Cuba addresses its "lost" young people (Juventud Rebelde, Nov. 7, 2004)

Juventud Rebelde
November 7, 2004
Translated for CubaNews from by Ana Portela.

The found link
They were spectacular and complex changes. The social reinsertion of young people separated from studies or work gave back tranquility and dreams, but not all assimilated the change nor was society prepared for this phenomenon. Experience in the Eastern provinces that demonstrated how much can be done in this matter made it a moot point of analysis in the VIII Congress of the Young Communist League (UJC).
By Osviel Castro Medel

Manzanillo.- “It’s true, I sold dollars in the street” he admitted with an expression of remorse after the incisive question. “For ten years I was unemployed and at the time I invented means of earning money”, he remarks.

His confessions seem doubtful today in the narrow office that filled that October day with student leaders whose backgrounds had also been uncertain.

At the time, none of them were integrated to “institutional life” and he himself was involved in dubious economic activities to which he was prone – according to his own words – to move towards worse things.

“Legally my house was maintained with my father’s salary: a little over a hundred pesos a month. I had been a shoe repairman for several years but I didn’t make enough money in this private work and took to selling foreign currency in the streets. I improved my finances, my clothing and shoes; I don’t deny that. But, emotionally I was never calm.

TURNING POINT

The interesting revelations of this 31-year-old young man whose name is Jorge Luis Bigñotte, moved in a similar situation.

“Something like this happened to me; I was working in a private cafeteria in Matanzas, I ‘struggled’ along in different things and came back a vagrant, with a great spiritual void”, Miguel comments.

“I helped my husband in his photography; I did some work as a domestic that gave me some earnings. But I wasn’t well inside”, Yailés tells us.

“I spent five years separated from work; I worked the land for a while but I felt useless and lost”, Ivan points out.

A peace of spirit … the turn about in the lives of Jorge Luis and his colleagues that are gathered together in the small little room of the FEEM^{^[*]} local of the UJC in Matanzas came about in September of 2001 when they enrolled in the Course of Integral Training for Young People, a project that has been the compass for a change in the lives not only for those who had no work or study links.

There are, for example, the stirring stories of Liliobel Ortiz, a 30 year old mother in Yara municipality who with health problems and almost a decade of work as a kitchen helper is today an outstanding student of Law, the same career she had to abandon when her mother became seriously ill.

“I went through a terrible depression because I lost my parents; my former husband was in Prison and later died. The classroom relieved my physical and emotional ills”, she explains.

But much more than the individual changes like those of this young woman and Jorge Luis who is, today, a militant of the UJC and municipal president of FEEM, are the collective mutations.

Programs of this kind, not understood at first, changed completely the Cuban social map. They became strategies to attenuate and prevent ills such as parasitism on a group level.

In a region such as Manzanillo that had the highest rate of unemployment, close to ten percent, this experience helped to clean the social environment and improve the general projection of its inhabitants, specially the young people.

“The black market vendors have not completely disappeared but the city has less ‘contaminated’ corners; there are more people talking of useful matters, of future university careers, of courses and books. "Some were on the wrong road …” Jorge admits.

Putting pencil to paper, the test of change is in the two years of the experience in Manzanillo. According to official records, there were about 1 200 persons between the ages of 16 to 29 who did not work or study and today, this figure has dropped to 500.

“In May of 2002, in Granma province, there were 12 700 young people unrelated and now there are about 2 420” affirms Mailedys Borrero, the social worker who attends this sphere in her command post of the province.

“From this number, 214 have expressed their wish not to be incorporated in studies or useful work for society, but we continue with the persuasion, that always bears fruit”.

NO MIRAGES

The course … that unknown and beautiful purpose for studying has not been the only means for young persons who were not studying or working.

Recently thousands of young people around the country, stimulated by other advantageous programs have become emergent teachers of Physical Education or in construction, or gastronomy, or hospitals, beauty salons and barbershops, urban vegetable gardens and other agricultural work.

For five years Lester, for example, was a fritter vendor in front of the Secondary School of Cauto Cristo and, today, is an acknowledged professor of Physical Education in that same school.

And Oslaida was an occasional manicurist and, for six years, was not doing anything. Today she is an efficient dental assistant in the Bayamo polyclinic.

Both agree that the barrio and they have changed their skins. “My street was the most boring in the world, chock full of housewives talking of the same things every day. These talk clubs don’t exist anymore”, she concludes.

For Frank Ferrer, head of Social Work in Granma, the cause of a reduction of unemployment of young people – and, consequently, the tendency to crime and “inventions – lies the taking advantage, to a maximum, of the social programs.

“There is a close link between our front, the Labor Ministry in the province and the Education Direction; we study and search for variants on a daily basis so that there are no young people in limbo or vagrancy”.

However, he acknowledges, there is a latent possibility that some of these young people may be active agents of the underground economy during the day – vendors of bicycle inner tubes or some other article – and students in some night courses or vice versa. In these cases, there can be no illusion or excessive praise and a critical view becomes necessary.

“For this reason, in Granma, we have begun to visit each of the young people and not only those unrelated to work or studies. We want to learn of the opinion of each one, what are their plans, what they want, how they see the present and the future.

“When we have concluded this laborious and ambitious task we will be better prepared to carry out our social work”, Ferrer explained.

Another side of the problem is the desire to incorporate the younger ones, perhaps a part of the 30 or more year old segment of the population may be forgotten and whose amazing indifference to our programs is evident.

And a tender point, that requires serious and pertinent analysis, refers to young people who have no job options after concluding their studies in polytechnics, schools of specialized and conduct workers.

“From these centers and the Military Service many young people come out without a job or receive job offers not related to their profession. These are the main sources of unemployment in the under 25 year group”, Frank added.

From this reality, other projects arose for these segments, recently announced by the direction of the country. Cuba is living a constant revolution.

DREAMS

There is nothing worse than living in spiritual solitude, without dreams and concrete goals. Jorge Luis, Miguel, Lili… were in this position until they were touched by the new programs of the Revolution. Others, like Lester, already crossed the dreamed of portals.

This morning Miguel thinks of himself dressed in the whites of the physician, Lili with an imposing toga and Jorge with a keyboard in front, like a happy computer scientist.

This was the correct result of this national awakening of thoughts and achievements that has now gone on for five years: give gifts of individual and collective gifts to parts of the population that never looked beyond the horizon.

^{^[*]} FEEM is the federation of secondary school students