Cuban youth and student organizations initiated the exchange by inviting young people from the United States to visit Cuba July 22–30. Nearly 160 youth responded to the opportunity to meet their counterparts in Cuba and gain firsthand knowledge of the revolution. In August a group of youth from the United States joined 6,500 others from around the globe for the world youth festival in Algiers, Algeria. Speaking on the panel were Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange participants Seth Dellinger, Elizabeth Olsen, and Jack Willey, who also attended the World Festival of Youth and Students. Several other youth who participated in the youth exchange spoke from the floor during the discussion.

Luis Miranda from Casa de las Americas opened the event by pointing to the importance of the youth returning from Cuba getting a chance to speak to as many people as possible about what they saw and learned in Cuba. "We live in a city where a disaster took place," Miranda said. "We have to feel very, very sad about it. But we also feel nothing but indignation about those killed in the bombing of Iraq and Yugoslavia, and of the indiscriminate slaughter of the Palestinians. We feel for the children of Vieques, who are terrorized by U.S. Navy bombing. We feel deeply about the question of terrorism because our people in Cuba have faced terrorism for 40 years."

From the bombing in Havana harbor and of a department store in Cuba's capital city as Washington escalated its military and economic aggression in the early 1960s seeking to overturn the Cuban Revolution, to the uncovering of a plot by CIA-trained terrorist Luis Posada Carriles and several other rightists to assassinate Cuban president Fidel Castro while at the Ibero-American Summit in Panama City last November, the Cuban people have faced violence organized and condoned by Washington for more than 40 years, Miranda said. Cuban officials gave Panamanian authorities detailed information on the terrorists in Panama who were planning to attack Castro and asked they be arrested as swiftly as possible.

Posada boasted to the New York Times in 1998 that he had been trained by the CIA to take part in the unsuccessful U.S.-organized invasion of Cuba by 1,500 Cuban-born mercenaries at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Afterward, he told reporters, he was recruited by the CIA to carry out assassination attempts on Cuban leaders. Together with notorious counterrevolutionary Orlando Bosch, Posada was arrested and sentenced in Venezuela to 27 years for the 1976 midair bombing of a Cubana de Aviación airplane off the coast of Barbados, killing all 73 passengers and crew, many of them teenage members of Cuba's fencing team. Posada, who had connections both in the CIA and Venezuelan secret police, was allowed to escape prison in Venezuela in 1985.

Miranda also spoke about the case of the five Cubans convicted in Miami for gathering information on individuals and organizations in Florida responsible for terrorist attacks on Cuba (see article page 13). "This they were doing and do not deny it," Miranda said. "However, they did not do many other things they are accused of, such as spying on U.S. space missions."  
 
Battle of ideas
Seth Dellinger, a participant in the Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange, spoke about what is known today in Cuba as the "battle of ideas." He said that Cuban youth organizations such as the Union of Young Communists were carrying this out in a number of ways, such as through "promoting a dialogue about which social system is better for the majority of working people: socialism or capitalism. Members of the delegation were also able to see new social programs being developed, such as the Latin American School of Medicine, where young people without financial resources from around the world come to study medicine and then return to their communities to serve as doctors. Another example is the school of social work," Dellinger said, "where young people work with other youth who have become alienated and have dropped out of school or gotten in trouble and ended up in jail. Over all, I was impressed by the openness I found among government officials on all levels to discuss the social problems Cuba faces and how they can be resolved."

Dellinger said that what he learned in Cuba helped prepare him to understand how to respond to Washington's war moves in the wake of the September 11 events. "Cuba is able to look at this attack, deplore it, and then talk objectively about the problem of terrorism in the world, including how the U.S. itself uses terror when it thinks that will serve its purpose, whether it is the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or carrying out attacks in Cuba. The U.S. government can only use the attack to step up its military interventions abroad," he said.

Pointing to recent protests and vigils in New York where people have raised placards saying "Islam is not the enemy," and "War is not the answer," Dellinger asked, "What is the enemy? Not 'fanaticism.' And what is the answer? Cuba is the answer and what happened in Cuba can happen here."

Describing his experience at the world youth festival in Algiers, Jack Willey said, "More than 6,000 fighters against imperialism from around the world came together at the event." When the news came of a massive Israeli military assault against Palestinian areas in the occupied West Bank, a spontaneous demonstration erupted at the main discussion center of the festival. There were wide-ranging discussions on the struggle for land by peasants around the world, he said, such as in Brazil, where members of the Movement of Rural Landless Workers spoke about the occupations of estates by peasants and rural workers. Festival participants from South Africa and Namibia also helped highlight the pressing need for a land reform across southern Africa. The land reform in Cuba, he said, made possible through the socialist revolution in the early 1960s, was seen as an example to many participants in the festival.

Following the festival Willey and others were able to visit the refugee camps of Western Sahara, organized by the Polisario Front, which is leading the Sahrawi independence struggle. This, and other struggles for national liberation and against imperialist oppression and exploitation, marked the Algiers meeting, Willey said.

"The World Trade Center attack is being used by the U.S. government to go after workers' rights," he said. "This is coming at a time of spreading resistance by workers and farmers. The "homeland defense" that the rulers are putting together will be used to accelerate the miltarization of the United States and ultimately be used to go after the political rights of workers and farmers."  
 
'That's just the way it is'
"Before I went to Cuba I decided not to go with any pre-conceived notions in order not to be disappointed or to see things that weren't really there," said Elizabeth Olsen. But what she saw there made a deep impression on her, such as the land reform, the high level of literacy and importance of education, availability of health care, the human approach of doctors to their work, the lack of homelessness and access to housing, and the level of political awareness, even among the youngest generations of the population.

"In the United States," Olsen said, "you are always told, 'there is poverty, prejudice and racism and that's just the way it is, these things will always be with us.' But in Cuba, no one talks like this. In Cuba they do something about it and there is hope that the world can be different."  
 
 
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