The flight of professionals from the state sector in Cuba has become a topic for the official press, which allows us to have figures on a situation that was already known on the street. If last week it was announced that 10,000 electricians left their jobs in 2022, this Monday the absence of construction employees transcends, in this case in Sancti Spíritus.
In the last eight years, the province’s Construction and Assembly Company has lost 1,000 workers, 500 of them in 2022. The Ministry of Construction estimates that the province needs at least twice as many staff as it currently has.
In 2015, the entity had 2,426 employees, but emigration and flight to the private sector have left it without a workforce, it says this Monday the official journal Escambray “I don’t want to spend my last years of work with a salary that doesn’t even reach 3,000 pesos because, how much am I going to retire with? That’s why I went to a MSME, with the expectation that my salary would increase, which is now triple and sometimes more”, argues one of the former workers, who after 30 years in construction refuses to return because he wants to “subsist”.
“We have a Training School that still trains operators in different specialties, but there is no established mechanism to retain those who graduate”
According to Osvaldo Acosta Rodríguez, the company’s head of human resources, there is a lack of incentives to keep workers trained in the sector. “We have a Training School that still trains operators in the different specialties, but there is no established mechanism to retain those who graduate. The same happens with the inmates who go through the school and when they leave the prison they are no longer a responsibility from the Ministry of the Interior and yes from the Court, which also does not have a legal apparatus for them to stay in the construction, even when we give them an evaluation that is useful anywhere”.
The lack of employees joins the thousand problems that prevent the availability of raw material and, therefore, hinder construction. In this way, hydraulic, industrial, tourism, road works and, of course, the execution of housing programs are hanging by a thread.
To illustrate the decline of a situation that is going downhill, a sample: in 2019, 12 masons were trained with category A, compared to 2 in 2022. The same number was achieved in category B, but not a single carpenter, no plumber, no welder, no operator or electrician installer. That, as far as specialists are concerned, because if you look at the group of basic trades there were 1,260 at the beginning of the year, of which only 877 remained.
The newspaper wonders who is going to build then in the province if the company that must undertake the largest works is in a situation like the one described. “How then in the province to build more than twenty works such as the Meliá Trinidad hotel that at the time required close to a hundred men, or more than 100 homes, only with a little more than 1,426 builders?”, he laments.
“I like my job and I have had plenty of offers because I know how to do everything on a job, but I have to keep my salary of 3,000 pesos,” argues one of the workers consulted for the note whose only reason for remaining in his position is that he works at Fomento, where he also resides. “If there was a MSME in my municipality, not me, the entire brigade would leave for the improvements with the salary”, he points out, however.
The case of these workers is similar to that reported by the personnel of the Cienfuegos thermoelectric plant Carlos Manuel de Céspedes. It is not just about the salary, but the loss of many stimuli that the employee received before: there are no toilet modules or work clothes, there is no year-end holiday and the offers at the recreation center are now negligible due to the rise in prices.
“I like my job and I have had plenty of offers because I know how to do everything in a project, but I have to keep my salary of 3,000 pesos”
Rislander Torres Díaz, director of the company from Sancti Spiritus, blames the private sector in part because it starts from an “unequal” situation, a version that the newspaper endorses.
“This is not far from the truth if one takes into account that, although the new forms of management have promoted articulations with the state company on the basis of pre-financing its productions or supplying it with raw materials or other inputs that it cannot acquire, to market their products, they also have other possibilities, such as being able to access the foreign market and even pay bills from abroad, and they have the power to make their own decisions,” the note states.
The article coincides with the one that is also published this Monday Invader, official newspaper of Ciego de Ávila, in which he talks about the depressing situation of the sector, and although in his case he does not mention the lack of professionals, he does make it clear that “the constructive capacity of one’s own effort is superior to that of the state brigades”.
The province ended the year with only 946 completed homes, 54% of what was foreseen in the annual plan. The managers, however, are optimistic and believe that 2023 will be better because there is more stable raw material and 163 houses have already been delivered so far this year. However, for the whole year it is expected that 1,321 will run out, so the pace should improve even if the figure has been lowered, which in 2022 was 1,757.
According to the outlet, at the end of 2022 there were still 900 total collapses “caused by meteorological events” that were mentioned, including Hurricane Irma, which happened more than five years ago. A third of the homes in Ciego de Ávila were in “fair or poor condition” and there were 40,000 with “logical and demographic needs.”
In addition, the note clarifies that there are thousands of buildings that must be rehabilitated and that these works need more knowledge, because they must take into account the deterioration and know how to solve it, a task that does not seem within the reach of any attempt “by own effort.”
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