“The Transformations have to be Profound” Part 2

An interview with Rogelio Polanco, Head of the Ideological Department of the Cuban Communist Party

By Katrien Demuynck on February 7, 2013

KD : The challenge with the youth is great. There is a group of young people who are emigrating, does that mean that they no longer see prospects in their own country and think they will be better off elsewhere?

RP : The United States has historically used the migration issue in a manipulated way to provoke an attack on the essence of our socialist system. Let us remember that this has been going on since the very beginning of the Revolution. At the beginning, the United States received the main characters of Batista’s tyranny. It protected them and after that it tried to generate destabilization actions whose essential element was migration. Let us remember that operation called “Peter Pan” which provoked the departure of 14,000 children from Cuba with the propaganda that the Revolution was going to withdraw parental authority, a perverse machination. And then, at various times, the United States and the U.S. government used the migration issue to generate destabilization within Cuba and also to show the Revolution and Cuban socialism as having failed, to present Cubans fleeing alleged political persecution. Based on these manipulated foundations, they established legal norms in the United States with exclusive migratory facilities for Cubans that are not granted to any other nation in Latin America, such as, for example, the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 by which any Cuban, by the mere fact of arriving in U.S. territory, without even presenting an identity card, saying exclusively that he/she is Cuban, is admitted and after one year is given facilities to reside legally in the country. As we know, all this has generated at different times confrontations on the immigration issue. Cuba has decided to make its immigration laws more flexible and make it easier for any Cuban citizen who wishes to travel to another country, stay for a certain period of time or even settle in another country, to do so. The very condition of our socialism is only possible on the basis of the voluntary participation of those who wish to carry our society forward and also live in Cuba or, at the same time, stay in another country and maintain a link with their nation.

Today thousands of Cubans live outside Cuba, maintain a normal link with their homeland and return systematically. Many even actively participate in solidarity actions with their country of origin. We are moving towards what social science and demographic analysts call a circularity migration that will make it increasingly normal for Cuban citizens and even citizens of other countries to stay for periods of time in other nations and come back to their country of origin, and to have an increasingly normal relationship. This is being prevented by the U.S. government, which is using the migration issue and the existence of a sector that has broad influence in the levers of political power in the United States to maintain a migration policy that goes against legal, orderly and safe migration, because what precisely provokes everything that prevents normal migration is these destabilizing actions.

In the last period the United States closed its consulate in Havana and, therefore, forced Cubans to go to a third country to apply for a visa to travel to the United States. During these years the U.S. government has limited the granting of visas and has created greater difficulties for normal relations between Cubans living in Cuba and those residing in U.S. territory. It is a tremendous contradiction, because by making it easier for any Cuban who arrives in U.S. territory to enter without the need for normal legal or consular procedures, it stimulates the exit by non-legal, disorderly and unsafe means. And then they exacerbate in the media any incident of this nature; it is really very perverse. And it can only be explained by the fact that they are subordinated to a political nucleus that, particularly in Florida, influences in a very negative way the government’s decision making for alleged electoral or political interests in relation to Cuba. So this has to be denounced because they are punishing the Cuban family. They are punishing the relations between family members. They are punishing an entire nation for petty political interests. The United States has always manipulated the migration issue between Cuba and the United States in the revolutionary period.

This has now reached a certain level due to these elements I mentioned before: the closing of the consulate, the limitations on the granting of visas and the fact that for several years normal travel and the number of visas agreed upon in the migratory agreements between the two countries have been limited. In the case of the United States it was at least 20,000 per year, but during these years the number has been much lower. And, on the other hand, let us remember that we have had two years of pandemic in which, in addition to that, international flights have been limited and the exit through the borders of different countries. The United States extraordinarily limited the number of flights from its territory and established extraordinary restrictions to airlines, to travel agencies, with the aim of generating irritation, of creating discontent within Cuba. What we are seeing is the methodical application of the so-called Lester Mallory Memorandum, who was a U.S. Secretary of State who in 1960 wrote to his superiors to describe how the U.S. government’s policy towards Cuba should be in order to achieve its objectives. In a very general way, the memo stated that there is no political opposition in Cuba. The majority of the population supports the government. However, everything possible must be done to reduce access to income. To reduce the impact that salaries can have in order to generate discontent, to generate hunger and desperation among the people, so that the government can be overthrown. Now it has been exacerbated to extraordinary levels because in addition to all the instruments of an economic nature, it has the impressive power of the media.

Indeed, we have a migratory potential and the main objective of the United States turning to this migratory potential, fundamentally related to the youth, is also that this young force, prepared thanks to the Revolution, with the capacity for intellectual development, does not stay in the country, but emigrates out of it. On the one hand, our nation is in the process of aging, which is the natural process of developed societies. In the case of Cuba, an underdeveloped country, it is achieved thanks to high rates of health, medical care and social care. On the other hand, there is a population decrease and we are going to have a higher percentage of elderly people. We are going to have to dedicate more and more economic resources to take care of them. Fewer members of the economically active population are going to have to generate a greater percentage of the Gross Domestic Product to attend to the welfare of that population that does not participate directly in the production of goods and services. So, if we add to this the idea of stimulating migration, particularly of the youth and of the most educated people, of those with university studies, of course, it is also a way of having a negative impact on the country’s economy.

We have to ensure that the personal and professional fulfillment of our young people takes place in Cuba and for that we have to guarantee more and more living conditions and policies aimed at the youth that facilitate that this personal life project can be carried out more effectively in their homeland. Without denying, of course, that anyone who wishes to emigrate can do so because it is his or her right. The objective must be that we achieve the contribution of the vast majority of the youth to society and that, by developing their individual capacity, their professional development, they can contribute to the collective interest. The revolutionary government has been especially dedicated in recent times to encourage the design of public policies aimed at youth. Government working groups have been created which, with the participation of experts and with different disciplines and government structures, can in the short term present some projections of these policies in the field of employment, self-improvement, housing and other facilities especially aimed at youth.

An essential task is that of the youth movement to achieve greater participation of youth in decision-making, to ensure that they are increasingly represented in all areas of economic and social life of the country. That their considerations, their criteria, their proposals are taken into account. That young people may increasingly be able to move in a more expeditious manner in the economic organizations of socialist state enterprises to assume management positions. That they be more and more represented in the main decision-making bodies of the country. We have to accelerate these actions aimed at young people and in particular at young university students. And starting from the earliest ages, we have to achieve, for example, an effort so that high school students are better prepared, so that they are able to go through the different levels of studies, not only pre-university, but also technical and professional. That they find employment and also find study facilities to continue their preparation for the future.

These are the great challenges, also addressed to our younger generations. However, there is awareness of the need to work much better. To work much more with young people, to involve them actively in the main processes and also to transform the whole environment related to our youth.

KD : Is there a specific work done on social networks to reach the youth?

RP : I think it is still very incipient. We are all still in the process of learning what the digital public space is. Let’s remember that Cuba arrived late to all the technological development due to the information and communication blockade, which has limited our own capacity to generate contents, to understand that communicational ecosystem.

Internet access on cell phones and cell phones began less than four years ago. Today, more than 7 million Cubans already have access to the Internet. The capacity to access each new technology has been quite accelerated from the technological point of view. And, at the same time, there is a growing awareness, even promoted by the leadership of the Party and society organizations, that it is not possible to maintain a dichotomy between physical and digital spaces. We have to make people understand that both spaces today have a dialectical relationship and that everything that is done in the physical space must have a correlate in the digital public space, because otherwise, we would be excluding ourselves from an essential area for the development, even of the human being. Today, a large part of the development of human knowledge, of access to information and of all technological processes takes place in the digital environment. This will be increasingly the case. To the extent that we manage to accelerate the process of digital transformation of society, we will have a more efficient economy, more efficient technological processes and more efficient social processes.

The pandemic forced us in a short period of time to develop teaching methods in which we had not made much progress. However, during much of the development of the teaching and learning method during the pandemic period, we had to venture into virtual teaching and learning environments created for this purpose, with the difficulty of connectivity and access to technology for much of our population. Even so, more and more progress is being made in the digital transformation of society. It is still at a pace that is far from what we need. We need to transform a good part of our processes to achieve greater efficiency in appropriating this true digital transformation. Today we could have a much better performance in different areas of the economy and services if we had been able to advance more quickly in the development of digital transformations in the country. We are going to achieve it. We are going to have more and more training and improvement. And each time we are going to have new generations that come already, as we say colloquially, with the digital chip incorporated. That is, they come from the so-called digital natives, not from those who were born in an analogical age.

I believe that the country, with the leadership of the Revolution, which has a great will to move forward more quickly in this area, we will be able to generate content and generate significant changes in a short time in the digital area. This will require technological sovereignty, developing our own applications, our own platforms that give us that sovereignty, and it will also require from all of us a greater effort to move more quickly towards these transformation processes, in all areas, in the political, economic, social and cultural spheres. For example, the government has considered that computerization and now digital transformation is one of the pillars of government management. And the Party has also considered it. The Party has created a group for its digital transformation. It can no longer be that we are promoting this digital transformation in all areas of society and that our Party, the highest leading political force of society and the State as established in Article 5 of our Constitution, is not at the forefront of digital transformation. We have to achieve it, and in the shortest possible time, that our political processes also assume the digital transformation as something essential for a greater efficiency in the political and ideological work. And we have been doing so also in everything related to our youth, that they quickly assume these digital codes.

There are already very interesting experiences of the use by our young people of important applications and digital formats. We want, for example, to develop more and more Cuban applications, applications related to instant messaging or audiovisual use on the web or the use of video games produced by Cuban filmmakers, with our formats, our aesthetics and also our values. The digital world is very wide. There is an open horizon that is there, waiting for our increasingly intense participation for its use and transformation.

We have to generate content to infinity and in a creative way. The consumption of audiovisuals by the new generations is exponential and values, essences and identities are arriving through this channel, whose objectives today are easier to achieve than through the reading of a book. Although we must continue to promote reading, but today the consumption of audiovisuals, the consumption of all these new formats of the digital ecosystem becomes an essential element of human knowledge and the formation of values. We have to make this format our own.

At the Party Congress held last year, the three pillars of the essence of the Party’s work and government management were established: informatization, communication and science and innovation. All three are interlinked. In the case of communication we also have to make a qualitative leap forward. We have just published a draft of the Social Communication Law. It will be the first Social Communication Law that the country has ever had in its revolutionary history. This draft bill will be debated in specialized debates in different institutions, but it is also open to the population and all citizens to express their opinions. We are going to put it to a vote in the National Assembly this year, for which we will have a legal norm at the level of a law that will allow us to develop and execute the communication policy of the State and government in the institutional, media and community spheres. These are different spheres in which communication is developed.

In addition, we are creating an Institute for Social Communication, that is to say, a government entity that will lead the country’s social communication processes. We are proposing that at all levels and institutions, the structures in charge of communication must be hierarchized at the highest management level, because communication is a strategic management resource. We have to transcend the still very limited way in which we develop the communication processes within the organization, which includes the Party, and also achieve a better external communication, not only with the militants, but also with the whole population. And so it should happen with all the institutions and agencies of the Central State Administration, with the mass organizations. Communication becomes an essential instrument of political work. We have to better prepare our human resources in the field of communication.

We are now developing an experience for the transformation of the economic, editorial and technological management model of the country’s media. We need to give them a greater capacity to reflect the reality of Cuba and also to allow those media to have income for their sustainability, which guarantees the creation of better technological capacities to face this new digital ecosystem. We are also strengthening the training of our journalists. We are developing a new experience by selecting future candidates to the journalism career from the beginning of the second grade so that they can spend a year preparing themselves in a special way and once they enter the journalism career they can be better prepared from the professional point of view and also in values.

These are different ideas that we are developing to give more and more importance to digital communication, both to informatization or digital transformation and to communication and science, innovation, looking for more experts in different disciplines to participate in the decision making of the government and the Party. I believe that in the shortest possible time it will give us more results to improve the action of our organizations.

KD: Do you know Vijay Prashad? We had a meeting with him at Casa de Las Americas. One of his theses is that the battle of ideas is not enough; we must also have a battle of emotions.

RP: I totally agree. Indeed, we have to go to the emotions. Not only to reflection, to thought, to actions in the theoretical field, but also to human subjectivity, to emotions, to enchant, to fall in love, to captivate human beings. Much of the work that is done today through social networks has a great element of emotionality, sometimes negative emotionality, since it generates hatred, animosity. We have to go to the soul, to the heart, to the feelings, in order to achieve human mobilization and active participation.

What else are we going to do but to generate feelings of empathy, of emotions and to fall in love, to captivate the other person? We have to do it also in politics, but we have to do it well, it cannot be manipulated or fabricated, it has to flow naturally. Our organizations also have to strengthen this area and for that we have to get our best activists, intellectuals, writers and filmmakers to put all their professionalism and talent into this collective love. We have had recent experiences of television series that have captivated part of the population, particularly the youth, or sometimes a song, through music, dance or a play, through art and culture in its artistic expression we can reach those feelings. And we have to bear in mind that politics also goes through that area of emotions, of captivating the other. It is essential. To move away from that would be to move away from everything that makes the essence of the human being. We also have to fall in love.

Che used to say that a revolutionary is motivated by great feelings of love. It is love in all its expression, so we remain in love.

Source: Rebelion, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US