How much is your labour worth?  In Cuba, apparently, about US$20 a month on average. But who needs mere cash when you are also getting free housing, education, health care and subsidized food rations?

At least, that’s how former president Fidel Castro felt, and it became his guiding policy for the nearly half a century he was in office. But now Brother Raoul is shaking things up - at least a little bit - now that he’s taken over the top job.

Last week, the Associated Press reported a story which appeared in Cuba’s official daily, Granma, quoting the country’s labour minister, Carlos Mateu as saying that many government companies had already eliminated caps on salaries for productive workers and the rest must do so by August. According to Granma, said the AP, Mateu "underscored that there has been a tendency for everyone to get the same, and that egalitarianism is not convenient."

Sometimes you just can’t believe what you read in the newspapers these days.

But Granma was not making sport: The old lady of Cuban journalism summarised the labour minister’s argument, noted the AP, to the effect that the traditional Cuban pay system sapped employees' incentives to excel since everyone earned the same regardless of performance. The system was "unfair because if it's harmful to give a worker less than he deserves, it's also harmful to give him what he doesn't deserve," Granma said.

Are they saying that some Cuban workers don’t even merit that US$19.50 per month?

And just a few more quotes for context: Granma, according to the AP, quoted Mateu as saying that that the new compensation system fitted with the "socialist distribution" often mentioned by new President Raul Castro: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work," as opposed to the current system derived from Karl Marx's formula of communism - up to now religiously observed by Cuba - which states: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
Is this the start of independent unions emerging in Cuba? I mean, how will you determine the value of the work being done if there is no negotiation between the management and the workers’ representatives? Oops. In Cuba, the government owns 90 percent of the economy, including either all or at least 51% of the shares in every company, except for small family-type businesses, which are heavily regulated to stop them getting too capitalistic. And it being a workers’ revolution, the government is also, if you will, the workers’ chief representative.

But the effect of low wages, corruption and waste, according to the AP, is what seems to be driving Raoul to play with the notion of a meritocracy. Watch out, Señor President, it’s a slippery slope you are on. Pretty soon, workers might start demanding wages to keep pace with inflation, and might threaten to, er, strike if they don’t get what they consider a fair deal. Workers striking in a workers’ state for higher pay? Or maybe adopting sick-out, go-slow and work-to-rule tactics? Sounds like fun times ahead in Cuba, but don’t expect much of that to happen overnight. It will be a long road back for Cuba’s economy.

Talking about inflation, while Barbados had a good first quarter, what’s happening in this (second) quarter which ends June 30, not to mention what is likely to occur in our economy over the rest of the year, is the topic of a BHTA-BMA seminar next week (Wednesday at the Savannah. Call your respective association if you want to attend). It has a very long title, which perhaps sums up the worries being felt in our export-earning sectors, as follows: “Defending Tourism and Manufacturing in the ‘New Perfect Storm’”.
The perfect storm metaphor is here being used to sum up the lengthier sub-title of the seminar, which is essentially a worst-case scenario about rising oil and commodity prices and the resulting inflation we are all seeing on the shelves and feeling in our pockets.

Of course, there’s every reason to worry, because if tourists spend their vacations in their own countries, or even in their own neighborhoods (now being touted as the ‘stay-cation’) instead of taking a jet plane or cruise ship to the tropics, well, we will all be in deep trouble come year-end.
But look, and I mean this sincerely, knowing at the same time that a downturn in the economy wreaks financial havoc on many who cannot afford one day without some kind of income, in short, what the economists call the working poor. Let us not minimise their dilemma for one moment, but we as a small country simply cannot continue on the import binge we have been on for the past decade. Sure, there were all sorts of reasons why we spent so much more and have run such high foreign exchange deficits. A lot of it was poor economic policy as well.

So if our best estimates are for a fall-off in visitors, we simply have to reduce our demand for imports wherever possible, from the smallest items of unnecessary consumption to the biggest. We can and must all pull together to keep the economic ship of state afloat, no matter how hard the times ahead. Sermon over.