The other side of the numbers
From Havana
The other side of the numbers
By Manuel Alberto Ramy
Last Aug. 6, I published in this column an article titled “Meditating on the basis of numbers,” where I pointed out the following contradiction: Cuba has what’s probably the best-educated active labor force in our region (65 percent of all workers have a high-school and college education) and one of the best-educated in the world, but at the same time Cuba suffers from low production and productivity, a fact that is acknowledged by our own authorities. We don’t extract the oil from the olive.
From my point of view, I wrote that this contradiction is due to three causes: “structural, administrative and conceptual, the three being intimately intertwined.”
These figures, which demonstrate the huge investment made by the government in the sector of education, need also to be seen from another angle, the use of the communications media in relation to the following facts: out of Cuba’s 11,243,000 inhabitants, 727,600 have college degrees and 2,545,900 hold high-school and tech-school diplomas. By adding up both levels of education, it turns out that 29.11 percent of our population displays a high level, and the rest of the population has a ninth-grade education. Impressive.
Does the policy that rules the communications media correlate with this undeniably successful reality in the field of public education? Is it consonant with an educational system that, from the first grade, places the child in front of a computer and teaches him how to use it?
As I wrote years ago, computer sciences are based on the rational and logical thought exchanged by operator and machine. Any illogical proposal is rejected and breaks the communication. Generations have been raised in the cybernetic world, yet it seems that the policy of information is unaware of this fact and when it establishes with the new generations a dialogue better suited to the Morse or telegraphic era, it receives a cutoff as response. “Fatal error,” as some young people say.
Slogans are valid when they summarize essential ideas processed by the addressees through the reception of varied information that is exempt from that rare combination called commented information. Informing is one thing; guiding and opining are something else. Both are valid and most necessary (so is debate), but we must keep them apart and trust in the new crop, bearing in mind that more than 70 percent of our population was born after 1959.
The educational level and the new generations deserve another kind of information. We’re not talking about the audio generations (the radio era) or the television generations. Rather, information should come from satellite communications in their different variants, including nanotechnology and microprocessors of every type. What to do? Ration the information provided by the media? That’s as futile as to keep water from going through a sieve; also dangerous, because it facilitates the technique of rumors, a practice used by the enemies of socialism.
I often hear critical comments (inaccurate, too), about the new generations, concerning their fashions, musical preferences, lifestyles and even their distancing from the revolutionary values. The critics forget that that happened to each generation and that one of them, with its own style, spawned a genuine revolutionary process that requires continuity, not rupture, inclusion, not alienation, aperture and news that do not contradict socialism. This is a complex process that demands renewed creativity and different content and communicative language.
Every communication needs two elements: the communicator, with his content, and the receiver of the messages. The latter has changed favorably due to the educational level he has reached, an achievement that allows him to deal with varied information and complex analyses. The breakdown occurs when the communicator’s message runs short, when discourse and reality don’t match, when those who are summoned to be leading actors don’t recognize themselves in their role or in the roles that are written for them. Have we taught others to separate the essential facets of the revolutionary process from the accidental facets? More important still, are we older folks aware of them?
Information is power. No question about that. And every docent-educational process that does not end in the classroom continues down the rails of the knowledge accumulated by mankind. Its objective is not only to prepare people for the activities typical of their vocation but also to provide them with the values and tools necessary for the exercise of opinion and analysis. It is necessary to think in order to decide, to debate (an exercise that’s missing from the public media), to act, to participate with the utmost clarity as a citizen, not only to identify problems but also to propose solutions with solidity. This, in a nutshell, is the challenge posed to Cuban socialism by the other side of the numbers.
Manuel Alberto Ramy is Havana bureau chief of Radio Progreso Alternativa and editor of Progreso Semanal, the Spanish-language version of Progreso Weekly.
