In any other country, a survey asking young people what kind of nation they want to see in the year 2020 would hardly be fodder for the pundits. But in a nation that rarely gives its youth a voice—and seldom divulges the results of government opinion polls—the decision to publish a recent survey in the country’s official youth newspaper took on its own significance.
The poll of nearly 300 young Cubans, published in the Dec. 31 issue of Juventud Rebelde (Rebellious Youth), provided a rare and revealing glimpse into the attitudes and aspirations of a generation. These young Cubans have never known any other leaders other than Fidel Castro and now, his younger brother Raúl. They had the misfortune of growing up in an era of harsh austerity measures and personal sacrifice triggered by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the aid pipeline from Moscow that had propped up the Castro regime for three decades. Such is the gap separating them from their peers on the other side of the Florida Straits that the laptop computer which American undergraduates take for granted has the aura of an impossible dream on the streets of Havana. And as Cubans become used to life without the ailing Fidel running the government, many analysts wonder how his successors will manage the island’s increasingly alienated youth. “Many grew up under intense economic deprivation in an increasingly globalized and connected world,” notes Julia Sweig, a Cuba expert who heads the Latin America program at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York. “They know what the good life is through family members [living outside Cuba], they want Nikes and iPods and stuff, and the revolution isn’t delivering that stuff.”
About two-thirds of the country’s 11.4 million people were born after Fidel seized power in 1959 and have no memories of the corruption and social inequalities that were hallmarks of pre-revolutionary Cuba. An estimated 2.2 million were born after 1991, when the regime was forced to take draconian measures in order to survive without its longtime Soviet allies. Electricity blackouts became commonplace, soldiers were put to work cultivating crops on state-run farms, and university graduates traded in their professional careers for jobs as hotel porters and taxi drivers who received their tips in dollars.
Not surprisingly, the under 21s who equate communist rule with chronic shortages, crumbling infrastructure and inefficient bureaucracy have little revolutionary fervor. “This is the group that has no affiliation to the Cuban revolution,” says Andy Gomez, a senior fellow at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. “It is the group most likely to want to leave Cuba.
That has not escaped the attention of the regime’s top leadership. “These young people have more information and more consumer expectations than those at the start of the revolution,” acknowledged Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque in an unusually candid speech in 2005. “Sometimes I am sure that when you speak of free health care and education, many of them say, ‘Oh please, don’t come to me with that same old speech.’”
Mindful of that mood of alienation, the regime last year dispatched thousands of students and young social workers to take over government-run service stations where employees were suspected of siphoning off fuel supplies to re-sell on the island’s thriving black market. Many young Cubans have participated in a door-to-door campaign to encourage residents to conserve energy by replacing outdated electrical appliances. In one of the few major speeches Raúl Castro has delivered since his ailing brother transferred power to him last July, the 75-year-old defense minister urged university students last month to be “fearless” in debating the important issues facing the nation in coming years. “I always say, discuss to your heart’s content and then bring me your differences,” declared Raúl. “We must continue gradually opening up the way for the new generations.”
But that opening has not happened at the rate that many young Cubans would have liked to see. Of the five senior officials named by Fidel last summer to help his brother govern in his absence, only one, Pérez Roque, was born after Castro seized power in 1959—and the 41-year-old foreign minister’s star has actually dimmed since Raúl took over. Young Cubans are well represented at the municipal and regional levels of government and the Communist Party, but they are conspicuous by their relative scarcity on the national stage. University graduates must spend their first two years performing community service work at the princely wage of $7 a month, and if they are lucky enough to land a job in the bureaucracy or at a state-run company their monthly salary is unlikely to surpass $20. The dim prospects for decent earnings and social mobility led some dissidents inside Cuba to warn of a social implosion in coming years. “The regime knows it has a time bomb on its hands,” says Rolando Rodríguez Lobaina of the Cuban Democratic Youth Movement. “It has no confidence in a transfer of power to these young people.”
But no outward signs of a burning fuse have surfaced thus far. Despite Fidel’s sudden disappearance from public view, the second half of last year witnessed no major protests in Cuban cities or a large maritime exodus of immigrants. The most public expression of resentment and disenchantment among young Cubans has traditionally come from some of the island’s leading rap music artists. Song lyrics complaining about police brutality and discrimination against black teenagers in Cuba’s ostensibly color-blind society prompted a crackdown in the 1990s, and some concerts were broken up by authorities. But the popularity of the genre has been waning in recent years, and Havana’s annual hip-hop music festival was canceled last August.
Young Cubans may appear sullen and thoroughly dissatisfied with the status quo in their country. But their political apathy and inaction to date may reflect a frank recognition they would be no match for the repressive machinery of an entrenched totalitarian government on the streets of Cuba. “I don’t really think youth can be a source of major instability,” says the CFR’s Sweig. “Providing young people with a sense that they have a stake in Cuba’s future is a huge challenge on Raúl’s plate, but the regime pretty much has a handle on that.” Perhaps the real test will only come when both Castro brothers are gone and their heirs will have to establish their own claims to legitimacy in the eyes of Cuba’s youth.
