the bureaucracy and to great human conglomerates
that are always unproductive, but serve
as extra-guarantors of the state control,
as in the old Spanish and Creole haciendas. Such work ethic is structurally
more related to spending and wasting
money in symbolic and political valued
luxury projects than in projects aimed to
increase productivity and savings.
Therefore, work is deemed as an obligation and a duty, rather than a source of
motivation and responsibility, which are
the only ways to create work ethic. The
ways imagined by the government for
leaving the crisis behind and facing its
consequences couldn’t be more contradictory: the sale of workers abroad,
which artificially forms some privileged
labor segments and administratively and
illegally punishes those who refuse to
reproduce their poverty and to reduce
their expectations to the state job offers.
The institutional, economic and labor
collapse prevents that Cuba relocates
itself in the circuit of modern states.
This collapse politically eliminates the
modern institutional communication
between the State and the citizens.
There are no clear rules to ensure the
continuity of the public policies and the
predictability of the actions by both the
citizens and the State. The Communist
Party is acting as its entire discretion
and so it destroys the legitimacy born of
the behaviors with constitutional status.
Economically, the peripheral condition
of the Cuban model of production is
recovered and reinvented around such
centers of power like the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and BRICS (Brazil,
Russia, India, China, and South Africa),

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