Taking Note
DM
Recapturing Cuba's Disenchanted Youth One April evening in Havana, I joined Pedro Luis, a 21year-old Cuban, to view a television documentary about Cuban TV shows from the 1950s. Interviews...
...It is these new generations who are going to live in the country in the future, so they must be incorporated as fully as possible in the search for solutions," says Julio Carranza, deputy director of the Center for the Study of the Americas...
...The malec6n-Havana's boardwalk-is packed on Saturday nights with teenagers drinking rum, and listening to rock and rap music blared from car radios...
...These circles of youth are apparently experimenting with marijuana and barbituates, a completely new phenomenon in socialist Cuba...
...As we watched, Pedro Luis regularly interjected with scornful comments...
...The future offered only uncertainty...
...Many others have sunk into indifference and apathy-rejecting all things political...
...Did I know that actors and television programming had been adversely affected by the post-1989 "special period...
...And why do they always show old programs on television anyway...
...Since what the future holds is not clear," Maria Isabel Dominguez says, "these young people have decided to enjoy the present and satisfy their immediate needs...
...That too, he declared, was the fault of how hard life had become in Cuba...
...The economic crisis that erupted in 1989 hit these young people particularly hard...
...But disenchantment with the revolution is a more common response...
...Without warning, they witnessed the collapse of what everyone had told them would be eternal...
...For them, the pre-1959 capitalist era is the stuff of history books...
...Others are exploring avenues for softer exiles, reflected in the growing incidence of arranged marriages with foreigners abroad...
...The participation of youth in Catholicism has grown due to the government's recent relaxation of restrictions on religious activity in general and the Church's savvy outreach to youth...
...Why was there this obsession with the past...
...Over the course of their lives, they have experienced a slow, but seemingly inexorable rise in their standard of living...
...A minority are seeking ways to leave the island...
...Pedro Luis' stewing, inchoate anger is typical of the alienation that many young people in Cuba feel today toward what remains of the Cuban revolution...
...Young, single men were disproportionately represented among the balseros last summer...
...If not, it will be very difficult to arrive at a consensus so that young people feel that the national project is theirs and move it forward...
...Overnight, they saw their possibilities for material and professional advancement, and their hopes for social development, fade...
...Look at how Cuban actors have aged, Pedro Luis said, pointing accusingly at the television set...
...ome young people have reacted to this turn of events by redoubling their efforts to renovate socialism from within the traditional mass organizations such as the Communist Youth (JC...
...Did I know that people who had set up satellite dishes to capture broadcast signals from the United States had had their equipment confiscated...
...We made them as they are, by omission or commission...
...Free, universal education and health care-which earlier generations considered significant achievements-were part of normal, daily reality for this younger generation," explains sociologist Maria Isabel Domfnguez...
...As Fidel Castro and the Communist Party search for ways out of the economic crisis, it is the needs and values of these young Cubans that they must take into account-or ignore at their peril...
...Many have been drawn to religion...
...They are our responsibility...
...A poker-thin, whitehaired actor appeared on the screen, reminiscing about the comedy show that he had appeared in some 40 years earlier...
...Don't they know that young people want new dramas...
...Today over half the Cuban population is under age 30...
...This generation of Cubans was formed entirely by and within the revolution...
...If the revolution is to survive and thrive in this new era, it must draw these young people into the debate about Cuba's future which is currently raging in the Communist Party and among intellectuals on the island...
...The revolution told them that they had the best, and encouraged them to believe that things would only get better...
...Looking for ways to partake of the Western way of life that they see in the island's tourism sector and 90 miles across the Florida straits, some young women have turned to prostitution while other young people have fallen into petty crime...
...For better or worse, the fate of the Cuban revolution-and the shape that it will take-rests, in large measure, in the hands of its progeny...
...Interviews with the now-elderly actors were interspersed with clips from the old shows...
...They were not born out of thin air...
...These young people are our sons and daughters," says Ambrosio Fornet, a Cuban novelist and screenwriter in his 60s...
Vol. 29 • July 1995 • No. 1
