By Luis Sexto                                                                        Read Spanish Version
From Insurgente digital

HAVANA -- "The most common judgment defines bureaucracy by the item of furniture that distinguishes it -- the bureau, the work table -- and by the material usually utilized to record its decisions: paper.

"But those metaphors are eminently simplistic. Einstein may have cogitated while leaning over a table and made his calculations on paper, but we couldn't call him a bureaucrat for that reason. And if we wanted to extend that description to a doctor who listens to his patient's complaints while seated at a desk, or a writer who drafts his novel seated also at a desk, we would be just as mistaken.

"That's because bureaucracy finds its definition in an attitude that is little related to its palpable attributes. Rather, it is an intangible evil, almost untouchable because it is tortuous [...]"

To begin to understand bureaucracy, we would have to turn to Max Weber, the author of a voluminous book that carried certain sociological certainties for the interpretation of that entity that pervades capitalism.

I shall not now review its chapters. This article hopes to present democracy as a practical problem, although it transcends what's purely technical and injects itself into the ideological sphere and, within it, the political arena. I prefer to turn to another book and tune into your wavelength without philosophizing too much.

Here, then, I give the three definitions given in the dictionary of the Royal Academy of Spain: "Bureaucracy: (1) Public servants as a whole. (2) The excessive influence of functionaries in public affairs. (3) Management that becomes inefficient because of paperwork, rigidity and superfluous formalities." The third definition is closest to that which experience has allowed me to deduce.

My experience in Cuba, not anywhere else. Because it is the role of bureaucracy in my country that I am interested in elucidating and warning about its dangers to the improvement of socialism. From the viewpoint of a journalist, of course, who is an observer and sometimes the pained object of bureaucratic attitudes.

The best definition of bureaucracy, or the bureaucratic mentality, I read in a short article by Eduardo Galeano. It was a kind of evangelical parable. Although our Greco-Latin culture is not as narrative as the Hebrew culture of Biblical times, sometimes a tale illuminates the encapsulated concepts of analysts so we may understand them in all their transparency.

The author of "The Open Veins of Latin America" says that, in a military garrison, the officer of the guard punished a soldier by ordering him to stand guard next to a bench on the parade grounds. For hours, the soldier guarded the bench, which did not need any protection.

The officer finished his tour of duty and forgot to revoke his order. The officer who replaced him, having no knowledge of the circumstances, relieved the punished soldier but replaced him with another. So, the "bench detail" went on for 20 years, until finally someone asked what its purpose was -- and nobody could provide an answer.

Therefore, bureaucracy -- which is necessary in many aspects of public administration -- becomes dangerous when it loses the sense of its objective. 

José Martí, a liberator and thinker for all times, foresaw the dangers of an uncontrolled bureaucracy that would hold the strings of power. "Bureaucratic life" was to Martí "a danger and a scourge and he wished for the Cuban republic to be free of the "plague of the bureaucrats."

Evidently, Martí suspected that the bureaucracy, as a representative of the interests of the people, might at one point jettison those interests and take into account only its own, as a group or caste.

Today, the rigidity, paperwork, the inefficient management that the dictionary attributes to bureaucracy has "mediocresized" and decontextualized the prerogatives of the Cuban socialist state.

It has been a sort of Fairy Godmother in reverse: everything that bureaucracy's magic wand touches becomes a caricature of the socialist aspirations. It mistreats and upsets every creative endeavor that Fidel Castro's revolution brought to Cuba.

In the words of the sharp-witted Giovanni Papini, bureaucracy -- when turned into a mentality, an ideology -- holds the secret of a "copropherous" alchemy, that is, it can turn gold into excrement.

In this, bureaucracy has become an unwitting or involuntary accomplice of the U.S. blockade. Maybe, also unconsciously, it is to bureaucracy's advantage that the blockade continue, as a guarantee of bureaucracy's interferential and anarchic existence.

In Cuba, vox populi says, bureaucratic attitudes respond to each solution with a problem; with a "no" to a "yes." And they dilute every initiative with red tape and meetings. And they see reality through their tinted glasses, or from their balconies, which are usually in high towers away from the streets and the workshops. Or through reports that are usually adulterated by those who do not wish that truth be known.

I do not exaggerate. And if I say it here, in this leftist space, it is because the Left needs to know about people's experiences, and because I have often said it in my country's newspapers. Enough of explanations -- if indeed the reader needs a justification for what he is reading. 

European socialism dissolved like Alka Seltzer in water thanks to bureaucratic distortions. Distortions that forced political discourse to hover in the air while the people's reality became bogged down in the mud.

Let's not invent enemies. The principal causes of the extinction of 20th-Century socialism, the socialism that failed, were within it: a mentality (not to say a caste) was incubated that jettisoned the predominance of the working class.

Who profited from the ruination of the Soviet Union? Who are the rich in today's Russia? The bureaucrats, who -- long before Gorbachev, Yeltsin and their ilk -- replaced the floor of the socialist state with quicksand. The bureaucracy, of course, emerged from a society that had been frozen by its vertical structures, to the detriment of a horizontal, democratic structure.

This should be clear to us: where democracy is missing and centralism expands, reducing the sides, bureaucracy prospers. With it, dogma and corruption prosper, too.

Any project to renew and perfect socialism in Cuba will have to face and quell the resistance of the bureaucracy -- not to mention the opposition of the United States and its permanent war, and the efforts of those people in our country who try to push Cuba into capitalism, one way or another.

The bureaucracy will oppose anything that seems to limit its interests, its privileges, its ability to delegitimize every constructive decision. Any legitimate freedom will face the bureaucracy's hostility, in the form of indifference, extremism and distortion.

There's more than enough facts to confirm this. Why did the Basic Units of Cooperative Production, a political decision of the Communist Party in 1993, become paralyzed and failed? The answer is well known by those mighty business people who held (like generous feudal lords) power over the farm and cattle production.

They prevented the consolidation of this basic principle of farm production: the autonomy to utilize the means of production that the state sold to the workers' collectives and to utilize the land that had been granted to the workers by the state.

The entrepreneurial structures continued to impose their command, breaking laws, rules and procedures and limiting the relative independence of the cooperatives. As Raúl Castro denounced on July 26, our agriculture has been overcome by the marabú, the almost indestructible weed that covers and chokes every nearby plant. Many years earlier, Fidel charged that the countryside had been filled with office buildings.

Even in stores, bureaucracy introduces its narrowness of vision. Stores with numerous doors keep only one door open, for entrance and exit. Inside, depending on the merchandise, the buyers have to pay at different cash registers, thereby wasting their time.

And what about legal paperwork, particular the paperwork needed for housing construction? Or the paperwork needed to become self-employed? An image comes to mind: the Stations of the Cross, with Pontius Pilate dispensing red tape at every stop. In a word: hermetism. Immobility. Sometimes, corruption.

The same (or worse) may occur in other countries. But ideological and political confrontation in Cuba seems to me to be inexcusable. Unthinkable. The survival of the Revolution is at stake. Because bureaucratic actions are time-consuming, limiting and infuriating, they tend to extinguish the cause of socialism in the hearts of the people.

The antidote is the people. By expanding the democratic uses, spaces and controls and by making economic structures more flexible we can reduce bureaucracy to its first definition in the dictionary: public servants as a whole. That is its ideal status.

However, shall we be brave enough to order the bureaucrats -- like the tamer orders the lions -- to slink, heads down, to the corner of the stage where they belong?

Luis Sexto, a Cuban journalist, writes a regular column in the daily Juventud Rebelde.