Meditating on the Malec

From
Havana                                                                         Read Spanish Version  

Meditating
on the Malecón

By
Manuel Alberto Ramy

I
love dusk and love to enjoy the precise instant when the sun floats
on the horizon like a fire balloon, as it goes to brighten other
fields in the world. Fear not, dear reader, I am not going to write
poetry, just to tell you about the time when, after walking along the
Malecón for a while, I decided, like many other Havana residents, to
sit on the seawall and watch the day’s departure.

Near
me, some young people were "rapping" and I heard this
statement: "If I don’t think, I don’t exist." I don’t know
if he was defending Descartes’ famous theory but it was evident that
the young man claimed his legitimate right to think. That was not the
end of what I could hear, because the conversation went on from
thinking to exercising one’s opinion, the next inevitable step. I
stopped listening and started to meditate.

In
several recent articles, the newspaper Juventud Rebelde (JR) has
discussed certain attitudes of our young people — 70 percent of our
population was born after 1959. The newspaper pointed out youngsters’
predilection for certain musical styles, ostentation as a sign of a
presumably superior status, the display of gold teeth and gold
chains, the temptation to identify themselves with foreign models or
paradigms. We should ask ourselves what we have done for our
children. The articles in JR are a summons to work with that sector.

Those
manifestations exist in crucial ages, but the young men on the
Malecón whose conversation motivated me belong not to that segment
but to the tens of thousands to whom the Revolution gave the tools to
think, including the almost or outright marginal young people. Why
the difference between them? I hope the topic will be studied by
specialists.

Every
revolutionary project aspires to the creation of a better man, with
superior human qualities. It is an integral transformation. The
revolutionary creation is based on the postulate that Man, as a
leading actor, makes his own reality, transforms it and transforms
himself. The human person is both the provocateur and the final
objective of his provocation.

It
happens that in the conquest of Utopia — and every true revolution
is just that — there is no protagonism without sharp thought, the
exercise of criterion, criticism and self-criticism. The processes
that bar access to those needs run the risk of resembling young men
who wear gold teeth. Socialist thought and debate are coexistent. To
separate them, to the detriment of others in the revolutionary camp,
amputates the feet needed to march ahead.

In
the course of 50 years, the Cuban revolutionary process has
accomplished unthinkable achievements. First among them: the
reconquest of national dignity and our sovereignty in the face of a
ravenous empire; the promotion of systems of health and education for
everyone. I will pause on the latter subject because it is related to
the fragments of conversation I heard.

Elementary-school
classrooms have computers and the children learn to use them. The PC
and the child establish contact through logical thought and
rationality. Without the latter, nothing works and communication
breaks down. While we have given several generations the tools of
thought and analysis, while Cuba probably has one of the most capable
labor forces in the continent, while Cuba has formed tens of
thousands of professionals and scientists in diverse branches of
knowledge, including leading-edge techniques, the absence of rational
answers (not of slogans) and analyses of reality (not of apologies)
conspire in favor of the enemy and weaken, through frustration and
disenchantment, the generations that in a few more years will assume
the reins of the process. To give someone a bicycle and tell him not
to ride it makes no sense at all. The bicycle rusts, the investment
is wasted, and the recipient questions the transcendent sense of
personal effort and the effort of those who taught him to ride.

Some
weeks ago, Armando Hart Dávalos, a longtime revolutionary and lucid
intellectual, said we should be prepared in the face of a change of
administration in the U.S. In a new scenario that will feature
weapons of penetration that are more sophisticated and subtle, we
need to sharpen our ability to define ourselves, because the game
will not be in black-and-white but in shades of color. It will be (it
already is) a qualitatively different confrontation that will involve
the entire population.

Hart
sees culture as a defensive system in the imminent battle of ideas. I
share his opinion. Culture, in its broad sense, encompasses the
totality of a person or a society, from the lullaby to the poem or
some other, more refined work of art, including the marvelous
creations of our science and technical knowledge. All of us represent
culture and are its recreators. Cuban culture came together as a
nation in the swamp, but it continued with a machete in one hand and
the debate of ideas under the Mambi hat. And overcoming the avatars
of the pre-Revolutionary republic, it became part of the Motherland.

At
the same time we train militarily, we must practice the revolutionary
confrontation of ideas aimed at delving deeper into socialist
thinking and the solution of our material and spiritual problems. The
hegemonic world is moribund but it has oxygen tanks. Neoliberalism
has failed, yet it tries to return with makeup, gold chains and teeth
"the better to eat you with." Have we forgotten the wolf in
the tale of Little Red Riding Hood?

Faced
with that obvious picture, the challenge is to materialize a viable
alternative, consisting of ideas, presentation of opinion, creative
imagination, profound analysis and effective control of the people.

Manuel
Alberto Ramy is Havana bureau chief of Radio Progreso Alternativa and
editor of Progreso Semanal, the English-language version of Progreso
Weekly.