Cuban Colada

Blogging, a weapon of rebellious youth

Cuba's next revolution will be waged in the blogsphere, says the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz in an article titled, fittingly enough, "Cuba's next revolution." Sample:
• The recent Juanes concert, "however unprecedented, does not herald a true change for Cuba, which hasn't had free elections for over half a century, where personal and political freedom is restricted and where the economy is in a state of perpetual collapse due to the American embargo.
"The significant indicators of the prospect of change are a growing group of young Cubans who are expressing their critical opinions in blogs hosted on servers outside Cuba, where the government cannot tamper with them, a phenomenon that has been dubbed blogostroika. In the weeks leading up to the concert, Cuban bloggers waged a furious debate about its political ramifications, and when it was over, they packed their blogs with impressions and photos. In Cuba, this type of openness is a concrete challenge to the status quo."
Young Cubans today, "were not raised to believe in the ethos of Soviet invincibility, and they are not captive to the conception that Fidel Castro holds the absolute truth."
For more, click here.

Marx, Lenin reenter teachers' curriculum

Teachers colleges have reprised the teaching of Marxism-Leninism "as one of the strategies of the current transformation of the Cuban educational system," Radio Rebelde reported Wednesday.
The course had been suspended six years ago.
(As they would say in Hollywood, "Back to the Future, Part Two.")
Teaching 20th-century communism to would-be schoolteachers is intended "to strengthen the actions destined to form patriotic values that adhere to the social project being built" in Cuba, the article says.
According to the Dean of the Blas Roca Pedagogic Institute in Granma province, Oscar Rivero Reyes, "the discipline attempts to strengthen the revolutionary thinking of the future teachers" and "elevate [their] political, ideological and historical training."
The institute will eventually create a Department of Marxism-Leninism and History, which "will take up, in a novel and interesting manner, the study of history and through it foment the formation of patriotic values in the new generations."
The article, which you can read by clicking here, is rich in lofty descriptions but basically says that old-fashioned communism is in Cuba to stay.
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.

Andy Garcia wows the Raices college crowd

With his customary Cuban "chispa" and warmth, Andy Garcia kept about 300 students at the Raices de Esperanza conference enthralled with his hourlong talk Friday at the University of Miami. Garcia talked about his acting career and his love for Cuba, which he left when he was 5 years old. Talking about the difficulty he had to get international film festivals and Hollywood producers to pay attention to his film, The Lost City, the actor/director noted: "There's only one truth. Not two truths, yet people out there wanted to discredit that truth for the glorification of a situation that has no glory."

During the question and answer period, a couple of the female students began to cry, telling the Cuban-American heartthrob that the film had made a huge difference to them and their friends, particularly those students who arrived from Cuba as recently as 10 years ago and had been spoon-fed the communist regime's propaganda and revisionist history of pre-revolutionary Cuba.

Ever the sentimentalist, Garcia wiped his eyes.

"If there's a future for the island it has to be a rapprochement with the Cuban youth,'' he said. "They're not aware what's happening outside their world.''

He told the college students who came from dozens of universities for the sixth annual conference to keep reaching out to their counterparts in Cuba, to exchange ideas because both sides can learn from one another. "What's not negotiable is freedom and human rights,'' he said. "What has to be protected is morality and human decency."

He offered this advice for the future: "Stay true but try to never negotiate your integrity because you can never get it back."

As for lifting the U.S. embargo, which some members of Congress are clammoring to do, Garcia correctly pointed out that "Cuba trades with the entire world" and already buys about 40 percent of its food purchases from U.S. farmers.

So right, Andy. The communist regime gets what it needs to keep their hotels stocked, and what of the Cuban people?

 "The Cuban people cannot trade and engage with people throughout the world,'' he said, when asked about the embargo. "It's the Cuban government that benefits. ... So the embargo that has to be lifted is the internal embargo Cuba has imposed on its people."

-Myriam Marquez

Blogger and Castro kin clash on the Web

A cyberduel erupted this week between Cuban blogger Yoanis Sánchez and Mariela Castro Espín (Raúl's daughter), who is director of the National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX). In her blog, Sánchez tells of attending a lecture on transsexuals' rights given by Castro on Dec. 9 and asking her if society's struggle "to accept sexual preference could at any time take on other roles and struggle also for tolerance for other aspects, such as opinion, such as political and ideological preferences."
"I don't know," Castro replied, according to Sánchez. "The ideological and political field is outside my responsibility."
On Dec. 15, Castro wrote in the CENESEX website that, although she was not aware of her questioner's status as a prize-winning blogger, she "later learned that her name is Yoanis, that she has a blog and substantial honoraria made available from abroad, although her sponsors demand a facade of humility."
Sánchez's question was a self-serving provocation, Castro suggested. "Poor woman!" she wrote; her foreign sponsors "buy her intellectual honesty. [...] This little girl is acting like a she-rooster, playing with lies, under the protection of her owners. [...] She doesn't seem to be interested in the rights of Cubans but in sabotaging the efforts we make to legitimize those rights. With this service, she guarantees her stipend."
The United States' opposition to Cuba continues, Castro wrote. "Everything seems to indicate that our opponents have run out of intellectual resources when they resort to insignificant and ill-trained people who, far from making things difficult for us, facilitate our endeavors."
Insignificant, moi? Sánchez riposted in her blog on Dec. 17. And what's this about a she-rooster? "I cannot understand what [Castro] meant by assigning me a masculine role with a feminine noun. [...] If in order to be a very delicate chicken I must accept that a group of septuagenarians -- all of them male -- decide every aspect of my life, then I'll lean to transvestism and crow cock-a-doodle-doo like the rooster with the most hormones in the coop."
Cuban government functionaries become easily irritated by criticism, Sánchez summed up, "and end up sticking out their tongues. Beyond [those tongues] we see the ugly entrails of intolerance, which they work so hard to conceal nowadays."
To read Sánchez's blog, click here. For Castro's letter, click here.
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.

U.S. kids' visit goes almost unreported

Although Cuba's printed media have yet to report on the goodwill visit of a preteen baseball team from New England, Radio Reloj mentioned it Tuesday in its website. In an article titled Three Strikes to the Blockade, Radio Reloj derides the efforts of "anti-Cuban Congressman" Lincoln Díaz-Balart (R-Fla.) -- "a sworn and avowed enemy of [our] politico-social system" -- to prevent the trip of the Twin State Peregrines. The article praises Sen. Patrick Leahy's (D-Vt.) defense of the trip and says that, "to make Díaz-Balart's tantrum even worse," the University of Alabama baseball team will travel to Cuba in December for a series of exhibition games.
On Sunday, the Peregrines lost in Havana, 16-5, to the local team Los Santos and won, 18-9, against Los Mangos. They will play again Friday at Havana's Sports City. On their schedule this week: a tour of Old Havana and a trip to the Varadero resort in Matanzas province.
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.

Cuban Youth Crisis

There's growing concern about the role Cuba's youth will play in the future of the struggling island.

This week's communist party papers have reflected on the decreasing number of youngsters who are members of the artists union and who - arguably more importantly - toil on the country's arable land.

Today's Granma asks the pointed question: "Who works in the fields?"  

The paper said Villa Clara's peasants own just 35 percent of the land and produce nearly 70 percent of the food. Yet the average age of its farmers is 50, which could spell trouble for future food production.

Today's paper also has an interview with Communist Youth Union first secretary Julio Martínez Ramírez, who seems hung up on the 1960s "New Man" communist rhetoric. He says the youth have to stop being so darn capitalistic and get with the revolution program.

"Our work is focused on getting all Cuban youth to be conscious of the high responsibility they have to continue the revolution," he said. "That is the reason for our organization. We cannot lose sight of the fact that we have some young people who painfully do not have a clear idea of the value of the revolution."

Juventud Rebelde newspaper pointed out Thursday that only 1,453 writers and artists in the UNEAC are under age 40. Just three percent of participants of this week's congress were born after 1968.

-Frances Robles

UM analyst: Cuba youth rebellion may be in embryonic stage

Brian Latell (left), a former CIA analyst on Cuba and Latin America, says Cuba may be facing an embryonic rebellion of the young.

Latell, now a senior research associate at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, suggested that possibility in his latest Latell Report available on the institute’s website: http://ctp.iccas.miami.edu/main.htm

   “Fidel [Castro] himself, in late 2005, during one of his last major speeches, warned an audience of Cuban youth that ‘this country can self-destruct. The revolution can destroy itself,’ ’’ Latell wrote in his March 2008 report titled Cuba’s Unquiet Youth. “A short time later his warnings were reiterated by foreign minister, Felipe Perez Roque, who expounded at length about the disaffection, alienation, and apathy of Cuban youth. He too warned that the revolution could destroy itself.

   “More than two years later, with generational problems considerably more aggravated, Cuba’s leaders understand they have no good options. What they probably cannot yet be sure of, however, is whether they are experiencing an incipient rebellion of the country’s youth.’’

   Latell based his report partly on a landmark event that took place at the institute last month when five UM students chatted for an hour via Internet video phone with several Cuban youths sitting around a living room.

    Organizers asked reporters who witnessed the event not to identify the Cuban youths who were shown on a large screen (left) inside a room at UM's Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies.

   During the chat, the Cuban youths openly criticized the Cuban government referring to it as “dictatorship” and “tyranny.’’

   One of the Cuban youths said that eventually there might be anti-government youth protests in the streets of Cuban cities in the same way as in other countries.

   When Andy Gomez, the UM assistant provost who moderated the video chat, asked the Cuban youths how long they were willing to wait for change patiently, one replied that while it was “illogical’’ to think of forceful street protests in Cuba “it may happen one day as has happened in Venezuela or as happened in Burma.’’

   Latell told The Miami Herald after the video chat that while Cuban youths were becoming more dissatisfied he did not think they were as yet organized in a movement.

   One of the Cuban youths who participated in the video chat read Latell’s comment and reacted to it in a message relayed through one of the people who helped organize the video chat.

   “Advise Mr. Brian Latell that his observation is not true,’’ the youth wrote in a note. “There is organization among the dissident and opposition youths, and we have been working for a long time to bring about changes in Cuba.’’

   Latell took note of the young man's reaction and wrote in Cuba's Unquiet Youth: "To whatever extent these activist youth are organized, it appears that they already pose a challenge of unprecedented scope and intensity for the new regime.''

   -- Alfonso Chardy

Cuban youths see protest movement and generational conflict on island

Cuban youths across the Florida Straits met and talked via Internet video phone this week during an unusual experiment conducted by the University of Miami. The images of youths in Miami and in Havana were projected on a large screen inside a UM conference room.

For one hour Tuesday night, about half a dozen UM students of Cuban origin talked to more than half a dozen Cuban youths, some students, in Havana.

The UM students asked the Cuban youths questions about the current situation on the island and some of the answers were surprising.

   At times, the Cuban youths sounded like Cuban exiles referring to the Cuban government as “dictatorship’’ or “tyranny’’ and its actions as “repression.’’ One even said that while Fidel Castro used to describe the Cuban Revolution as the revolution of all the Cuban people, most young people on the island now feel it is “his revolution.’’

   While many issues were discussed, overall the Cuban youths left the impression that an anti-government youth movement is emerging and that pro-democracy youth protests may one day spread through the island. One student noted that the greatest peril to the Cuban revolution is the country’s youths because they are the ones who most fervently want change.

   One of the most insightful comments came from a 25-year-old man who said: “There’s a generational conflict which also includes a political conflict. Today’s generation does not feel committed to the same initial ideals of the Cuban revolution.’’

   The UM group sat in a room at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the UM campus in Coral Gables. The Cuban youths sat in a living room-like setting somewhere in Havana.

UM organizers said they could not identify the location or provide the names of the participants to protect them against possible Cuban government reprisals.

-- Alfonso Chardy

The Two Cubas: Alarcon Speaks.

Cuba's National Assembly president Ricardo Alarcon speaks out for the first time in the current issue of Cuban culture mag La Jiribilla about last month's brouhaha at the computer science university, when a student quizzed him about freedom to travel and other daily frustrations. In an article titled "The Two Cubas," he says the whole business was manipulated by the foreign press, which took a two-hour, six-minute and 30-second meeting (who's counting?) and pared it down into a deftly-edited four-plus minute video.

It was funny and sad at the same time, Alarcon said. Funny because there were more than 10,000 students there and sad because even "serious journalists" bought the story hook line and sinker. Then he went on and on about Cuba's democratic elections.

A blog insiders are following

At a recent FIU seminar on Cuba, attended mainly by insiders and academics, many said they are following closely a blog from Cuba called Generacion Y produced by a young woman. Her  post earlier this week:
"No me dejan dormir desde las tres de la madrugada. El teléfono empezó a sonar minutos después que la página web de Granma colgara las últimas reflexiones de Fidel Castro. Desde ese momento no he podido volver a acostarme. Es difícil pensar con claridad cuando se lleva encima una madrugada en vela, así que todavía estoy en la fase de “pellízquenme a ver si estoy despierta”. Los amigos tampoco me ayudan mucho a espabilarme, pues me acosan a preguntas, como si en esta Isla alguien pudiera tener “respuestas” a algo."
Some material is in English.
To see more, go to the blog by clicking here.