This speech was delivered to a meeting in Havana, organized by the Central Organization of Cuban Trade Unions (CTC), of workers from four factories that had surpassed their production quotas. At the meeting, CTC General Secretary Lázaro Peña also spoke.
Compañero acting head of the mission of the sister German Democratic Republic; compañeros all:
As compañero Lázaro already pointed out, this ceremony has a dual purpose. One is to express our gratitude to the workers of the German Democratic Republic, who extended their hands in friendship across the sea, helping us in this stage of socialist construction with one of our most cherished weapons: the tools of work.
The other purpose of this gathering is for all of us here to celebrate that a group of several of our Ministry’s factories, despite the difficult conditions created by the imperialist blockade, have nevertheless been able to surpass their production goals.
These factories belong to different enterprises, but all are closely linked to the people’s consumption: the two flour mills that are part of the Consolidated Flour Enterprise, one of the factories of the Consolidated Tire Enterprise, and the ice factory that is part of the Consolidated Beer and Malt Enterprise.
Unfortunately, due to present conditions, the other factories that are part of the beer and malt enterprise, the breweries, have not been able to surpass many goals. We’ve had to significantly cut back their production, because all the raw materials must be imported.
That, in general, is the tragedy of our industry, an industry created in semicolonial conditions, dependent on getting supplies from abroad. Under these conditions we’ve had to develop new techniques to adapt our industry to the raw materials that come from the socialist countries. These new techniques will allow us to save more material, in some cases to find raw materials here in Cuba. We cannot stress enough the importance that saving raw materials has for our development. We have to accomplish all these things simultaneously. We must try to raise our revolutionary consciousness so that work becomes the center of our efforts in the hard struggle to build socialism.
Emulation will play a major role in this effort. And these compañeros, involved at times in emulation between factories, at other times between trade unions or enterprises, have topped numerous goals.
A few days ago we celebrated the production of the one hundred thousandth sack in a month by the Echeverría Flour Mill of Havana. Hours earlier its rival, the Frank País Flour Mill in Santiago, had broken its mark of 50,000 sacks. In this way, emulation — becoming a kind of collective competition in which the consciousness of the workers intervenes to make it work and to turn it into almost a sports competition — has little by little been attracting the interest of the working masses. This assembly today is a demonstration of the advances we have made.
Like any other serious gathering of revolutionaries during this period, however, this one must include a self-criticism of the systems and methods that we have used up until now to make emulation a real vehicle to mobilize the masses.
All of you worker compañeros know that we have been working on emulation for some time now, and that we presented some guidelines to the last congress, to the [CTC] workers’ congress last November. But we could not get away from a certain formal and bureaucratic spirit. So at this point it would take a highly trained specialist to wade through all the rules and regulations for emulation and determine who is the winner or who is ahead in the competition. We have turned emulation into a formal competition. We have separated it from its logical strong point: the masses. But the workers, conscious of its importance, full of revolutionary enthusiasm, broke down the formal barriers and began on their own to organize emulation in different production units.
We have to gather the experience of our errors and talk constantly with the masses, talk things over so that emulation becomes a really collective effort. So that winners of emulation will be not only the workers who successfully reach their goals, or surpass them, as they have been surpassed in some cases. Rather, the winners will be those who surpass the goals because they have doubled or tripled them, because they have achieved fabulous results. In the future no-one should win in emulation simply by meeting the goal.
In other words, every worker at every factory must be conscious that emulation is something more than a competition during a given period. It is a vital part of our nation’s work. Every worker should take an interest in emulation. Every worker should understand well the importance of the results of emulation, which is to produce more and better, increase production, increase productivity, improve the quality of products, and save raw materials. And we should strive for these basic tenets to become systematic. It is fine for us to organize on the national level so we are able to establish who the winners are after complicated tallies. But all of you should engage in emulation on all levels: shop to shop, department to department, factory to factory, enterprise to enterprise, state institution to state institution. Emulation should be part of the worker’s day-to-day discussions during the hours he is not working. That would really mark the triumph of emulation.
That is very important because we are at a difficult stage of the revolution. We are at the stage of building socialism in the face of the imperialist blockade, 150 kilometers from the shores of the United States; surrounded by the enemy day and night; spied on by their planes that violate our territory and by spies sent out from the Guantánamo base; our territory trampled upon by the stain of Guantánamo; facing constant threats of an invasion that could signify the cruelest war in the history of humanity.
We feel ourselves to be, in a certain sense, the vanguard of the world proletariat, part of a broad battlefield with many vanguard positions. But we are proud of defending here what man values most: the right to develop freely, the right to build a new society under new conditions, where there are no exploiters and exploited. All this, as long as imperialist aggression does not come about, as long as it is only a threat, as long as it is not necessary to pick up the rifle, to pick up whatever weapon the revolution happens to assign us, whether by luck or by the aid of our friends, while we become increasingly stronger and better able to beat back an invasion — as long as that time doesn’t come, work is our daily battlefield. It is the battlefield on which we confront imperialism every hour of our working day.
And this work should be done as well as possible, taking as much interest in it as possible. Because socialism is built on the fruits of labor, on optimum production, on the greatest productivity. It would be useless to deepen our consciousness to the maximum if we did not increase our production, if we did not have goods to share out among the people.
Socialism is a social system based on equal distribution of society’s wealth. But this requires that society has wealth to distribute, that there are machines with which to work, and that these machines have raw materials to produce the necessary goods for our population’s consumption. To the extent that we increase the number of products available for the whole population, we move forward in building socialism.
New factories will have to be built because socialism is based on the factory. Socialism takes root in a technologically developed society. It cannot exist under feudal conditions, under agrarian conditions. It develops on the basis of technology.
Work, therefore, contributes its fruits to production. In addition, daily work, applied with creative enthusiasm, develops socialist consciousness in all of us. Productivity, more production, consciousness — these are the foundations upon which the new society can be built.
But let’s not forget that we still have not created the new society. Memories of the past, memories of struggle, and the vices of a wretched past — of a past that strangled man — have not yet been erased. Let’s not forget that the working masses who today are beginning the task of building socialism are not pure. They are made up of human beings who carry along with them a whole series of bad habits inherited from the previous epoch. I say bad habits they have — we have — we all have those bad habits inherited from the previous epoch, which weighed heavily on us over many years.
We are all children of that environment. We have destroyed the fundamental thing and have changed it, but we have not been able to wipe out as rapidly those bad habits from our consciousness. Not even social labor, community labor, collective labor, is sufficient to create that new consciousness: when man begins to look upon work as a moral necessity, not just a material necessity to earn a salary for his children and relatives.
At this stage there are a whole series of measures to create closer ties between the masses and the government, to rid ourselves of the vices of the past, to build a strong and prosperous state, to have the nation’s best sons and daughters contribute their work to the tasks of leading more rapidly to the period of the transition to socialism and the subsequent period of communist society. Even though it’s a distant future, we should already be thinking about communism, which is the perfect society, the fundamental aspiration of the first men who could see beyond the present and foresee humanity’s destiny.
Among those factors we should point to, and point to as very important, is discipline. When the structure of the old society was torn down, the worker felt freed from a series of burdens that weighed upon him. Many compañeros thought that reaching this new stage of society automatically meant being free from responsibilities and acquiring only rights. That is precisely the reflection of the old society in the consciousness of men who are building a new society.
Discipline, however, is fundamental to the work of construction, compañeros. Don’t think of discipline as a negative attitude, that is, as submission to management. In this stage discipline must be absolutely dialectical. It consists of abiding by majority decisions in accordance with democratic centralism. It means following the guidelines of a government supported by the masses. It means collectively discussing, on each level, the fundamental problems of the shop, the factory or the enterprise to ensure better production. It means increasing the workers’ participation through their organizations in the management of the factory, in the sense of being able to participate in discussions and decisions about production and to constantly supervise the administration in carrying out every one of the disciplinary rules that we must all impose upon ourselves.
We were undisciplined at every level, but especially in the economic sphere. Our guerrilla fighters started off with the characteristics of guerrillas, of soldiers unfamiliar with the formal discipline of the barracks, and had to begin to form new units that required a rigid discipline, because the command of soldiers in battle must be that way, rigid and automatic. But the economic apparatus marched to a different beat, and the understanding of these problems by the worker compañeros on all levels was not always clear.
We have had to take drastic measures to definitively reestablish discipline and establish the principle of authority, of central responsibility in state administration. One of the factory directors, the director of one of the prize-winning factories today, was penalized for not complying with a recommendation of the Central Planning Board transmitted through our Ministry.
Several enterprise directors were also penalized. We have the highest opinion of all of them as revolutionaries, as workers, and as administrators. But their enthusiasm led them to believe that their own enterprise was the most important thing, that they had to assure supplies for their own enterprise, forgetting that the enterprise is only a tiny grain within the entire administrative apparatus. So we had to take drastic measures.
It so happens that some of the penalized compañeros were among our best and most hardworking directors within the Ministry of Industry. In other words, their revolutionary enthusiasm in making their factory produce to the maximum made them lose perspective, and along with it, lose the necessary discipline.
But that discipline should not be applied only on the administrative level; that discipline should be adopted by the workers. And that’s your job, to cooperate fully in this task through your mass organizations and also as individuals.
We lack two fundamental things, two pillars upon which this new society must be built: the establishment of work norms and salaries for all categories of the country’s workers. We are way behind in these tasks; several months ago we promised to complete them right away. On the eve of May Day we announced that we would start with the mining enterprise and we did so. Today, by the middle of August, we have established work norms in one mine and we are studying them in a few others.
We cannot permit this sluggishness. Establishing norms and salaries in order to come up with new collective contracts should be the work of the masses. It must be the work of the masses not only in the sense of having lively discussion when it comes up at the workplace. Rather, the masses themselves must take initiative in the work of standardizing job categories on the national level and fixing new salaries.
This should be everyone’s concern, the national trade unions, the revolutionary nuclei [of the party], the entire government, and the workers.
These norms will set the quantity and quality of what each worker must contribute to society. Every worker in every workplace must be capable of providing society with products of labor of a given quantity and quality.
We should always remember that by no means is quality at odds with this stage in the construction of socialism. We should always remember that our obligation as producers in a society that is freeing itself is to give the people the best we can, our best efforts embodied in the form of products of the highest quality.
But of course discipline is only one of the factors that will move us forward; there are many others. We can take an example from today: the aid of friendly countries, friendly countries that extend a hand in the form of technical assistance, advice, material goods and entire factories so that we can develop our society. All new value comes from human labor, and this labor will be embodied in the large factories and big machines we’re going to build in our country during this four-year plan and in the planning periods that follow.
If we had to carry out the gigantic effort we are projecting alone, we would have to call upon the people to make the greatest sacrifices to get the wherewithal to build these factories. The aid of friendly countries spares us a large part of that sacrifice, and for that reason our task seems easier. Nevertheless, sacrifice is part of building a new society. We cannot hope to destroy an agency of U.S. imperialism, like our comprador bourgeoisie was, or like the big landowners who spent their summers in the United States or Europe, or the U.S. companies themselves — we cannot hope to challenge the most powerful oppressor on earth and at the same time try to do so without sacrifices. We must be ready to make the relative sacrifices we have made, as well as new ones. We must be prepared for tighter blockades, to beat back who-knows-what attempts by the invader to destroy our society. We must always hold aloft our banner as the first to begin building the socialist society in Latin America. That is an honor and an example. It is an example that will nourish the countries of Latin America.
Every time visitors come here, or every time our truths are heard over Radio Havana, a new consciousness grows throughout Latin America. Already the oppressed masses of the continent know that change is necessary, that they can no longer continue living under centuries of oppression, where injustice is the instrument for the enrichment of a few. But they know something else.
The consciousness of the masses throughout Latin America — peasants and workers mistreated, attacked, murdered — that consciousness has been transformed into something new: the certainty that change is possible. And many machetes are being sharpened throughout Latin America!
Whenever we start to lament our sacrifices we should remember that our responsibility transcends the borders of Cuba, that we are a living example, that we are showing something new in Latin America. And we must overcome whatever difficulty we may confront.
All right, compañeros. In order to build the society we also need a superior technique, a modern technology. An example of what can be accomplished is shown by the visit of a Soviet technician to the two flour mills that compete each month in surpassing production goals. This compañero, after investigating the capacity of the flour mills, discovered some bottlenecks — places where production was held up. He recommended the necessary measures to eliminate these bottlenecks.
All the measures were implemented. Today, with a very small investment and with the talent and capacity of this Soviet compañero — and his revolutionary enthusiasm on top of that, because he’s an untiring worker — we now have almost the equivalent of an additional flour mill in Cuba. In other words, the compañeros of the flour mill — who have the moral incentive of being at the head of the people, being recognized as exemplary workers — must recognize that a part of this achievement belongs to that compañero who over several months provided all of his technical knowledge with unsurpassed enthusiasm.
To achieve this higher technology, to overcome all the stumbling blocks along our way, we need systematic training, systematic study.
One of the prize-winning enterprises today, a factory that is part of the tire enterprise — although the entire enterprise worked in the same way — looked up one day, shortly after the factories were nationalized, and realized that the foreign technicians, and some Cubans too, had left the country. It was only through the effort of the workers of that enterprise, and of one Cuban technician who handled all the problems that arose, that the factory was kept running. They were able to overcome all the technical inconveniences, adapt technology to the new raw materials, and through continual changes they were able to increase the rate of production. Today it is one of the factories in the front ranks of production!
Enthusiasm, discipline, the spirit of self-sacrifice, working as hard as possible — none of these things will result in a great outcome if there is not also the necessary technical knowledge. Technical knowledge, then, together with constant training on all levels to obtain it, should also be a daily concern of the working class.
Let’s not forget the basic technical course, the training course, nor the follow-up course! Let’s not forget that each particle of knowledge we gain helps us cement the foundation of the future! Let’s not think about our age or our lack of knowledge! Let’s not analyze the impossibilities; let’s analyze the possibilities, and sweep away the impossibilities! These should be our slogans. These should be the slogans of the working class at this time.
In other words, compañeros, work — the center of human activity and of the building of socialism — is what we are indirectly honoring here today. The efficiency of that work is determined by one’s attitude toward it.
Once again we have to look at the past, the past that spilled over the barriers when the old society was destroyed and that continues in the workers’ consciousness. In this case the past is reflected in the consciousness of many workers who see having to work every day as an oppressive necessity, a necessity one tries to avoid, thinking that the factory is still under the old boss, is still the way it was in the past.
Our attitude should be totally different. Work should be a moral necessity for us. Work should be somewhere we go every morning, every afternoon, or every night, with renewed enthusiasm and interest. We have to learn to extract from work what’s interesting, what’s creative, to know the tiniest secret of the machine or the work process.
If we don’t like the job, let’s acquire training to obtain one we do like. Work should always be part of the good life, something exciting, something associated with life’s happiest moments, not its burdens.
This will be the great result when communist society is achieved in full. But in social processes, changes in men that appear abrupt actually come about little by little. At a given moment it appears that there may have been a great commotion and a single great change. But that change has been gestating among men day by day, and sometimes generation by generation.
We have to begin today adopting that new attitude toward work — new for some, because many pioneers have already begun adopting it. Each person should feel happy at work. They should feel happy with their task as creators. They should instill all those around them with their revolutionary and creative enthusiasm. They should spread their knowledge along with their enthusiasm. They should mobilize by example. They should not remain the only meritorious worker, the only exemplary worker, but should bring along all those capable of following their example. They should engage in emulation with everyone and should help them at the same time. They should make his enthusiasm take form among groups of workers. They should engage in emulation with other workers. This attitude toward work should be at the center of society, and we should always remember that the worker with the most dignity in the country is the one who can bear the title of outstanding worker in any sphere of production.
If we are going to achieve this, compañeros — let’s not say if we’ll do it today, tomorrow or yesterday, because it’s a process. Alongside the most revolutionary workers there are some who don’t yet feel the revolution as their own, and still others who have not resigned themselves to forgetting the past.
But if we keep on achieving as we have up to now — and at a faster pace than now — if every day each one of us who feels creative enthusiasm inside himself is able to incorporate one additional compañero, or can simply get him interested so that little by little he becomes incorporated into the work — if we do this, we’ll advance with “seven-league boots.” We’ll advance rapidly toward building socialism, toward socialist society. The task has been laid out.
We should not leave this task up in the air, as something that’s contained in some speech and is analyzed and discussed for one or two days after that. The task we’ve laid out should be taken up by the masses as the center of their activity. Let me stress and insist upon this.
Building socialism is based on the work of the masses, on the capacities of the masses to be able to organize themselves and to better guide industry, agriculture and the country’s economy. It is based on the capacity of the masses to improve their knowledge every day; on their capacity to incorporate all the technicians, all the compañeros that have remained here to work with us in the revolution’s tasks; on their capacity to create more products for all our people; on their capacity to see the approaching future — approaching in historical terms, not in the life of any one man — and to enter onto the road toward that future with enthusiasm.
Today we’re honoring quite a few compañeros. Not merely the vanguard, they make up what we could call the spearhead of the vanguard, those who occupy the front rank, the first to confront danger.
We have issued a challenge for everyone to meet, the challenge for all of us to link arms in a single and unbroken chain, advancing as an unbroken and uncontainable wave. In this way we can arrive rapidly at the first stage of our journey and be able to say — already looking back at a past accomplishment:
We have reached socialism and we continue forward!
Venceremos! [We will win]