By Sonia Osorio

MIAMI – The Cuban Revolution was built in part on the basis of protecting workers and 50 years later “it has created the 21st century slave” who has no right to collective bargaining, independent union members complained in a documentary to be shown Thursday in Miami.

The film “Under Cuban Skies – Workers and Their Rights,” directed by Carlos Montaner, will be shown at the 19th conference of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy.

Montaner presents testimonies of workers, independent union members and journalists about what he calls the “systematic violation of human and labor rights” by Cuba’s communist government.

“It covers a not very well-known aspect of the situation of labor rights that is peculiarly different from most of the world because the government is the employment agency and the union represents the official party. There is no collective bargaining and many international agreements are being violated,” the filmmaker told Efe.

To show the labor reality in Cuba, Montaner sent teams to the island and conducted clandestine interviews with people in June and July 2008.

Most of the testimonies are from Cubans employed in hotels and to show the “sharp contract” in labor conditions, the teams also interviewed workers from the same hotel chains in Spain, Mexico, Miami and the Dominican Republic.

Emilio Jerez, of the illegal National Independent Workers Confederation of Guanabo, said in the documentary that in Cuba people never see a notice offering jobs in hotels, a “privileged” sector, because the government wants to assign those jobs.

“To hire someone, the negotiations are done by the same people with the foreign investor and the qualified person is the one who’s a member of the (Communist) party, the one who’s part of Cuban Youth and the internationalist,” Jerez said.

In Cuba, obtaining a job or a promotion “is heavily based on loyalty to the party,” Montaner said.

“Cubans should have the right to decide how they want to handle their working fate and not depend on a central government,” said the son of Cuban writer Carlos Alberto Montaner.

But because the government is the only employer on the island, the situation “is open to abuses and discrimination against workers,” said George Plinio, the documentary’s executive producer.

Plinio, an economic expert on the Cuban labor situation, said that the government confiscates 97 percent of the salary paid by foreign investors to the workers in hotels and in the exploration and production of nickel.

“The investor pays the government about 500 euros ($704) per worker per month and the government, in turn, turns over less than $20 to the employee,” he said.

The International Labor Organization determined from this situation that the Cuban government “is violating the agreements related to job protection and the prohibition of job discrimination, and that is what we denounce in the documentary,” Plinio said.

Tomas Bilbao, the executive director of the Cuba Study Group, emphasized to Efe that the documentary allows viewers to hear the Cuban workers themselves talk about “the violations that are going on.”

“The Cuban Revolution has always tried to base itself on the protection of the Cuban worker, which this documentary demonstrates ... is a farce. What it has done is create a 21st century slave, as an independent union member says in the film,” he said.

The documentary will be distributed in Cuba, in countries of the European Union and in Latin America. EFE