Salary reform pending

Since 2006 when he was “provisional” president, Raúl Castro has pushed for a salary reform that would eliminate the previous egalitarian system in favor of a system familiar in most other countries: paying higher wages to individuals who work harder and yield higher production. The idea, of course, is to spur production by creating an incentive to work hard—incentive that Cuban workers otherwise do not have. The regime set August 1, 2008 as the start date for this new “results-based pay” system, but even today has still not completed the discussions, debate and study necessary to implement it. Cuban workers fume as it remains on hold.

In some ways the reform, Resolution 09 of the Ministry of Work and Social Security, seems to deviate from the ideals of the revolution. Equal wages were established as a manifestation of the idea of absolute equality of each citizen, and of raising up the poor and downtrodden. But socialism itself accounts for the reform by underlining the importance of each worker having a direct relation to his product and compensation (remember, it was the assembly line and alienation of the worker from his/her product that so frustrated Marx), and by applauding those who work hard to benefit society as a whole. Che Guevara, an oft-mentioned figure of the Cuban revolution, is quoted as having said:

I am not interested in dry economic socialism. We are fighting against misery, but we are also fighting against alienation… Marx was preoccupied both with economic factors and with their repercussions on the spirit. If communism isn’t interested in this too, it may be a method of distributing goods, but it will never be a revolutionary way of life.

But on the capitalism side of things: performance-based pay really is the way to assure any semblance of efficiency. And in the context of global economic downturn, this is necessary even for socialist Cuba.