The meeting was organized by the Australia-Cuba Friendship Society, and sponsored by a number of unions and political organizations. In his four-day visit, Rivero also spoke at a New South Wales (NSW) parliamentary reception, at the University of NSW, and at similar events in Melbourne.

The Battle of Ideas is a wide-ranging political and educational effort, he explained, through which the leadership in Cuba aims to advance the proletarian course of the revolution. This is a political battle to win new generations of youth to help lead the struggle to deepen the revolution and to confront the imperialist ideological drive that promotes capitalism and its individualist, "dog-eat-dog" values.

The Battle of Ideas, he said, aims to make education and culture more widely accessible to all generations in Cuba. Rivero explained that it grew out of large mobilizations in 1999 and 2000 protesting the refusal of the U.S. government to return Elián González to Cuba.

This effort is based on the "indispensable condition of the first literacy campaign that enabled all Cubans to read and write," said Rivero. At the time of the revolution’s triumph in 1959, one in four adults was illiterate. In 1961, more than 200,000 mainly high school students were mobilized into even the remotest parts of the country, despite murderous counterrevolutionary attacks, to teach a million people to read and write, while participating in the labor of farm and home.

These and ongoing advances in education were part of a "mobilization of human resources" by the country’s revolutionary government, said Rivero. The Cuban government is presently working toward a goal of one teacher for instruction in all courses up to grade nine, and no more than 20 students per teacher.  
 
Revolutionary social workers
Rivero cited the results of a recent UNESCO study of Latin American education standards which placed Cuba, with more than 90 points out of 100, well ahead of second-placed Argentina, which scored just over 70 points.

At the time of the revolution, said the youth leader, "there were three universities; now there are 72." Today 1 million students are placed in 9,000 primary schools, half a million are studying in some 1,000 lower secondary schools, and 405,000 are enrolled at around 1,000 upper secondary schools. By September, the government will have opened 82 new primary schools and all schools will have a video player, a television set, and a computer for each class, he said.

"A developing force of young people" who are revolutionary social workers are carrying out projects on a community level, collaborating with families to solve a range of social problems, Rivero said. These and other youth organized by the UJC recently arranged a series of house visits across the country to discuss and evaluate questions such as housing, the quality of services, and what television programs are useful.

Over the past several months the youth have been able to visit all households that include children of up to 15 years of age, of whom there are some 2.5 million. In the same period, 20,000 university students visited all dwellings in the capital of Havana, a city of more than 2 million people. Two weeks ago, in just five days, 545,000 retired people across the country who have monthly incomes of less than 100 pesos were visited in their homes.

Some 120,000 people between the ages of 17 and 29 years are neither working nor studying, Rivero said. Many of these are being asked to study in computer science and English while being paid a salary. "So long as Cuba doesn’t have work for them, their job is to study," he explained. The goal of the revolution is to have "no young person in Cuba who is neither working nor studying."  
 
‘Internationalist spirit’
At the University of NSW lunchtime meeting, in response to a question about Ernesto Che Guevara, the outstanding Argentine-born leader of the Cuban revolution, Rivero emphasized the "universal importance of the internationalist spirit inherited from Che." This is expressed in the Cuban missions to aid liberation struggles in Africa, he said. It is still reflected today, as more than 2,000 Cuban doctors are serving "in some of the most inaccessible regions of the world."

In answer to questions about solidarity with Cuba and defense of the five Cubans imprisoned in U.S. jails, Rivero responded that the "communist youth of Cuba" are helping to lead the international movement to free the five. These revolutionaries have been framed up on conspiracy charges. They were in the United States working to alert Havana of attacks being organized by rightist counterrevolutionary outfits. "The best gesture of solidarity is to participate in this battle," he said.

Over the last decade the U.S. government had tried to exacerbate the economic hardships in Cuba resulting from the collapse of trade and aid with the Soviet Union and countries in Eastern Europe by passing "laws to tighten the blockade and impose it on third countries," said Rivero. He was responding to a question about U.S.-Cuba relations. The economic embargo has been imposed on the Cuban people by U.S. imperialism for more than four decades with the goal of strangling the revolution.

At a time when the U.S. rulers are striving to "become the lords of the world," Rivero said, revolutionary Cuba is "ready to continue on the same road to defend our conquests and our independence, and ready to defy this great enemy."

Ron Poulsen is a member of the Maritime Union of Australia. Alasdair MacDonald is a member of the Young Socialists.
 
 
Related articles:
Cuban tours New Zealand to build support for five revolutionaries held in U.S. prisons  
 
 
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