Sandpaper factory workers bow to the future with their daily effort. Impressed by the jump in plan compliance from the previous year – 65% in 2003; 54% in 2004 – I headed to San José de las Lijas to record such feat.
The main door of the center is blocked by a fence of three meters high. It explains the serene needed to be made to prevent the abduction of goods by some unscrupulous ones. Workers – including unscrupulous ones – now enter and exit through a narrower door on the side. The result is palpable: the number of sixty thousand pesos in missing has not increased for three years. It doesn’t diminish either, but something is something.
The workshop is a hotbed. There boils a huge vat with the mixture ready to pour into the molds; here the boiler water that gives impetus to the central production line. On one side, a group of workers puts out a high oven after making a steaming coffee that I gladly accept.
The finishing line was purchased from a German-Western firm, but could only be assembled fourteen years later because of documents that lacked an essential Cuban-Oriental firm.
Indescribable the feat of innovators to start the immense machine for the first time… and the will to kick her out again. As that day comes, workers manually assume, manually, the production and packaging of sandpapers.
Attention to man is priority one for the direction of the center. The principal engineer himself is responsible for moving to the hospital daily, in his car, to which worker suffers burns from the absence of means of protection.
“In November we will meet…,” says one worker as he blasphemes against a particle that has been inserted into his eye.
–The plan?
–… three years of applying for mirrors and gloves.
–And what does the factory address respond to?
–That soon the machines and components of a protective media factory bought from a German-Western firm, which is only missing…
I continue my journey. I look at the ceiling and sense that savings are not mere slogans for these foundationrs of tomorrow. With the removal of three-quarters of the luminaires from the extensive ship, electricity consumption has declined dramatically, and there is already a salary fund for an ophthalmologist who consults all workers during the eight hours of work.
For these exploits and many others that the pen of an inexperienced journalist is unable to review, it is worth coming to the sandpaper factory of San José, worth it… How much is worth it? Is the penalty profitable? That will be the subject of an upcoming report. Ω
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