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Speech by comrade Carlos Lage Dávila on the
45th Anniversary of the UJC (Union of Young
Communists)
Dear Raúl
Comrades:
I’m not here to talk today with the nostalgia of
someone who was a leader of the communist youth,
or talk about what we were, or give advice on
how a young revolutionary should be.
When I learned I had been assigned to speak at
this event, I understood it to be my duty to
think and meditate on the problems of today’s
youth, on their responsibilities and challenges
and, with my words today, to prompt you to think
and meditate, too.
Those who are young people today were born or
grew up in the Special Period. They did not know
the degree of well-being, social justice and
fairness achieved by the Revolution after
January 1, 1959. We don’t idealize the society
that we enjoyed in the ‘80s, because we know
well that all human creation is imperfect and
incomplete, but at the end of that decade, there
was nowhere else on the planet where the notion
of socialism was as real as it was on this small
Caribbean island. History has demonstrated it.
We always knew that the greatest challenge for
socialism was forging a communist consciousness
among the youth, and to reject capitalism
without having lived under it and without having
been able to feel how a society based on
selfishness, individualism, vanity and the
profit motive causes so much moral damage,
obstructs happiness and wounds human dignity.
But beyond that challenge, our young people must
understand that the socialist society in which
we live, threatened militarily, attacked
economically and challenged politically and
morally, is much less ideal than we would like,
and than was achieved years earlier for all
Cubans by Fidel, Raúl, Che, and the young
rebels, for whom the Granma was a great
battleship, the Moncada a miniscule barracks and
an army of 80,000 soldiers a minor obstacle
compared to the dreams of freedom and justice
that inspired them.
What should not have happened, what could have
been prevented: the disappearance of the USSR
and the socialist camp left Cuba — let’s say it
how it was — alone against the empire.
Our markets, sources of credits and investment
also disappeared, and the U.S. government set
itself, openly, to breaking our people through
hunger and disease, and it intensified the
blockade, the economic war, the campaign of lies
and slander, and it intensified terrorist acts.
You all were born or grew up during the time
when electric power was cut for 10 or more hours
a day, when medicines were lacking, when food
was dramatically scarce, and when transport
barely circulated through the streets, including
in the capital.
These circumstances substantially changed our
people’s lives; they bred bitter contradictions,
propitiated the spread of vices and privileges
that had been overcome by the work of the
Revolution itself; they caused social equality
to suffer; and wages were no longer the just
salaries with which the needs of daily life
could be resolved.
It was essential to make tactical concessions
with consequences we have not yet overcome.
Certain changes that lacked the appropriate
preparation produced disorder and a loss of
efficiency, and others, also necessary, led to
undesirable situations.
The young people of today did not know
capitalism or the socialism that we had
achieved, either, and they have lived through
years in which they have seen deformations and
inequalities grow. But the young people of today
have also known the tenacious and admirable
resistance of our people, who in the midst of
harsh shortages, were able to defend what was at
that time more of a dream than a reality, more a
chimera than a possible achievement, and to the
world’s amazement, they saved their Revolution,
which today rises up with more strength and
pride than ever.
While being aware of our justified
dissatisfaction, our people today enjoy rights
that are not even imaginable for thousands of
millions on the planet; they have free access to
health and education from one end of the island
to the other; nobody is superfluous in our
country; not a single Cuban is prevented from
having a place in school or work, a way of being
useful; nobody has to sleep in the streets or is
abandoned to their fate. We live in a society of
justice, solidarity, dignity that will be
increasingly better, because our resources are
not the property of transnational corporations,
our laws are not imposed by the market, and our
policies are not dictated by a foreign power.
Today, as we advance, we are seeing the retreat
of neoliberalism, the disappearance of the Free
Trade Agreement of the Americas, the
discrediting of the European governments,
addicted to the hypocrisy of democracy and human
rights; we are seeing the empire in marked
ethical, moral and systemic decadence.
IT WOULD BE AN ERROR TO BE CONTENT WITH WHAT
WE ARE DOING
More convinced than ever of our socialist course
and the justice of our ideas, we must be
conscious of the contradictions inherited by our
society from the Special Period, and that our
work with young people requires a much greater
reach in depth and extension. It would be an
error to be content with what we are doing, to
imagine that we always reach the hearts and
minds of young people, that our ideological work
is adequate; we must understand this well, not
as a simple reiteration of ideas, but as the art
of awakening sentiments and forging
consciousness.
It is essential for a solid culture to be
appropriated in order to be able to discern the
essences and to be confident of our ability to
build a society that is more and more just in a
world that is unjust and in danger of
extinction, and not just by threat of war.
Culture provides us with the lucidity “to change
everything that should be changed,” to achieve
what we set out to do. There is nothing so
typical of youth as change, as lofty goals, and
that is why it is a privilege to be a young
person in times of Revolution.
Achieving what is best for our lives, our
families, our fellow human beings and the new
generations, can only be done through culture.
Without culture, there is no freedom possible,
Fidel has said to us.
And on a significant date like today, we should
continue to meditate on the speech by our
Commander in Chief in the Aula Magna of the
University of Havana and ask ourselves: are we
satisfied with the level of information, the
development of interests and the internalization
of values that are being implanted in the new
generations?
Does the membership of the UJC (Young Communist
League) correspond to the vanguard of our youth,
with its condition as the replenishment of the
Party, the irrefutable guarantee of the
Revolution?
A negative or partially negative response to
those questions would not deny the advances or
existence of a strong and prestigious youth
organization, which the UJC is, or the
unquestionable virtues of a healthy and
revolutionary youth like ours. It is a matter of
being aware of the great responsibility assumed
by the young people of a country that has known
how to defend the banners of socialism under the
most difficult circumstances, a country that has
been a guide and inspiration for millions,
hundreds of millions of human beings in the
world.
Our youth are disciplined, organized,
responsible, and participate actively in
political life, and those qualities may be
easily appreciated, but that is not always a
reflection, in each and every one of the youth,
of a solid revolutionary conviction, and our
duty is to be able to know how profoundly
revolutionary each young person is, and for them
to decide to be increasingly more so.
The real and effective participation of young
people in every sphere of social life must be
guaranteed; in whatever field young people act,
they must make themselves felt, offer their
contribution. We need their critical spirit,
their natural rebelliousness, their attachment
to justice, their intransigence in response to
whatever is done badly.
The Revolution requires the exercise of
thinking, and thinking with one’s own mind, and
this should be fostered at the age when
character is forged, in which convictions are
crystallized, and values are implanted that will
guide our conduct for our entire lives. A
vanguard organization must analyze, debate and
propose.
When the debate and analysis of subjects and
matters that most concern and interest young
people take place outside of the UJC’s chapters,
the latter become formal elements that are at a
remove from real life.
This is not a problem solely of the UJC, but
there is nothing more reasonable than to deal
with it first among the youth.
The Battle of Ideas, born out of the
revolutionary ideas of Fidel, and to which the
UJC, Pioneers, FEU and FEEM have committed
themselves with so much dedication and passion,
and which arouses so much hope and justified
confidence in our people, opened new and
infinite possibilities for young people, but it
has just begun, and now requires a necessary
continuity in more in-depth work, young person
to young person. It’s not enough to react to
junctures, or to correctly take on important
tasks; an impression must be made on every young
person, with every action, with every activity,
with every task. Daily work cannot be events and
meetings, which are essential; daily work must
be the generation of intense political activity
and a genuine cultural life in every corner of
the homeland that provide for the Revolution
generations of young people who are immune to
the siren’s song of capitalism, to the shop
windows of the consumerist societies and the
banalities of a system whose values we reject.
The youth of today are internationalists; the
university students in every municipality of the
country, the student-teachers, social workers,
art instructors, information science scholars,
students, workers, combatants; never has the
Revolution had such a mass of such educated and
valiant young people.
The UJC does not need to wait for the young
people to come to it; it should go to them, and
contribute to the formation of a youth that is
increasingly revolutionary, that must be and can
be, because the ideas that we defend are the
most noble and just that have ever been fought
for.
It is true that not everything can be work,
study and political activities, and that it is
up to the UJC to play an important role in the
promotion of spaces and conditions for
recreation; that our material limitations and
the existence of two currencies and two markets,
plus a lack of imagination and effort, among
other things, prevent full access for young
people. The costs would be impossibly high if we
were to have a youth with time that is useless,
which generates bad habits, alcoholism,
pseudo-cultural consumption; which fosters
apathy, vulgarity, and insensitivity, which are
manifestations of human behavior that is
incompatible with the society we are building.
There is much more the UJC can do, and much more
that the UJC can demand from the agencies and
institutions that have responsibilities on this
front, but we all know, as well, that the more
cultured young people are, the more interests
and motivation that we have implanted in them,
the easier it is to find options for their free
time, to live life with the ability to enrich it
as human beings, to enjoy the best of what has
been inherited from human creation.
Comrades:
We congratulate the Union of Young Communists
and the José Martí Pioneers Organization on
their anniversaries, and we ratify the
confidence in those Cubans who today are at an
age when it seems like everything possible.
We live in a world with 900 million starving
people, and more than 1 billion illiterates; in
which a trillion dollars is spent on war or on
preparing wars; in which climate change is now
evident, and the consumption of fuel is growing
uncontrollably; in which the government of a
country that has attained the greatest economic
and military power in history is conducting
itself in an irrational, selfish and criminal
manner.
WE HAVE CAUSE TO HAVE CONFIDENCE IN YOU
Like never before, the world’s problems are the
problems of every nation, and no country can
face alone the immense challenges that the human
species has before it. This is the world in
which you all must live, and in order to save
it, our young people must fight. We have cause
to have confidence in you.
The history of our homeland has been forged by
generations of very young Cubans. When the
enlightening struggle of ’68 broke out, many
young people headed for the swamps, and those
ranks were joined by a 23-year-old farm boy
named Antonio Maceo. Another young man, Ignacio
Agramonte, defeated with his bravery the
proposal to abandon the struggle.
The eight medical students, innocent of the act
of profanation with which they were charged,
were not innocent of sympathizing with the cause
of independence.
During that war, José Martí, having only had 16
years (his age) to love his homeland, was sent
to the Havana prison. From then on, he did not
cease dreaming of and fighting for independence
for a single day. The “Necessary War” that he
organized and led in 1895 was joined by
thousands of young people. In that war, the
almost-adolescent Panchito Gómez Toro was
killed, protecting the then-lifeless body of his
leader.
As the years went by, when a satrap took power,
a young man, Julio Antonio Mella, fought
valiantly, as did Rubén Martínez Villena, Pablo
de la Torriente, Antonio Guiteras and many
others.
The dictatorship that was established on March
10 was combated and vanquished by the Centenary
Youth, commanded by Fidel. It was young people
who comprised the guerrilla troops of the Sierra
Maestra, the underground fighters, the
artillerymen and combatants of Playa Girón [Bay
of Pigs], the literacy campaign teachers, a
large part of the internationalist soldiers,
teachers and doctors, and our Five Heroes, who
have risen up against cruelty and treachery.
Throughout these 48 years, the nation’s heroic
resistance to attempts by the imperialist enemy
to take over Cuba again has also been on the
shoulders of young people, and now, it is still
on the shoulders of the youth that the
homeland’s socialist future lies. This is the
best destiny, the only one possible for our
people, and the essential contribution of the
Cuban people to a world of peace and justice.
¡LONG LIVE THE UNION OF YOUNG COMMUNISTS!
¡VIVA RAÚL!
¡VIVA FIDEL!
¡PATRIA O MUERTE!
¡VENCEREMOS!
(Granma) 27-04-2007
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