Transformations Shape Conformat’s Present

Matanzas – The Noel Fernández metal-forming enterprise is facing a moment of structural and organizational changes, a fundamental step for advancing in the implementation of several of the 176 economic and social transformations.

Pedro Llerena Rivero, general director of Conformat, the entity’s trade name, states that what has been achieved and the aspirations mark the collective’s daily life at a moment when the economic and commercial war of the United States government against the country is always an obstacle.

He summarizes that the enterprise has autonomy in its operations, independence in managing contracts with private actors, has already opened its foreign currency account, and aspires to create an International Economic Association.

Recovering the production of cylinders, the star line, is a major purpose, he emphasizes. Cupet, its main client, demands more than 500,000. This year, for example, it might only reach the figure of 12,000 10-kilogram small tanks in a plant with an installed capacity to make 200,000.

«Who better than us to supply the market… We have the equipment, the skilled operators, people committed to their work. Where could we get to without the impediment of the United States government’s sanctions,» Pedro reasons.

But at Conformat they do not wallow in laments. «Never,» maintains Jorge Luis Fernández García, near the sheet-corrugating machine, a recovered galvanized zinc roofing production line — one of the recent results that gladdens the man who has been 42 years in a collective capable of doing whatever it sets out to do, affirms his coworker Douglas Enríquez Hernández.

When others doubted, were slow, or little inclined to change, entities like the Noel Fernández Metal-Forming Enterprise (Conformat) saw benefit in diversifying the corporate purpose, among the many measures to perfect the socialist state enterprise, states the newspaper Trabajadores.

The only producer of cylinders for liquefied petroleum gas in Cuba was quick to decide to travel that alternate path. It was not about abandoning the road for a footpath. The option looked viable given the deficit of sheets, valves, and other imported inputs, in the environment of 90 percent of the raw material used in manufacturing those containers.

What to do to preserve the workshops, the qualified workforce, the jobs? The question moved thought in a place where, as in Cuban industries, tempering steel stopped being an easy operation long ago.

Ovens, stoves, grates, animal feeders, braziers prepared for charcoal and firewood, among other items, reached the population through agricultural fairs.

«That is how we have managed to keep the factory active, have income, and care for the stability of our people,» he comments with some pride.

Innovator Alaín Silvera Villamil, brigade chief in the cylinder workshop, explains that «it is interesting how we create new goods with unusable raw material. That container we have prepared to serve as a shooting range…»

There they speak of a different time. They are the winds of the economic and social transformations, notes the general secretary of the union bureau, Arianne Suárez Rosario.

«There are benefits in the attractive forms of payment, according to productivity, so a salary and income from profits of greater amount could be obtained.»

The economic and social transformations today shape, to the good fortune of its workers, Conformat’s present.