Communism and the tomorrow that never comes

In retrospect of the past Jose' my father-in-law saw in 1962 what we have to worry about today. Jose' said "It's Everybody's Battle" --Ian Jay Germaine I began to see the attitude of the workers in my firm change under the influence of Communist poison. The militia taught them that supervisors and managers were their enemies. They now talked resentfully about being "exploited" by the company.

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Some of these workers had been good friends of mine. I noticed that when they spoke to me, they lowered their eyes and avoided looking into my face. Then they began to avoid talking to me at all. I sensed that they were embarrassed in my presence. The communist's, with their belief that the human being is only matter in motion, possibly considered me a stimulus to what they call, in the terminology of Pavlov, "capitalist-conditioned reflex." In reality, my presence was like a voice of conscience to my former friends, and that is why they felt embarrassed. This perhaps explains why the Communist's try to obtain the cooperation of many people like me, first using persuasion and then terror. It is why when they don't get it, they try to destroy or eliminate us. Special meeting were called with the aim of breaking the discipline of the company and to indoctrinate other employees with Communist views. Work slowed down, production fell off, and the meeting became a great cost to the company. The government encourages workers to make excessive demands of employers--Pay increases of 300 to 400 percent, participation in management, the right to hire and discharge employees. All this was part of the plan to break the morale of the leaders of business and industry and confiscate the economy. There were many excuses for this confiscation. If Castro needed the kinds of goods a company imported, he might say go easy. If not, he would prevent the business from exchanging pesos for dollars in the nationally-owned bank. Therefore, the company would not be able to pay suppliers. When a company thus ran into financial difficulty, it was confiscated by the government on the grounds that the management was incapable of conducting a profitable business! Or let us say that a "Batista follower" in a #1 million business had a $100,000 share. Castro would confiscate not only that share, but the entire company. The existence of the suspect was a convenient excuse for taking the business property, regardless of the political character of those who owned it. Having confiscated the business , Castro would then tell the workers: "The business now belongs to you. You have to sacrifice. You should work more hours. We must revise the salary scales downward in line with the revolutionary program." Thus the workers, who had been encouraged to malinger, to slow down production, and to ask for unreasonable pay and fringe benefits, suddenly found themselves working longer hours, getting less pay and losing many benefits they had received before the confiscation. Castro's administration would now say, "In the interest of YOUR business, you must postpone vacation." The Communist promise is always a better life for everybody. "Today we sacrifice and work hard for the future. Tomorrow it will be a better life." But it does not work that way somehow. Life gets harder, but better days never come. It was during the initial period of harassment, when workers were being turned against management of the company that I received my first telephone call. The telephone on my desk rang. I answered it . A voice said "You are supporting a lost cause. Do not be a fool. Become one of us. If you don't, you will be a very sorry man." The voice gave me no time to answer. The receiver clicked, the line went dead. It may seem a small matter reading it from the viewpoint of a person who has always lived in the United States. But in the strained atmosphere of our changing Cuba, such a call to a person in a responsible job in business, under attack by Castro, was a very stunning thing and made one wonder what would happen next. There were other calls. And the voice was always a different one. The voice might say "Don't try to discipline your workers. If you do you will be sorry." or it might say "Don't try to interfere with us. We are watching you. If you get in our way, watch out." It could of course been someone's grim little practical joke. Later happenings show that it was not. (NEXT: Big Brother is watching) Column reprinted with permission of the Long Beach Press-Telegram