March 2008

      They are mostly miserably poor and frustrated, isolated and repressed, living with only the faintest hopes that their lives will ever improve under the Castro brothers’ enduring regime. Heirs to five decades of the revolution’s material and moral failures, they reject its myths and collectivist values, and have no memories of anything but the grinding hardships that began in the early 1990s. Cuba’s youth --the more than two and a half million who were born and came of age since the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989-- have begun speaking out in a rising chorus of discontent. Nothing like their current stirrings has occurred in at least a half century.

      A small group of such dissatisfied eighteen to twenty-five year-old Cubans participated recently in an hour-long video conference organized and hosted by University of Miami Assistant Provost Dr. Andy Gomez, who is also a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. The Cuban participants interacted with Cuban-American university students in Miami. The results of their exchanges were remarkable, and perhaps unprecedented.

      “We are all brothers,” one of the Havana Cubans told the Miami students. The Cubans spoke of their hope for more contact across the Florida Straits and seem to have no fears that they or their families might suffer by some day having to surrender their homes to returning exiles. “What would someone in the United States want with my house?” one of them asked.

      Although it is not clear how the Cuban participants were selected to participate in the video conference, many other indications of rising youth activism on the island suggest that they are representative of their generation. They were uninhibited, surprisingly eager to air their grievances. Although they have been persecuted by the regime, they seem relatively fearless in speaking out against it. And although none of them spoke specifically about Fidel Castro, they surely appreciate that the relatively greater freedom they enjoy today to criticize the regime was never possible during his term in power.

      They despair for their futures, believing they will be even worse off when they are in their thirties than they are today. They spoke of their desire for “liberty, freedom, and structural and political change. “We want to be able to travel and we want respect for our human rights. Even if you work hard,” one complained, “there is little to buy with what you earn.” Desperately craving invigorating contact with the outside world, they asked the Miami students to help provide them with university course materials and readings. They hope for unrestricted access to the internet, now tightly controlled by the Cuban government.

      These young Cubans see a deepening generational divide, especially in the aftermath of Raul Castro’s formal assumption of power in February and his naming of elderly cronies to his inner circle. “That was discouraging,” one said, because many on the island had expected significant changes once he officially succeeded his brother. Indeed, since encouraging students to “fearlessly debate” Cuba’s acute internal problems last year Raul Castro is himself partly responsible for the rise of youthful activism. One of the Cuban students said simply that “Raul is not doing enough.”

      “They don’t trust the youth,” another responded, referring to the ruling elites. Most official repression, they said, now is targeted specifically at the younger generation. One participant revealed that she has been detained by security forces on eight different occasions. Another observed, metaphorically one supposes, that if there were any loosening of police controls along the seaside Malecon in Havana, where many idle youths congregate, “there would not be one Cuban left” on the island.

      Other signs of youthful activism suggest that Cuban leaders are facing a potentially more destabilizing problem than any since the early 1990s. One sophisticated web site -Generacion Y- that creatively expresses youthful dissatisfaction was recently closed by the regime to Cubans, suggesting that it was having a corrupting influence. But another site operated by a punk-rock musical group still reaches an apparently large youth following on the island attracted to its brash irreverence and anti-establishment music.

      Students and former students expelled because of their activism claim to be traveling across the island, endeavoring to enlist broader support for their grievances. Some of their professors appear to have allied with them. A recent report from a dissident student indicates that 241 university level professors have been expelled from their posts over the past two years because of their political beliefs. A new youth-based movement advocating university autonomy, curricular independence, and free speech has apparently attracted a growing following. A petition to reopen a Catholic university shut down decades ago has been signed by thousands. And the incident last month when two university students challenged national assembly president Ricardo Alarcon at an academic forum was unprecedented.

      It is not yet clear, however, to what extent this new student activism is organized. I was quoted in a Miami Herald article, following the video conference, observing that although Cuban youth are now more openly expressing their complaints, they don’t yet constitute an organized movement. That prompted one of the Cuban students to email the Cuba Transition Project at the University of Miami objecting to my conclusion. He wanted me to know that, “Yes, dissident and opposition youth are in fact organized and have been working together for some time to bring about change on the island.”

      To whatever extent these activist youth are organized, it appears that they already pose a challenge of unprecedented scope and intensity for the new regime. Cuban leaders will be loath to launch a brutally repressive crackdown against such a large and important segment of the populace. Inevitably, children and grandchildren of the communist nomenclatura would be targets. For this and other reasons, tensions and divisions probably run through leadership ranks, with hardliners demanding much tougher measures to curtail manifestations of discontent and moderates hoping they can somehow ameliorate it. Their most likely choice, during the short term at least, will be to selectively target dissident students for intimidation and repression, and perhaps incarceration.

      Yet Cuba’s leaders have no illusions about the complexity of the dilemma they face. Fidel himself, in late 2005, during one of his last major speeches, warned an audience of Cuban youth that “this country can self-destruct. The revolution can destroy itself.” A short time later his warnings were reiterated by foreign minister, Felipe Perez Roque, who expounded at length about the disaffection, alienation, and apathy of Cuban youth. He too warned that the revolution could destroy itself.

      More than two years later, with generational problems considerably more aggravated, Cuba’s leaders understand they have no good options. What they probably cannot yet be sure of, however, is whether they are experiencing an incipient rebellion of the country’s youth.

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I wish to acknowledge the valuable assistance provided by Vanessa Lopez, my University of Miami student research assistant, in the preparation of this report.

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