A disbelieving compatriot tells me that his teenage daughter's boyfriend is a very intelligent boy. His father has everything (I don't ask what he means by everything, but I presume he means money). He doesn't study, he doesn't care, so he buys the exams and that's it. He wants to have a senior high school's degree. Although the statement hits me, I try not to dwell on it. And do you really think he is very intelligent? I ask. Yes, he's learning English, for when he gets to the United States; there he'll work at anything, until he can set up his own business. He's a crack at social networking. He has it all figured out. He comes back with everything: in his country he has it all (money, something that almost no one has enough of, and great ideas of how to "succeed" there). Succeeding again means - as in the social pages of the systemic press - having a comfortable material life.
In my youth, most teenagers aspired to study at university: the children of professionals, of course, because their families highly valued the prestige that comes with knowledge; the children of workers in the city or in the countryside, because their children could fulfill the dreams they could not achieve. The Revolution placed aspirations and life projects in the sky, and the humblest, the owners of the Revolution, could jump and touch it. Some teenagers and young people, sometimes the children of professionals, think today that studying is a waste of time that it is better to find a trade through which to sneak into the First World (if they are already professionals, they do not mind renouncing the exercise of what they have learned) and drink from its riches. I have met them: they dress fashionably, and their appearance, their manners, do not betray their enormous spiritual gaps. They can still jump and touch the sky, but they prefer to advance at ground level, they think it is faster that way. They are rebels in the face of rebellion. The sky, of course, seems to be immaterial; the earth, on the other hand, is full of gold nuggets.
I have always repeated a maxim of my father: to be happy it is not necessary to be a professional, it is enough to love the chosen profession. On Earth there is an exact place, yours, for every human being; the place, the profession or the trade that can make you useful and happy. Not everyone finds it, and it is legitimate to look for it. But that is not the point. The happiness I know does not come wrapped in silk sheets. When the dream of these young people does not exceed, in height, the roof of their houses, even if it is extended to the sides, something is wrong. We have done something wrong. And it is not that things are so obvious: the balance between being and having must maintain a certain equilibrium, although having weighs more in a world designed for consumerism. But the imbalance is not only due to the economic and moral crisis that humanity is going through -pandemic, war, sanctions, disdain for truth and justice- aggravated as is natural in a poor and blockaded country, without great natural resources, a small David that endures, without surrendering, the siege of Goliath; it is not only that the weight of the material has increased, it is that the weight of the spiritual necessary for the counterbalance has diminished. The causes of the imbalance are not only economic.
Suddenly, the valves of society are triggered by accident (literally): a pandemic that endangers everyone's life, a tornado or a hurricane, an explosion in a hotel under repair or a fire in oil tanks, and the spontaneous solidarity of young people escapes from the cold material calculations, those same young people who seemed indifferent. Society has reserves, but demands that we mobilize them; the most difficult heroism, the daily one, needs permanent encouragement. I know, without food or clothing one cannot live; but I believe that without heroic acts that transcend immediacy, without distant but visible horizons towards which to row with strength, neither can we live. Groups of young entrepreneurs for solidarity, hungry not for food (even if they eat badly), but for Revolution. Rebels in the face of apathy.
If something has been healthy, paradoxically, it has been the lack of health. It has made us notice a youthful vanguard that flies higher, that looks more like the vanguard of their parents (not their parents), the vanguard of all the preceding epochs, than their own epoch and their contemporaries. Not in the formal, not in the external - ways of dressing, speaking, behaving - but in the essential. The transnational empire will try to dissuade them from their "error", to oppose her to the revolutionary institutions, to lock them up in the prison of "the rebellious" in order to extract from them every drop of their cause. But it is ours, it is necessary, our life is at stake in its rescue.
Meanwhile, the pandemic revitalizes old prestige: for months we applaud, at the window or the door of our homes, those doctors and nurses we used to look at with indifference, but who risk their lives for us. And while the bus that brought them from the airport when they arrived from some distant country, not from treating us, but from risking their lives for other peoples, passed through humble neighborhoods, their inhabitants, lacking much (although not everything), clenched their fists on their chests in greeting, or in surrender, proud of them (children, siblings, parents, neighbors). We discovered with astonishment that Cuban scientists, previously invisible, locked up in their laboratories for days and early mornings, are capable of creating vaccines reserved for First World countries and for the profit of transnational corporations. Songs and audiovisuals that exalt them, and that touch the fibers of the national soul, then emerge. We see that there are very young engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists who invent solutions, who overcome the limits of what is possible. And in the midst of the anniversary commemoration, we realize that half a century later -in the midst of a crisis of material and values- there are still troubadours who do not sell out to the market, who roam from square to square, accompanying us with their rebellious singing. There are children who now dream of becoming doctors or scientists or engineers or troubadours.
They are the offspring of a mystique that is reborn, still uncertain. Let us make it grow, even if we grow thinner in body.
In this new year, Cuba responds as yesterday: We do not accept other’s terms, Fatherland or Death! But unlike then, there will be no fruitful truce for the restart of the struggle for life, the one we chose -because there was not and there will not be another empty truce-; there will be no pause in the struggle for socialist prosperity and the freedom we desire, for the independence we conquered and defend, because there are young people in Cuba who are rebels, like their predecessors, before apathy, and are willing to carry the Fidel’s slogan to the end: We shall overcome!
Translated by ESTI
