4. Cuban society: the end of certainties (extract)
It seems like nothing have changed in Havana: the capital preserved still look like a big city of a remote province with its heavy Chinese bicycles which transport sometimes woman and children. The schoolboys continue to go to the school in their red uniform of pioneer and the high-school pupils in their uniform mustard. Cuban youth still gives this nice and clean image polished by the government: a youth with a record high alfabetisation rate ( almost 100%), gently lining to eat ices and to pile up in the downtown cinemas for two pesos. But this socialist varnish so pleasant to look at for the traveller is crackening everywhere. The depth of the economic crisis has considerably weakened the social cohesion and solidarity, that has until now been used to prevent the development of the tares which strike so hard other countries under developed. Criminality, prostitution, antisocial behaviour made a brutal appearance in Havana, even if they still remain less important that in the rest of Latin America. A déboussolée youth seeks its identity in the medium of an economic disaster which transformed into a few years the "tropical paradise" in hell of food shortage. Raised in the hope of better days and accustomed to be maternée by an omnipresent power which reduced the civil society to nothing, the cuban society is about to burst, due to the crisis of socialism.This bankruptcy of the State paradoxically made it possible to the Cubans to become aware of themselves: the Church, the artists, the young people made profitable the rout of Leviathan to grant tiny portions of territories left in waste land by the capacity. Spirituality, the music, dance are as many refuges against the daily grisaille, which thrive in a semi clandestinity tolerated by the authorities. The literature tries to survive in this universe kafkaïen, with authors ballottés between a semi official existence and the excommunication of the exile. Meanwhile, the press enterirely devoted to government aproval continues its populist and demagogic monologue, singeant a formerly revolutionary phraseology, which appears today meaningless.
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Journaliste indépendant, Ricardo González Alfonso a été condamné à 20 ans de prison en mars 2003 pour avoir dirigé la publication de « De Cuba », la première revue indépendante à paraître depuis la Révolution cubaine de 1959.
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