Rectification

The Communist Party’s Third Congress in 1986 launched a “Rectification of errors and negative tendencies”. Emphasis was placed on the need to abandon the mentality of copying other countries’ methods, which may not be appropriate for Cuba, rather than direct criticism of the ruling Soviet bureaucracy. The Cuban leadership, unlike armchair critics, had to consider the consequences of biting the hand that fed them.

Fidel called for a return to the anti-bureaucratic ideas of Che Guevara, who had served as Cuba’s minister of industries from 1961-1964. Che had promoted volunteer work brigades, among other measures, to cultivate a communist attitude to work and to combat the pernicious tendency for functionaries to adopt the bureaucratic mentality. Even in the absence of the high salaries and special privileges (such as exclusive stores, luxury cars and holiday mansions) enjoyed by the Soviet bureaucracy, people in positions of authority in revolutionary Cuba may zealously guard their prerogatives, resist change and display all the hallmarks of the bureaucratic mentality.

In Cuba, the material basis for such habits and practices is not the existence of an institutionalised system of privileges for administrators upheld by a totalitarian police state – as in the Soviet Union – but the persistence of specialised functionaries and the division between mental and manual labour inherited from class society. Administrative verticalism both reflects and reinforces the tendency towards bureaucratism, a tendency that can only wither away to the degree to which the working people as a whole take on the tasks of public administration.  

Che had come up with an effective antidote to bureaucratism in volunteer work brigades. During Rectification, such brigades were mobilised on a large scale to build homes, childcare centres and other social works which had been neglected; thousands of paid functionaries were reassigned to productive work and workers were encouraged to expose negligent or corrupt officials. Rectification began the difficult task of de-linking Cuba’s socialist revolution from the doomed Soviet “model”, but it was interrupted by the sudden demise of the Soviet Union itself in 1991 and the declaration of the Special Period.