Posted on 09/03/2009 7:21:58 AM PDT by Sloth
HAVANA -- At an age when most kids play stickball or videogames, Lazarito Castro focuses much of his energy on promoting Cuba’s socialist system, one speech at a time.
The studious 14-year-old is not related to President Fidel Castro, but he is one of the comandante’s most passionate young disciples, a member of the Union of Young Communists who is known across Cuba for his fiery, fist-shaking speeches at massive government-organized rallies.
Lazarito dreams of becoming a nuclear physicist when he grows up. But for now he sees himself as a soldier on the front lines of the “Battle of Ideas,” a government campaign to strengthen socialist values by highlighting Cuba’s accomplishments and investing in new educational and cultural programs that reach out to young people.
“When the comandante ceases to be with us, we are totally sure the path of the revolution will not be destroyed, neither by imperialism nor by capitalism,” Lazarito said with characteristic zeal as he sat with his parents at their comfortable suburban Havana home.
Lazarito and other Cuban students who occupy high-profile positions in their youth organizations have been galvanized by the Battle of Ideas, but their revolutionary fervor sharply contrasts with the apathy of many other young Cubans who are saturated with ideology but feel it has little to offer them.
As Castro turns 79 next month, one of his government’s challenges is “convincing young people that they have to carry on the revolutionary struggle,” said Hans de Salas, research associate at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuba and Cuban American studies.
“The whole Battle of Ideas is clearly directed at winning the hearts and minds of the youth,” said de Salas, who compared Cuba’s ideological campaign to Mao Tse-tung’s efforts at “purifying” Chinese society during the 1960s Cultural Revolution.
“This perhaps will be Fidel Castro’s parting legacy,” he said. “After having survived 15 years in the post-Soviet era, it’s an opportunity to solidify the regime and assure continuity in the next generation.”
Castro frequently attends school graduations, speaking to young people. Earlier this month he presided over Elian Gonzalez’s sixth-grade graduation, where he said he was honored to call the boy his friend. In a speech this week commemorating the 52nd anniversary of the rebel assault that sparked Cuba’s revolution, Castro singled out young Cubans for praise, noting that most of the island’s 11 million residents have grown up since the 1959 revolution.
“It would be unforgivable not to bear in mind that more than 70 percent of Cubans who today sustain the revolution had not even been born then,” he said. “They took up the flags of those who gave their lives in that [assault] and I think they will never let them fall.”
Values vaunted in the 1960s and ‘70s—self-sacrifice, solidarity and the rejection of consumer culture—are still instilled in today’s youth, but Cuba is no longer as insulated as it was then. Tourism, foreign investment, American pop culture and visiting Cuban-Americans offer young people a different world view, making the role of schools in teaching ideology perhaps more significant than in the past.
“The schools are the lynchpins in the ideological struggle,” de Salas said. “Once the children graduate from the school system, they are much more prone to other influences at work in Cuban society: political apathy, the skepticism and criticism of the regime, the desire for instant gratification.”
In the upscale Havana suburb of Miramar at the Enrique Maza secondary school, Principal Mabel Maria Ruiz Morales said one of her goals is teaching students unconditional support for the revolution.
“Wherever the revolution tells them `You are needed,’ they must be capable of stepping up,” she said. “That’s the challenge and that is what we are forming them for.”
Cuban students are expected to be able to discuss current events in school, including Castro’s speeches and newspaper articles from state-run media. Teachers must incorporate political and ideological topics into classes, from calligraphy to chemistry. In a math class, for example, the teacher might set up an exercise in which students tally the cost of the U.S. embargo for Cuba’s economy, Ruiz Morales said.
One of the most recent teaching tools used in Cuban schools comes from an unlikely source: The Bush administration’s Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba.
The commission report released in Washington last year outlines steps to press Cuba into a democratic transition and issues a wide range of recommendations for building a post-Castro government. Just this week, the State Department named veteran Latin America expert Caleb McCarry to lead that transition effort.
Cuban officials have lambasted the report as yet another U.S. effort to squash Cuba’s sovereignty. After the release of the report, Cuban state-run television rolled out a series of cartoons lampooning top U.S. diplomat James Cason as “transition man.” In one, Cason wears a wizard’s cloak and aims a magic wand at a free health clinic, turning it into a private clinic with Visa and Mastercard logos.
At the recently renovated Cesareo Fernandez elementary school, which boasts a large pool, mosaics painted by some of Cuba’s best-known artists and a vegetable garden cultivated by the children, Principal Miriam Bacallao rejected the idea that students are politically indoctrinated.
“Through the classes we talk about concepts of loving your country and feelings of nationality,” Bacallao said. “The class is not converted into politics.”
Education has been a top priority for the Cuban government for 46 years. Cuban students outperformed students in 12 other Latin American countries in regional standardized math and language tests conducted in 1997 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO.
Computers and videotaped classes have been introduced in schools to help standardize education, especially in rural and marginal urban areas. The Ministry of Education has reduced student-teacher ratios to 20 to 1 at the elementary school level. Recently created programs target adolescents and others who dropped out of school, offering them a small stipend to finish their education and train for jobs.
But analysts and Cuba experts say students in the past decade have faced a harsh reality once they graduate. The fall of the Soviet Union, the boom in the tourism industry, an influx of remittances from the U.S. to Cuba and Cuba’s dual currency has stratified social classes like never before in the past 50 years.
“You have kids who pursue an education and then run into the fact that economic opportunities are very limited,” said Phil Peters, of the Virginia-based Lexington Institute, who has written extensively on Cuba’s economy.
Although most of Cuba’s dissidents are middle-aged, they have also gradually begun to reach out to young people.
At a second-story apartment in central Havana, a group of dissidents set up a small classroom in what would otherwise be the living room. The walls are lined with a blackboard, posters of Cuba’s patron saint and books. Every week young Cubans are tutored in English, history, math and other subjects.
“For me the Battle of Ideas is nothing more than communist propaganda. Through the opposition we are guiding the youth to change their lives,” said Eusebio Morales, 66, a longtime dissident who teaches English using a 1952 American textbook. “When they [the students] are more advanced in English I’ll try to teach them how to express themselves with a foreigner and explain the real situation we are living in.”
This is why Obama should not be speaking in our public schools.
Say, I have a great idea for Obama. Why not take post-pubescent youth and enroll them in volunteers for Obama. You could call them the Young Pioneers. Oh, you say that Axelrod has already thought of that?”
A Battle of Ideas in Cuba is a great idea, as it is here.
Too bad only one side is allowed to contend openly in Cuba.
The world is far more complex than they can imagine.
Just like our public schools. Evil.
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