RECAPTURING CUBA’S DISENCHANTED YOUTH
Disenchantment has spread among Cuban youths after the ideology which they have grown up with under Castro–that of “eternal progression”–has been squashed by the 1989 economic crisis.
By Deidre McFadyen
One April evening in Havana, I joined Pedro Luis, a 21year-old Cuban, to view a television documentary about Cuban TV shows from the 1950s. Interviews with the now-elderly actors were interspersed with clips from the old shows. As we watched, Pedro Luis regularly interjected with scornful comments. Did I know that actors and television programming had been adversely affected by the post-1989 “special period”? Did I know that people who had set up satellite dishes to capture broadcast signals from the United States had had their equipment confiscated? And why do they always show old programs on television anyway? Don’t they know that young people want new dramas? Why was there this obsession with the past? A poker-thin, white-haired actor appeared on the screen, reminiscing about the comedy show that he had appeared in some 40 years earlier. Look at how Cuban actors have aged, Pedro Luis said, pointing accusingly at the television set. That too, he declared, was the fault of how hard life had become in Cuba.
Pedro Luis’ stewing, inchoate anger is typical of the alienation that many young people in Cuba feel today toward what remains of the Cuban revolution. As Fidel Castro and the Communist Party search for ways out of the economic crisis, it is the need, and values of these young Cubans that they must take into account–or ignore at their peril.
Today over half the Cuban population is under age 30. This generation of Cubans was formed entirely by and within the revolution. For them, the pre-1959 capitalist era is the stuff of history books. Over the course of their lives, they have experienced a slow, but seemingly inexorable rise in their standard of living. The revolution told them that they had the best, and encouraged them to believe that things would only get better. “Free, universal education and health carewhich earlier generations considered significant achievementswere part of normal, daily reality for this younger generation,” explains sociologist María Isabel Dominguez.
The economic crisis that erupted in 1989 hit these young people particularly hard. Without warning, they witnessed the collapse of what everyone had told them would be eternal. Overnight, they saw their possibilities for material and professional advancement, and their hopes for social development, fade. The future offered only uncertainty.
Some young people have reacted to this turn of events by redoubling their efforts to renovate socialism from within the traditional mass organizations such as the Communist Youth (JC). But disenchantment with the revolution is a more common response. Many have been drawn to religion. The participation of youth in Catholicism has grown due to the government’s recent relaxation of restrictions on religious activity in general and the Church’s savvy outreach to youth.
Many others have sunk into indifference and apathy–rejecting all things political. The malecon–Havana’s boardwalk–is packed on Saturday nghts with teenagers drinking rum, and listening to rock and rap music blared from car radios. These circles of youth are apparently experimenting with marijuana and barbituates, a completely new phenomenon in socialist Cuba. “Since what the future holds is not clear,” María Isabel Dominguez says, “these young people have decided to enjoy the present and satisfy their immediate needs.”
Looking for ways to partake of the Western way of life that they see in the island’s tourism sector and 90 miles across the Florida straits, some young women have turned to prostitution while other young people have fallen into petty crime. A minority are seeking ways to leave the island. Young. single men were disproportionately represented among the balseros last summer. Others are exploring avenues for softer exiles, reflected in the growing incidence of arranged marriages with foreigners abroad.
If the revolution is to survive and thrive in this new era, it must draw these young people into the debate about Cuba’s future which is currently raging in the Communist Party and among intellectuals on the island. “It is these new generations who are going to live in the country in the future, so they must be incorporated as fully as possible in the search for solutions,” says Julio Carranza, deputy director of the Center for the Study of the Americas. “If not, it will be very difficult to arrive at a consensus so that young people feel that the national project is theirs and move it forward.”
“These young people are our sons and daughters,” says Ambrosio Fornet. a Cuban novelist and screenwriter in his 60s. “They were not born out of thin air. We made them as they are, by omission or commission. They are our responsibility.” For better or worse, the fate of the Cuban revolution–and the shape that it will take–rests, in large measure, in the hands of its progeny.
