Debts

By Yadira Escobar

MIAMI – If you’re driving through South Beach, don’t be surprised if the young man who helps you find a parking place – someone who you can see is earning very little money – tells you he is a recently graduated college student.

If you go into a bar in that area, it is very likely that you’ll run into a friendly bartender who also holds an expensive bachelor’s degree in liberal arts. And when you leave, don’t forget to leave a double tip for the waitress, who probably owes about $27,000 for her post-graduate studies.

In the United States in 2012, almost 50 percent of graduates worked in jobs that didn’t require a degree. According to the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, five million of them work at places that don’t even require a high-school diploma.

The worshipers of the consumer society lie when they say that it is the perfect and final model of society’s natural development. No social model has been so artificial as capitalism, from its grim beginnings among soot, exploited children and street beggars.

Yet, we all live trapped, day after day, in the mechanism of a system in whose values we’re expected to be fervent believers. One of the falser values of that system is "equality," defined not as equality in the distribution of the benefits of the model but as equality of opportunity.

Presumably, everyone has the opportunity to succeed, but only the rich win at the end, because nothing has changed under the despotism of money.

In this environment of illusions of hope, many in Miami took the road of higher studies by going into debt. They didn’t know that, in a competitive system, to cheapen manual labor, not only the unemployed worker is needed but also the unemployed graduate, to lower the wages of those who have the privilege to serve the moneyed capitalists.

Unfortunately, faced with so many recently graduated job applicants (each year, 300,000 graduates join the ranks of job seekers), the employer has the luxury of selecting only those with real experience. The rest will be unable to fulfill their individual ideals.

Looking over some of the audiovisual propaganda spread by the industry of counter-revolution in South Florida in the late 1990s, I notice an insistence on the claim that so many college graduates on the island were working as taxi drivers or waiters.

In those years, Cuba was going through a serious economic crisis caused by the collapse of the socialist camp, and I can imagine how remarkable the contrast was with the opulent Miami of easy credit. So, the propaganda peddlers stressed those differences, lacking a more solid ideological argument.

Of course, even today, despite Miami’s notoriousness as a city rife with child prostitution, some people insist on the topic of jobless graduates in Cuba, so as to morally disqualify Cubans on the island. This says much about the scant capacity for questioning and free expression in the Cuban community when it comes to pass judgment on the local evils.

Seeing the effect of the bank swindles on most of the citizens here, I wonder if the rich people knew in advance that the new generations would live plagued by unemployment and debt. Could it be that all that propaganda about "investing on a good education" was part of a collective swindle?

I think that many young people right now are losing their capitalist illusions. If they can free themselves from the "artificial paradise of drugs," it is possible that they’ll gather together and assume their civil responsibility as citizens. I can’t think of a more effective way to make oneself heard than the vote to achieve new and better hopes – democratically, of course.

It is possible to vote for a better country, where education frees itself a little more from the despotic market.