Motivation

Motivation is one of the greatest challenges in our universities

By Jorge Luís Leyva Romero

From La Joven Cuba (The Young Cuba)

MATANZAS – Why am I not motivated?

More than once, and as part of my work in the secretariat of the top committee in my school, I’ve had to participate in meetings at which the students – seeing in me a leading representative of the Union of Communist Youths – give me the same argument to explain their escapist attitudes toward responsibilities:

 “The problem is that I’m not motivated.”

These simple words are undoubtedly among the most used in every political organization that I’ve been in – perhaps spoken more in some than in others – and I fear I will hear them again in other organizations in which I’ll be involved.

For a while, my reaction was radical. Whenever someone told me that, I immediately sent him to look into himself so he could reflect on the reasons for that lack of identification. I was totally convinced that my interlocutor was to blame, thinking that his team did not make his stay in the organization more pleasant.

But time passes, and our thought process gradually achieves maturity. One day, without realizing it, while I engaged in self-analysis, the rebellious and mistrustful part of me hurled at my conventionalism the same defying and pejorative sentence I had often heard before.

At that moment, I realized that I should give that statement a better rebuttal, one that might convince me, so that I could thereafter convince any others who might say it to me.

Broadly speaking, it seems that lack of identification with an organization reveals, first, a loss of values in the organization’s principles and, second, an almost obligatory need on the part of its members to belong to it, because the simplest thing for them to do is resign from it. But in our case, perhaps there is another type of problem, which I believe to be this:

In Cuba today, notwithstanding the inconveniences that might exist at any one time, most of our people unconditionally support the country’s leadership. Our youths are not the exception, of course, but after more than 50 years our organizations are affected by an ailment whose characteristics resemble the so-called “winner’s syndrome.”

When the Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959, those young people who used their rebellious spirit to stage demonstrations against the previous government because of the social problems had to change sides. Their new mission was to defend an achievement and help build it up from a different position.

Of course, from that time on, we ceased engaging in spontaneous activities and began looking for a mechanism that would enable our organizations to function correctly nationwide.

At that moment, bureaucracy appeared, an element that’s incredibly more harmful than usual when young people are its victims. On one hand, our support for the Revolution and our unbreakable ties with it has meant that every government decision is assimilated as if we were confirming it, even though we didn’t have an opportunity to make it our own.

We can’t even dream that an organization with our characteristics can gain the support and identification of its members if we continue to look at the problems from the government’s point of view.

Our members can never see the problems from that perspective as theirs. The things that affect us, we should see from the position we occupy. We are the foundation of this society and must bring out the revolutionary we all have inside so he can guide us on the road to a better future.

We cannot wait until the undisputed leaders of our nation issue the call in a more explicit manner. They do that every time they ask us to engage in revolution. Our youth needs to be problematic, impetuous and constructive.

Our opinions cannot remain in documents or bytes that perhaps will never be read by the people who can do something about them. Those people must feel our drive and be moved to make changes that perhaps they don’t consider necessary, either because they’re not in contact with the problems or their spirits have been attacked by the disease I described above.

Let us be consistent in our actions and never fail to do what we consider correct just to avoid having a discussion or a problem with someone. What would José Antonio or Mella do if they saw the inertia of our actions? Did they live and die in consecrated struggle for that? Are we so arrogant that we believe we live in a perfect system that does not need an explosion among the student vanguard to improve it?

Today we don’t live in the Cuba of the 1960s. The identification of the problems and the solutions proposed by us Cubans in no way affect the foundations of the system. Rather, they strengthen it and lay the foundations for a promising future, full of achievements.

I do not think that 100 years from now people will talk about my Motherland only because of what it did from the past until today. I think that, when they talk about this nation 100 years from now, people will have to take into account what this generation of youngsters are capable of doing.

Times change and we must change with them. That is undoubtedly the greatest tribute we can make to the men and women who died on July 26, March 13 and other days of national redemption. And that is undoubtedly the greatest gift we can offer to those who were part of the glory and are still alive.

When we achieve this, I am amply convinced that nobody will use a lack of motivation as an excuse for their weaknesses. At that moment, our organizations will be rejuvenated and the entire island with them.

Jorge Luis Leyva Romero is a student at the University of Computer Sciences.