In a February 5 interview here, two Cuban youth leaders described some of the highlights of the upcoming Youth Exchange. The two, Ernesto Fernández Sánchez and Estela Zulueta Valdés, have been invited by faculty and student groups in the United States to speak at a number of U.S. campuses in March and April on the subject of youth and the Cuban Revolution today. Fernández, 23, is a member of the national leadership of the Federation of University Students (FEU); Zulueta, 35, is a law student at the University of Havana.

The Youth Exchange, Fernández said, will allow young people from the United States "to see for yourselves and learn about the real situation in Cuba" in order to cut through the campaign of lies about the Cuban Revolution spread by the U.S. government and big-business media--a campaign reinforced by Washington’s travel ban and trade embargo against the Caribbean nation.

Zulueta and Fernández said participants in the one-week Youth Exchange will have a chance to meet with students, young workers, and other Cubans involved in a range of activities. During the last Exchange in 2001, for example, they visited the Latin American School of Medicine, the renowned Havana psychiatric hospital, and the School for Social Work near Havana.

They will also visit historical sites of the Cuban Revolution, including the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, the army garrison attacked on July 26, 1953, by a group of young revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro. While they failed to take the garrison, the action marked the start of the revolutionary struggle that led to the overthrow of the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in January 1959 and the opening of the socialist revolution.

The U.S. visitors will attend the annual July 26 celebration, which this year marks the 50th anniversary of the attack. Hundreds of thousands are expected to mobilize in cities across the island to express their support for the revolution and opposition to Washington’s 44 years of aggression against Cuba.

"This is a special year for us because we are celebrating three important anniversaries," Fernández said. In addition to the Moncada celebration, 2003 is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Cuban national hero José Martí, who led the final war of independence against Spanish colonial rule at the end of the 19th century. Martí fell on the battlefield in 1895. This year is also the 100th anniversary of the birth of Julio Antonio Mella, an anti-imperialist student leader in the 1920s who became a founding leader of the Communist Party of Cuba and was assassinated in 1929 by an agent of the Machado dictatorship.

Participants in the trip will learn about the political campaigns that revolutionary-minded youth are involved in today. These efforts are part of what is popularly known as the Battle of Ideas, a political offensive to deepen the involvement of working people and youth in the revolution, central to which is broadening the educational and cultural opportunities available to the Cuban people. The goal is to counter the imperialist ideological drive promoting capitalism as the future and to address the social inequalities that have widened as Cuba has become more directly exposed to the capitalist world market since the collapse of preferential trade relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe more than a decade ago.

Fernández said that the launching of the Battle of Ideas marked "the beginning of a new political stage to address some of the difficulties of the revolution, especially among the youth," including the demoralization among certain layers of youth who were not working, had dropped out of school, and in some cases had become involved in petty crime. Cuba’s revolutionary leadership launched a fight to win these youth back to productive participation in society and to build a revolutionary consciousness among them by involving them in a number of educational campaigns.

These programs are mostly led by cadres of the Union of Young Communists (UJC). "The leadership of the revolution has asked young people to help lead this process," Fernández said. "We are not simply participants, but protagonists in the Battle of Ideas."

Zulueta described some of the "more than 100 programs that are part of the Battle of Ideas." One is the campaign to introduce computers, television sets, and VCRs into every classroom across the island, including the most remote areas. Another is the accelerated training of teachers to help reduce class sizes.

Speaking to participants in the Second Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange in July 2001, Cuban president Fidel Castro compared the effort to universalize computer literacy to the historic literacy campaign of 1961, when tens of thousands of young volunteers went to the countryside to teach peasants to read and write, largely wiping out illiteracy.

Another program is the publication of "family libraries." These are a series of boxed sets of 25 books, printed cheaply on newsprint and sold for 60 pesos (about US$2.40), to make available to every Cuban family the best of world literature. Among the titles selected for the first set of 25 are Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, and titles by Cuban authors from José Martí to Nicolás Guillén. At the same time, "popular libraries" are being built in working-class neighborhoods across the island, where local residents can use computers and VCRs, as well as access books on CD-ROM from library systems around Cuba.

One major effort is the training of thousands of revolutionary social workers who, after studying in special schools for one year, go into working-class neighborhoods and, in collaboration with the residents, work directly with youth and their families to find solutions to numerous social problems--from working with youth to continue their schooling, to campaigning to raise public awareness about health and other social issues.

"The goal of the revolution is to give every young person the possibility to study and even go to the university," Zulueta said, pointing to the plans now under way to establish university-level schools in every municipality.

The Youth Exchange will also be an opportunity to learn about the campaign to free five Cuban revolutionaries who are in U.S. federal prisons on frame-up conspiracy and spying charges because of their role in providing Cuba with information on U.S.-based rightist organizations that have carried out violent attacks on Cuba with Washington’s complicity.

To find out more about the Third Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange, contact: youth exchange2003@yahoo.com

Arrin Hawkins and Scott Dunlap are members of the Young Socialists in New York
 
 
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