Cuba / Cuban Affairs

I have been thinking about the realities unfolding in Cuba that deeply concern me.

We tend to think in broad categories: the people, the population, society. Yet all of those categories are made up of individual human beings whose lives are not only real but unique. Their joys, their suffering, their hunger, their needs, their dreams, their present, and their future are all deeply personal. Their time is also unique and irreplaceable. Once it is gone, it never returns.

That is why I am troubled by the situations I encounter—situations that shape not only the present but also the future of the real people who live in this land.

I am concerned about youth illiteracy. For years I have witnessed teenagers who read like beginning readers, unable to read fluently and unable to understand what they can barely pronounce. But increasingly I am meeting young people who, quite literally, do not know how to read.

Their teachers, following directives from the Ministry of Education that prohibit failing any student, whether or not they have acquired the required knowledge, have promoted them from one grade to the next year after year. But artificially passing students does not make up for a lack of basic skills, and the number of teenagers and young people who cannot read continues to grow.

Adding to this is the increasingly common practice of teachers handing out exams and then immediately dictating the answers. Not to mention the decision made during this most recent school year to eliminate final examinations altogether. The lack of motivation and apathy toward learning that this creates is like a virus quietly incubating. For now, our children feel fine—even happy—without realizing that countless opportunities are being closed off to them in the future.

 I am concerned about child and adolescent labor: children selling goods to help support their parents or begging for money and food; teenagers making charcoal in makeshift kilns while trying to avoid the forestry authorities so they will not be fined. These are childhoods and adolescences being lost forever in the midst of poverty and necessity.

I am concerned about the spread of drugs among our young people, and I am alarmed by the media’s silence on this issue—the taboo placed above the truth, political image valued more highly than the salvation of our youth.

I am concerned about all those people who are no longer receiving even their already meager wages because “there is no money,” as though that explanation could somehow spare them from hunger and need. I am concerned about the many people—many of them elderly—whose money is deposited onto bank cards that force them to stand in long lines outside banks, hoping to collect an amount equivalent to barely two U.S. dollars. Many travel from distant towns only to return home empty-handed because there is no cash, no electricity, or no functioning connection.

And I am concerned about the growing violence—open, shameless, and unpunished—that is plunging our cities into fear and insecurity, and above all into vulnerability and helplessness. No one does anything because no one wants to “get into trouble.” And that “no one” includes the police, who are swift and efficient when it comes to acting against those who publicly protest, yet completely incapable of guaranteeing the safety of the ordinary people—the real men and women who make up this people.

Yes, I am concerned about my people. I am concerned about the present and the future of the individual human beings who make up this people.