BY MICHEL PRAIRIE AND VICTORIA MERCER
MONTREAL - "Before coming to this meeting, I didn't understand much about the Cuban revolution and the U.S. blockade. Here, it was clearly explained. If I had known more, I would have gone to [the October 21 demonstration against the embargo in] New York City. Now I want to get more involved."
This is how Véronique Landry summarized her reaction to a November 17 meeting here of 150 addressed by Joel Queipo and María del Carmen Barroso, two Cuban revolutionary youth on a three-week tour across Canada.
Landry is a student at the Vieux-Montréal pre- university college (known as a cegep). She is part of Optimonde, a special academic project organizing students to visit third world countries where they share the lives of ordinary families. The next country they will visit is Cuba. In October, 20 students from this school made the 15-hour bus trip to New York to be part of a 3,000-strong regional demonstration against Washington's economic war on Cuba.
Queipo is a member of the National Secretariat of the Cuban Federation of University Students and Barroso is a leader of the Union of Young Communists. They visited the Montreal area November 12-19, speaking on "Youth and the Cuban Revolution Today."
Altogether they spoke to audiences totaling more than 400. They addressed five public meetings, including at McGill University and the Dawson, Edouard-Montpetit and Vieux-Montréal cegeps. They met with 30 strikers doing their weekly picket duty at the Kenworth truck assembly plant in Ste.-Thérese, north of Montreal. And they had dinner with a dozen immigrant workers from Stylecraft, a manufacturer of wristwatch bands. Both groups of workers are organized by the Canadian Auto Workers union.
"We are building socialism," said Queipo at the November 17 meeting. "If you want to know what capitalism would be in Cuba, look at Haiti and the Dominican Republic." The difference can be measured by the fact that "Cuba is a third world country. Our imports have been cut by more than 50 percent. Our raw resources are few. But we continue to defend education and health care for all working people. We even increased the budget allocations in these areas."
One of the main aspects of their visit was explaining and answering questions about the steps - like increasing tourism and foreign investment, and legalizing the possession and circulation of foreign hard currency - taken by the Cuban government to confront the "special period." This the name given by the Cubans to the deep economic crisis precipitated five years ago by the collapse of the preferential trade relations that Cuba had with the former Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries.
Queipo described the measures the Cuban government has taken, such as legalizing the use of foreign currency and increasing foreign investments, as necessary to deal with an economic decline triggered by the collapse of aid and trade at preferential prices from the former Soviet Union.
At the Kenworth picket line, one striker described the daily living conditions of Cubans as deplorable, judging from her own visit there as a tourist.
Queipo answered, "Let me use myself as an example. I have a university degree. My family lives in a modest but comfortable house. I am Black. Before 1959, my family lived in very difficult conditions because of racial discrimination. It is because of the revolution that everyone has the same opportunity to live a decent life."
If that is the case, asked a student at the Dawson cegep meeting, why do so many people want to leave Cuba?
"Many people leave Cuba for the same economic reasons as in other third world countries," answered Barroso. When "the economic situation became very difficult, many Cubans were not ready to support that."
"But for many years," she added, "the U.S. government encouraged people to leave Cuba illegally. There are as many immigrants from Haiti who go to the United States. But Washington uses the emigration from Cuba to create a scandal out of the revolution because we defend our dignity and our socialist revolution."
In every meeting there were many questions about the reappearance of prostitution in Cuba.
"With the intensification of the special period," said Barroso, "we lack things that tourists can bring with them or buy with dollars in Cuba. These young women do it to get goods that Cuba is not able to provide.
"We are doing an intense ideological work to explain that they don't need to prostitute themselves in order to survive. What they obtain is not worth the dignity they lose," she added.
At the end of a wrap-up meeting with the committee organizing the visit, Queipo was asked by a tour activist what struck him the most in his first visit to a capitalist country.
"I was surprised," he answered, "to see that in such a rich country like Canada, they close hospitals and plants without any explanation. Coming here has been a deeper experience than any book or movie to understand what is capitalism."
Victoria Mercer is a member of the Young Socialists. Michel Prairie is a coordinator of the Montreal Cuban Youth Tour Committee. Monica Jones, a striker at Kenworth, contributed to this article.