On May 1, Cuban President Raúl Castro bragged to a huge crowd of workers participating in the International Labor Day parade at Plaza de la Revolución in Havana that the big turnout demonstrated support for the regime and the vitality of Cuban labor unions.
These unions are the same officially sanctioned Confederación de Trabajadores Cubanos (CTC – Cuban Confederation of Workers)labor unions that for more than 50 years have helped control workers, assuring there were no strikes and no expressions of independent worker demands.
Raúl Castro’s speech not withstanding, most of the Cuban workers in the parade had something else in their minds: their existence.
Earlier this year, Raúl announced that hundreds of thousands of jobs in Cuba were not needed, and that a million workers would have to be laid off, without compensation or unemployment insurance. That’s approximately one quarter of the jobs in Cuba.
Most Cubans weren’t surprised by Raul’s Labor Day speech. It was filled with the usual boilerplate tirades denouncing the “enemy to the North” and the foreign press. Cubans are accustomed to the Castro brothers’ tirades and the mass demonstrations held for foreign consumption. Cubans also know their country’s Labor Day drill. Early in the morning on May 1, Cuban workers are required to report to their work place to gather banners and placards and be trucked to the event; the same is true for elementary, secondary and university students, who report to their schools and are then shipped off to march. Housewives are rounded up by their neighborhood Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), and women who do not report to factories or do not fall under the CDR’s purview report to the Federation of Cuban Women.
This is life in the Castro brothers’ “workers’ paradise.”