Educational Crisis in Cuba
Encienosa, Enrique
Youth Against Castro Educational Crisis in Cuba Enrique Encienosa Fidel Castro has ruled Cuba for a dozen years. Therefore, an eight-year-old child when Castro took over the government, would now...
...Guido Garcia Inclan, spokesman for the government, stated in a broadcast on Radio Havana-Cuba that the students at the University of Havana refer to the city's Central Park as Miami...
...Therefore, an eight-year-old child when Castro took over the government, would now be twenty...
...These exiled students represent a strong factor in the war against Castro...
...Incaln admitted that he feels many thousands of youths would like to leave Cuba and join 600,000 exiles in the United States...
...Student Revolutionary Directorate...
...Several thousand Cuban exiles in American colleges have banded together to form the FEC (Cuban Student Federation) dedicated to the liberation of Cuba...
...Campaneria died before a firing squad, while the twenty-one year old Muller was condemned to twenty years imprisonment for his defiance...
...For if it could propagandize by radio and in other ways help those rebellious students inside Cuba it could create a serious crisis inside Cuba-a crisis not only in the present Cuban educational system, but throughout the Cuban government...
...Only a year after taking over the country, Castro was faced with eliminating many of those students who had once supported him...
...But even with the careful selection of a privileged elite to attain a higher education, university students in Castro's Cuba have been everything but submissive in their actions...
...Yet, the Castro government seems to have failed in its educational goals...
...With the indoctrination methods used by the communists in their school systems, one would logically expect that most Cuban youths of today are adherents to marxist ideology...
...Further, they have collected money for the cause of a Cuba "without a firing wall...
...Among these youths, there are many who arrived in exile while only young children, and remember little about their country...
...Hopefully, this student exile organization will become well-organized...
...For it was the students, believing Castro to be a democratic leader, who swelled Castro's guerilla units, while Batista was still in power...
...The students then regrouped into an organization called the D.R.E...
...Bortel's reward was a forty-two year prison sentence for "counterrevolutionary crimes...
...Inclan also complained that "youths always have a derisive joke to make against our revolution...
...Because of this, enrollments have decreased almost seventy percent in the last ten years, anti-communist professors have been expelled from their jobs and often jailed, textbooks have to be in accord with government policies, and the standard of education is constantly changed to suit the government's need...
...There have been more than twenty riots in five years protesting the poor quality of education, mass indoctrination, and the arrests of students who are suspected of belonging to anti-government resistance movements...
...The FEC has lobbied in Congress, organized rallies, prepared exhibits of photographs and charts denouncing Castro as a totalitarian...
...The students' anti-government feelings are apparent at many of the more than eight thousand schools and one dozen universities in Cuba...
...Minister of Education Armando Hart stated recently, that because eighty thousand students between the ages of fourteen and twenty refuse to attend classes, "Oriente Province should be declared to be in a state of educational alarm...
...and arrested hundreds of students in a large raid...
...Encienosa is a Cuban refugee and an undergraduate at Purdue University...
...University students were among the first opponents of the regime...
...There are those who maintain that, as long as students oppose Castro, there is hope for a free Cuba...
...In present day Cuba, only those students who are considered good communists are permitted to attend the university...
...Indications point to a strong feeling of rebellion among both university and pre-university students...
...In 1960, Porfereo Ramerez, a former Castro guerilla, who was elected President of the Student Federation at Santa Clara University led a revolt in the Escambray Mountains of Central Cuba, until he was captured and executed...
...But after Batista fled the country, the students' demands for free elections and a constitutional government were ignored...
...Other members are veterans of the resistance, the ill-fated Bay of Pigs Invasion, and graduates of Castro's concentration camps...
...Two years later, Castro smashed the D.R.E...
...Pedro Luis Bortel, another student leader publicly opposed communist tactics and indoctrination programs...
...The province of Oriente was the section of Cuba where Fidel Castro was born and where he started guerilla warfare against the Batista regime...
...Two other student leaders of the D.R.E., Alberto Muller and Virgilio Campaneria, fled to the United States to save their lives, returning clandestinely to bring weapons and to organize insurrection...
...For it is from the universities that the government will have to draw its future leaders in administration and technology...
...Both were captured...
Vol. 4 • April 1971 • No. 5
