By Ana Hurtado on April 5, 2024 from Havana
photo: Bill Hackwell
The past few days the Youth Congress has been held in the capital of all Cubans. Many young people gathered to discuss, propose, talk and look to the future of a Cuba that continues to live a silent war. A Cuba that is seeing how the Empire wants to take away from it the most precious thing it has, the clay to mold any possible horizon: its youth.
So what is the world’s youth facing nowadays?
What are they facing in Cuba?
While it is true that socialism has made progress in shaping the morals of a new man and a new woman, Cuban society is not outside the planet, and often suffers from many of the evils that concern it.
The dismissing of ideology, for example. The world lives immersed in an ocean of alienated minds that wander and consume superficial, instantaneous contents that do not make us think about existence. Neither the values, nor the why of each thing. Capitalism is turning human beings from their youngest age into robotic individuals who do not question anything. They are entertained in front of a mobile device, swallowing the content that they themselves prepare, and consuming, producing and forming part of the neoliberal chain so that the system continues to perpetuate itself with a scarcity of critical voices.
I call it the “anesthesia” of the new generations. The new immobilizing of man and women.
Looking at both realities, the Cuban and the foreign ones, there are several questions I ask myself.
In order for Cuba not to lose its achievements, what can it continue to do?
The Young Communist League (UJC) has to remain at the forefront. Always bearing in mind that we have to reach everyone, and not only our own.
These are not times to be defeatist. The task of cultivating the youth is not only for the UJC, but for all of us, on the island and abroad. We have to take care and work with conscience together with the youth, hand in hand, to guarantee their survival in difficult times.
We have to give the youth causes, we have to give them missions and opportunity, we have to give them hope. Apart from all the theory and debate. Young people must see that there is a reason to get up every morning and move forward.
The troubadour and outstanding intellectual, Silvio Rodriguez, spoke in an interview about his experience as a literacy teacher and about the lack of “epic”.
What happens to young people when they feel lost, when they do not know where they are going, are without a guide and do not believe in anything that moves them inside?
Silvio says: “Young people of all times are eager for epics. If you put them in front of them, they take them. They want great and noble tasks that make them grow. When they get into misery, it is because there is no greatness in sight.”
But if they have an epic in sight, let there be no doubt that they will go for it. Fidel involved the youth in several epics. Díaz Canel and the Revolution also did so in the face of the COVID 19 world health crisis.
The youth must be our objective, our Revolution in the Revolution. Our permanent Revolution.
We must give the youth a challenge that resonates, a literacy campaign.
Even if there is no longer an Elian, even if there are not five comrades to be brought back. We must think and act at a high level to keep the people active. Because the living and social conditions will continue to become more complicated in the current world context, and without an epic, there will be no victory.
The anvil does not strike alone. The anvil is struck with a fighting spirit with attitude. And if sometimes we see that it is lacking or is not solid enough, we must build it.
For Revolutions to remain alive, we must always be the vanguard of them. I return to Silvio when he spoke of his experience as a literacy teacher: “We had the epic of the Sierra Maestra fresh in our minds and it was something we all wanted to imitate”.
Among our possible epics at this moment… which one should we immerse ourselves in? The armed struggle of ideas can lead us into different issues that can only be headed by the younger ones, such as, for example, freeing Cuba and the countries of the world from the scourge of de-ideologization, imperialist cultural penetration, sociological illiteracy, disinterest and apathy. Accepting the new times, but knowing that we can work the new tendencies and adapt them to our values, to our struggles and to our hearts.
If we use literary terms, this life, ours, right now, is not “magical realism”. We should not, in my opinion, dream up fantasies and normalize them. To live in a parallel reality. To alter it with fantastic actions, taking for granted that they are normal.
For me, “The wonderful real” in today’s times is to find beauty in everyday things, in the everyday, whether in Latin America or the Caribbean, in Africa or in the eyes of a child resisting in Gaza. That is what it is. And it must be part of our epics. Of those of the youth and of our own. Those of us who were once a little younger, but still growing up, know that there are follies that are not worth curing.
Like the madness of those boys who decided to storm the Moncada barracks, not on a white horse, as Martí did; but rather the madness of disembarking on a yacht with 82 men and starting the liberation of a country with few boys and even fewer rifles.
That is the type of epic that cannot go out of fashion. And we have to keep it alive even if we have to die defending it. The people know how to carry it out.
The Real Wonderful must come to stay and finish throwing aside banality and the imperialist cultural dictatorship that tries to sneak in anywhere through any little crack it sees open.
We don’t need anything from them; we have everything.
Source: Cubadebate translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English