Youth in Cuban Anti-Revolution - Case Study Example

Youth in Cuban Anti-Revolution Approximately half a century has gone by since the beginning of the revolution in Cuba as it carries on to incite strong reactions, continuous mentions and opposing elucidations. The Sixties are equally controversial, as the historical heroes are challenged by researchers from the modern age group, who have a very cloudy commemoration of that era but still have went on to research and argue about the happenings in that historical time. The key factors that consolidate and connect the island of Cuba and the decade of the Sixties are matters surrounding the youth. The youth, the decade of 1960 and the Cuban Revolution are triple coordinates that this research will mainly focus on. However there will be focus on the arguments posed by the scholars of this modern era about the occurrences that took place since the inception of Cuban Revolution. The association among these three is frequently taken for granted since not much investigation has been put into action regarding the initial years of the uprising. The purpose is not to highlight remarkable youth cultures like it has always been the situation through research into youth but to delve into roles of the youth in Cuban revolution. As an alternative this will prove how the young populace in Cuba engaged in recreation of their own destiny by becoming agents of transformation in their individual right, but then again how they cruised through a changing culture. During the events, their actions exaggerated and reformed that culture, by changing the development of the Revolution especially in the 1960s gradual rather than enacted. The Place of Youths in Cuban Revolution Prominence of the youth in Cuba was fueled by the dissatisfaction they had with their parents in which the latter did not act to exercise and demand for their rights. The communities were becoming more populated with the young population hence making their numbers grow substantially day by day. The youths’ confidence with regard to the power of their figures, was growing and precisely since better youth pay showed that there was a readily available market for them. Higher education was growing so a group personality was emerging. And to end with, the youths were responding to the non-judgmental assertiveness of their parents, which prolonged youthful recklessness in educational matters and beyond. This classification of youth came up by branding their positions in the community with regard to their function and activities in the decades of 1960s and 1970s. There was profoundness about the advancement of the conception and role of the youth in the Revolution. Consequently, a much-refined picture appears in which assumptions essential to some prior considerations must be separated. The parting of ways and disintegration between Revolution and the youth originates at a certain point and gives the impression of building an assumption rather than actuality. Some critics who agreed to this distinction examined that, without considering the age of the governance, Cuba was encompassed with a young generation which even affected the ideologies of the veterans who were in the government since youths’ demands were growing by the day and policymaking had to focus on their needs and expectations. The society was flooded by youths who wanted to know and exercise their rights especially students from educational institutions who had the foundation of schooling stood their grounds when it came to revolutionizing the country. This was the culture of the youth saturating the Cuban society (Skierka 210). The Non-Social Cuban Revolution The notion that a real revolution took place in Cuba was convinced by the world-shattering exhilaration that the supporters of Fidel Castro had spread in the country. This was based on crucial misconceptions which misled the world into thinking that Cuba made it to the promised land of independence. In the midst of these fallacies was the misconception that a social revolution was able to occur in nations which are located in tiny semi-developed islands, a nation bearing inhabitants of around eight million, and painstakingly as well as entirely reliant on the never-ending flow of important provisions originating from Russian and the United States of America, the super-powers of the world. The assumption that these independent super-powers, who have their own agendas, would not begin to serve their own personal interests by taking advantage of the island’s political and social status was false. There might be no substantial evidence about this catastrophic impracticality than Castros ingratiating defiance in the direction of his sponsor, the Soviet Union, which went beyond the support he had about the attack on Czechoslovakia in the year 1968 by Russia, a wrongdoing undoubtedly on the same level with the military takeover that took place in Chile. In this coup, ironically Fidel Castro rightfully condemned. Moreover, the assumption that the social revolution that took place in Cuba could be inexplicably realized without concurrent revolutions in places like Latin America and in other places, is equally ingenuous and reckless (Sweig 249) The Classification of the Youths In the initial stages of the Revolution there were categorizations of youths that took place. These were mainly labor force, students, farmworkers, middle classes, as well as the youth. By this grouping it can be expounded that the groups were created with regard to identity foundation. The groupings that were formed were of significant value to the revolution regardless of their nature so long as the youth symbol is part of the discourse. This created a revolutionary theme in the sociopolitical arena as youth groups had a vital impact on the choices made in the society (Thomas 270). When Fidel Castro spoke out in the year 1959, he positioned those groups in such a way that it meant that the revolution was indebted to and dependent on them. In his speech he expressed that the Cuban national trust is thrust on the active cooperation of its citizens especially its labor force, farmworkers, middle classes, scholars as well as the young people. Fidel Castro eventually recapped this in another address clarifying why self-proclaimed illustrative democracy had been unsuccessful to eradicate illiteracy. He did this by giving the cases in point on the USA as well as Venezuela. He explained that both democracies were unreal if they did not have the support of the workers, students and the public in general whoa always display universal generosity and courage to solve their own issues. The prerequisite to develop a new agreement within Cuba which would both guarantee and reinforce support for the Revolution demanded a classification, so that every group was well-known in the developments of the events which could assist in identifying them directly with the Revolution instead of using a third party aspect like leadership. This showed the characteristic of the Revolution as all inclusive so that all Cubans except children were merged in one or more of those groups. Possibly the most expressive instance of the thoughtful or conscious classification of the young people took place in of youth occurred in the manual written by MinFar (1960), called the “Revolutionary and Counterrevolutionary Forces” which itemized those clusters according to the dependence the revolution had on them. These were labor force, farmworkers, students, experts and proprietors of small businesses. It was evident that the youth were left out in this categories and this absenteeism was similar to a list that was authored by Guevara in 1960. However, this was a curious oversight of the whole context of events after both authors elucidated that socially as well as economically, the lists presented the main revolutionary sectors, the followers of the Revolution. But in all those sectors, it was the youths that encompassed or cut across tall the groups and played a predominantly noteworthy role in the initial chapter of the Revolution and this is still felt till today (Sublette 23). The Literacy Campaign Prior to the revolution in Cuba, education of the youth was in decline and most of the well-off families were the ones reaping the benefits of education. The elite used to take their children to study in overseas countries, while those children from marginalized backgrounds were left to work home without schooling or to attend public schools that did not offer quality education to them. By the year 1959, statistics showed that the illiteracy levels of the country had risen to a record 41% in the rural areas only. This was evident by the reason that when troops went to Havana that year, many of them were not educated. The feebleness of pre-revolutionary schooling functions as a suitable benchmark that is used to evaluate the educational improvements of the 1960s (Kapcia 400). Many scholars argue about the educational system in Cuba during those days as conceivably the most serious deficiency because the schooling system was completely unsuccessful to keep in check the educational requirements of the rural residents. The literacy campaign led to the improvements in education. Army control centers, encampments, and police stations straightaway became hubs for literacy. It reached a point where Fidel Castro broadcasted that schools would be closed to give way to literacy helpers especially those who has finished their sixth grades and above to assist in spreading education. It was perceived that student voluntary assistants commonly came from more contented urban upbringings. Individual literacy employee was furnished with books, boots, socks, olive-green berets, pairs of pants, shirts, a shoulder patch worn that observed to notify the people about the identity of the literacy workers and a blanket. During those days, a gas lantern was used for lighting during night classes. Schools closed for eight months in the year 1961 after it was realized that only 10% of soldiers who could not read were successful in their literacy tests. Grownups who had specific concern completing and succeeding the literacy test were taken to special speed up encampments in which they were trained by more knowledgeable tutors for days and weeks (Kapcia, 405). Cuban Responses to the Campus Rebellions The significance of youth engagement to youth values in Cuba made it interesting to scrutinize the Cuban response of peripheral youth social action in 1968. The media fraternity in Cuba covered the developing stories about the rise of youth movements in the island and this culminated into students forming campus rebellions in the late 1960s. The concepts of the media were based on the variations whether the discussions were European based or the US movement was involved. There was no much reference about the political unrests that were happening across the borders of Cuba in the interviews that were carried out. This development displayed that the uprising had minute effect on the youth culture of Cuba in the 1960s (Thomas 197). The media divided the external youth rebellions in two parts dependent on the periods in which they occurred: before 1968 in which there was no distinct awareness of an external youth associations, and immediately after the campus rebellions in the year 1968, once a youth rebellion was branded. Just before the month of May 1968, there was some presence of European matters in the Cuban press, but the peripheral political reporting focused principally on the USA with reference to their internal politics and external course of action on policies. In the case of Europe, the press focused on their culture more than the political spheres. The ethical anxiety over the Cuban youths towards the end of 1960s was somewhat concomitant with the counter-culture in the United States. This points towards the enquiry of the positions the non-student youth took in the Cuban press. Across and beyond Cuban boundaries, ‘youth rebellion’ has more meaning than the mere student movements. Amid the diversity of youth cultures, the most hyped and active youth groups of the time were called the hippies. They crisscrossed multiplicity of cultural establishments: music, fashion, sex and hallucinogenic drugs, as well as an anti-establishment belief. All these features were shared with the student rebellion groups. The Cuban response was an explicit reaction to the counter-culture of the United States, but there was no particular reference that was pinpointed about comparable derivative cultures in the European countries (Martinez 149). Conclusion The Cuban youth were a big influence on the new revolutionary identity of the country, but then again it is thinkable theoretically to distinguish an identity with regard to the youth culture that in reality does not have any link with the livelihoods of the youth. The Revolution was not idle since it endeavored to be largely inclusive, which developed into combination of youth identities that was fixed within the Cuban revolutionary accord to a superior or less significant extent On the other hand the national interests would have chosen to ignore them but this would have had detrimental outcomes as the power of the revolution was invested in them. Youth turned out to be a group that was linked with a practical definition. This definition was somehow inconsistent, for the reason that on the one hand the youth were consecrated but on the other they to accomplish the potentials related to such consecration, which depicted the Revolutionary character and responsibility of the young people. The conversational modus operandi for accomplishing this was the strengthening of a direct rapport concerning the Revolution and youth, over the perceptions of heroes and scapegoats, anxieties and anticipations, inducement and, if the preceding could not work, ethical panic. Works Cited Kapcia, A., “Educational Revolution and Revolutionary Morality in Cuba: the ‘New Man’, Youth and the new ‘Battle of Ideas’”, Journal of Moral Education, 34(4), pp. 399-412, 2005. Print. Martínez Heredia, F., “In the Furnace of the Nineties: Identity and Society in Cuba Today”, Boundary 2, 29(3), pp. 137-47, 2002. Print. Skierka, V., Fidel Castro. A Biography. Cambridge: Polity, 2004. Print. Sublette, N., Cuba and its Music: from the first drums to the Mambo. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2004. Print. Sweig, J., Inside the Cuban Revolution. Fidel Castro and the urban underground. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print. Thomas, N., “Challenging the Myths of the 1960s: the Case of Student Protest in Britain”, Twentieth Century British History, 13(3), pp. 277-97, 2002. Print. Read More