Cuba at the crossroads: twenty-five years after the revolution

W~~lor the I irst and only time during our stay in Cuba, we m i are subject to strict security no cameras, no bags. The factory is a prime target for CIA saboteurs. In the foreground a welcoming committee from the complex is clustering lightly. Perhaps 200 people: women favouring bright bandanas to cover rollers in their hair, some o f the men a fleeting cord or denim peaked caps, all save lot a sprinkling in white lab coats — wearing Tshirts and jeans. Behind them, standing the law of perspective on its head, shrinking the group to a tiny vari-coloured mass, isa huge, functionalist topography of flat, bland surfaces and blind factory walls. The textile complex cuts a great raw swathe across a Santiago hillside through the detritus of an urban slum. My focus is pulled back to one of the Figures, a director, who, with the aid of a hand-held megaphone, is telling us that the complex, just brought on line, consists o f five integrated factories: three textile units, one mechanical plant and one industrial service and energy plant. The annual output of SO million tonnes of cloth (40 million tonnes cotton, 40 million tonnes polyester fabric) is produced by a workforce of 7,000. two thousand working in the cotton plant. We arc bussed to one of the textile units and, after another security check, are ushered inside. The scale o f the machinery is daunting, the nature and degree of automation more so. Plant items bear the stamp: "Made in the I SSR 1982". I he complex is part of a Russian economic aid package. All skilled processes are autom ated, as is the movement of materials through the stages of production. Labour appears ol two kinds. Most workers arc engaged in one form or other ol machine minding. On (he floor of the weaving section the clatter of the mechanical looms is earshattering. Workers stand in rows, several metres apart, hooking up broken threads, clearing Huff. Talk is impossible. Few wear car plugs. Hidden from view from the floor, in the mezzanine control consoles and computer rooms, smaller groups of technicians monitor and synthesise the process. The largest textile factory in Cuba, the largest in Central America, and one ol the largest in the world, this is a showpiece o! Cuba's industrial growth and of the New System of Economic Management and Planning instituted in ihe mid 70s. For me. it also concretises a cluster of crucial contradictions in the achievements ol Cuban socialism.