A few days after the Líder Máximo’s passing, a film, Santa y Andrés, best symbolizes the dilemmas that are troubling the children and, in particular, the grandchildren of the barbudos, who brought forth the events in 1959. In a small village, the government instructs a peasant woman faithful to the Revolution to watch a dissident homosexual writer. A particular and deep relationship grows between the two. The questions the film suggests are: Can one hate a stranger just because he/she thinks differently? Are we defined by ideology? Is it really necessary to take sides?
The candid and moving salute to Fidel Castro by thousands of young Cuban renders a true picture of the latest generation supporting the ideals of the Revolution, which seizes its opportunities and faces its daily difficulties with a strong conviction that accepting Cuba’s isolation under the leadership of the Party is the great strength of their small country.
At the other extreme, many young Cubans no longer believe that living a life of sacrifice happily in isolation like their grandparents is either a value or a strength. They are disenchantedand rebel as to their choices and manner of expression. The only options they see are doing nothing or emigrating.
In the middle there is a third group, which watches closely how the world changes, and wants to openly discuss the contradictions within their identity, culture and economy, and which calls for urgent changes while not giving up what Cuba has built.
Harold Cárdenas Lema confirmed what he wrote on the college students’ blog: “The country that produced the most charismatic leader of the last century and made beards fashionable is finding it difficult to take the lead and act. The number of young people joining [official] youth organizations is decreasing, young people prefer Facebook to students’ meetings (…) but our [leaders] reply that everything is fine.”
For those born in the ’90s the difficulty of having a vision of the future lies in the very virtues of the socialist economy extolled by the government and the only party: “The only way to fight the vices of representative democracy is the single-party, at least as long as society will not be mature enough;” or, “in Cuba, a physician earning a salary of $30 a month lives much better than one in other parts of the world, because the state will always take care of his basic needs, work, health, education and housing, irrespective of age.”
With a monthly salary of $ 30 all you can buy is a T-shirt, say, on the other end, the young people, rappers, rockers and hipsters, who meet in the evening at Parque G in Havana. “To study to become a professional, or work or do anything in this country is therefore not worthwhile.” A young woman who is studying to become a nurse told interviewers from Montalvan & Associates that that salary would only buy her “a couple of bars of soap,” and that that is the reason why at night she walks the streets with the approval of her parents to be able to buy herself clothes and feed herself.
The lyrics of Los Aldeanos or those of well-known rapper Silvito tell these stories. Gorki Aguila, a rock singer, believes “the Castro dynasty must end”, because it made people believe that there’s nothing beyond survival. They all appreciate the universal opportunity to get an education, but it’s what comes after that is discouraging. “Despite all my efforts to become a lawyer,” said Laritza Diversent to the interviewers, “with 275 pesos a month not even in 50 years could I buy a house.” Diversent founded a legal counselling service on her own.
Walking around Havana you will often see a basket hanging from a higher floor, from which you can buy what a micro-entrepreneur is selling from home, pizza for example. These “on your own” activities continue to grow with imagination — or the desire to build something and “not just survive.” Parlours like the Café de los Artistas (you could be in Barcelona or Milan) and travel agencies catering to local tourists — the cuentapropistas who are the only social group besides the elite to be able to save — or to foreigners who want to see “Cuba beyond the resorts” plus artisans, musicians, and taxi drivers.
Young people gather by the dozens with their mobile phones around the only Wi-Fi hotspot available (the internet costs about $7 an hour compared to a monthly wage of $22, and has a 2% penetration). Some Cuban websites, such as Dreamcatchers, already have more than 16,000 users in spite of their basic servers and infrastructures. The contents are passed around with USBs. “The new cultural revolution might as well start in the parks,” said writer Juan Antonio García Borrero.
This change of mentality does not spread easily to all population groups. “A majority of Cubans knows that aside from the ‘external’ embargo, we had also an internal one, the ‘NOs’ everywhere, prohibitions and impossibilities, “wrote journalist Katia Siberia in her ironic roster of the embargo’s “worst” and “best”. “The worst, in addition to the embargo itself, was that we believe it is normal to live accustomed to ‘not being able’ and ‘not having’, to hear the world say NO, and to continue unalterable and embargoed, adapted as the best of the species” .
Repairing one’s home or building a new one is prohibited without permits — and prohibitive because a bag of cement can cost a full monthly wage. Due to the housing scarcity many young people and young couples are forced to live with their families.
A coming crisis is best rendered by a popular joke: “A teacher asks the children what they want to be when they grow up. One says astronaut, another teacher, doctor and… ‘a foreigner’.” Cuba faces a demographic catastrophe because the younger generation tend to migrate or to skip having children. The abortion rate at childbearing age is 30/1000, twice that in the US, according to UN figures. The 15-29 age group population is among the lowest in Latin America, at a low 17%.
Suicide is the ninth leading cause of death in Cuba in general, but the third among the age group 10-19 and the fourth among the 15-49 group, according to 2014 data; and while the overall rate of emigration has more than doubled since 2000, the young people’s share of it is over 30%.
“My generation does not believe in anything. Living conditions have improved, but there is much corruption. Raúl chose to some extent the path of openness, but it is not open or fast enough to keep up with the real world,” said Generation Y blogger, Yoani Sánchez, who was attacked and beaten for relaying her take on Cuba.
The Havana Film Festival censored the film Santa y Andrés by director Carlos Lechuga just a few weeks after some local journalists reporting on Hurricane Matthew’s trail of destruction were arrested.
“To put it in Lenin’s words,” quips professor and director Eduardo del Llano, “we take one step forward and two backwards. The historical mistakes depicted in that film affected – and still affect – a lot of people. The censors want to eternalize a state of emergency in which independent projects are not only inconvenient but also a crime, in other words, the notion that history and our lives are to be designed top-down”.
Now that Fidel is for many Cubans already “in the past, condemned to the twentieth century”, as Sanchez put it last August, and despite the likelihood that another Castro could take the reins of power after Raúl, the debate among intellectuals and students who want to adapt to current times while preserving whatever the positive achievement of Cuban socialism are could revive. According to historian Pedro Pablo Rodríguez, the country “is not offering a real model for us on how to join a world [where capitalism is evolving] while preserving our national traits, modernity and our more just society.”
Cárdenas, the student, believes that in Cuba “a majority of young people are not participating actively in politics because what they see is not credible.” He would like “Granma and Juventud Rebelde to feature the debate, but that’s impossible. What made the Revolution a social and thought movement continues to be proscribed causing an immeasurable pain within the revolutionary left.”
