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Leadership, for Today… and Tomorrow’s Cuba

Noel repairs the blades of the fan. He has a little workshop in a doorway in Cerro neighborhood. He repairs electric irons, blenders, every kind of obsolete motor, and does good things with rice cookers and water heaters. It’s not a job that generates a lot of dividends.

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Noel repairs the blades of the fan. He has a little workshop in a doorway in Cerro neighborhood. He repairs electric irons, blenders, every kind of obsolete motor, and does good things with rice cookers and water heaters. It’s not a job that generates a lot of dividends. Some of the customers ask for his reliable services and then he doesn’t see them again; others want to pay in installments and end up not paying it off. However, in addition to diminished returns, this labor offers Noel a unique experience. Every day, he is in contact with people, many people. Speaking, opining, telling him what came over the illegal satellite dish and especially listening, opening his ears to what they have to say. So he has become, in his little cubicle full of grease and cables, an actor of opinion, a born leader appreciated for his abilities and respected for his words.

Cuba is full of people like Noel, anonymous, simple, who know reality at a level no minister can reach, even with the most competent advisors. People who don’t show up on TV screens, who aren’t at the front of any parade, but who have natural charisma and contact with the people to lead changes. For now, we only know those with whom we’ve managed to interact or meet personally, but there are thousands. They will never draft a political platform, but they know by heart the most acute problems that afflict our society. They would not sign an action demanding improvements in human rights, nor will they open a blog, practice independent journalism, or autonomous law. The word “activist” scares them and to call them opponents would put an end to the life they have now. They are — without saying so — all that and much more. They are citizens of conscience, to those who damage the situation in our country.

The future of our nation will be influenced by Cubans like this. So many who, today, are behind a desk in some office, at the front of a classroom, filling out forms in some State agency, we will see reach the public sphere. As they feel there’s a mark of respect in stating their opinions publicly, they will emerge from all sides. It’s important that at the point when they decide to take that step we do not react with our suspicions nor with confrontation, but with our embrace. Because while Noel fixes a broken fan blade, I feel that one day he will also have the ability to join together the broken and separated pieces of our reality. The same care with which he glues plastic and fixes the motor, he will put into the social leadership he will show tomorrow.

28 July 2013

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Leadership, for Today… and Tomorrow’s Cuba

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L’organisation internationale contre la torture lance une “intervention d’urgence” pour José Daniel Ferrer

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José Daniel Ferrer

MIAMI, États-Unis.- L’Observatoire pour la protection des défenseurs des droits humains (OPDDH), a lancé ce vendredi une campagne d'”Interventions urgentes” en faveur du prisonnier politique et de conscience cubain José Daniel Ferrer García, leader de l’Union patriotique de Cuba (UNPACU), selon une note de Radio Televisión Martí.

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Who Is Filling Cuba’s University Classrooms?

New students at the University of Havana (14ymedio) Born during the Special Period, they have grown up trapped in the dual currency system, and when they get their degrees Raul Castro will no longer be in power. They are the more than 100,000 young people just starting college throughout the country. Their brief biographies include educational experiments, battles of ideas, and the emergence of new technologies They know more about X-Men than about Elpidio Valdés, and only remember Fidel Castro from old photos and archived documentaries. They are the Wi-Fi kids with their pirate networks, raised with the “packets” of copied shows and illegal satellite dishes

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New students at the University of Havana (14ymedio)

Born during the Special Period, they have grown up trapped in the dual currency system, and when they get their degrees Raul Castro will no longer be in power. They are the more than 100,000 young people just starting college throughout the country. Their brief biographies include educational experiments, battles of ideas, and the emergence of new technologies They know more about X-Men than about Elpidio Valdés, and only remember Fidel Castro from old photos and archived documentaries.

They are the Wi-Fi kids with their pirate networks, raised with the “packets” of copied shows and illegal satellite dishes. Some nights they would connect through routers and play strategy video games that made them feel powerful and free. Whoever wants to know them should know that they’ve had “emerging teachers” since elementary school and were taught grammar, math and ideology via television screens. However, they ended up being the least ideological of the Cubans who today inhabit this Island, the most cosmopolitan and with the greatest vision of the future.

On arriving at junior high school they played at throwing around around the obligatory snack of bread while their parents furtively passed their lunches through the school gate. They have a special physical ability, an adaptation that has allowed them to survive the environment; they don’t hear what doesn’t interest them, they close their ears to the harangues of morning assemblies and politicians. They seem lazier than other generations and in reality they are, but in their case this apathy acts like an evolutionary advantage. They’re better than us and will live in a country that has nothing to do with what we were promised.

A few months ago, these same young people, starred in the best known case of school fraud uncovered publicly. Some of those hoping to earn a place in higher education bought the answers to an admissions test. They were used to paying for approval, because they had to turn to private tutors to teach them what they should have learned in the classroom. Many of those who recently enrolled in the university had private teachers starting in elementary school. They are the children of a new emerging class that has used its resources so that their children can reach a desk at the right hand — or the left — of the alma mater.

These young people dressed in uniforms in their earlier grades, but they struggled to differentiate themselves through the length of a shirt, a fringe of bleached hair, or through pants sagging below their hips. They are the children of those who barely had a change of underwear in the nineties, so their parents tried to make sure they didn’t “go through the same thing,” and turned to the black market for their clothes and shoes. They mock the false austerity and, not wanting to look like militants, they love bright shiny colors and name brand outfits.

Yesterday, with the start of the school year, they received a lecture about the attempts of “imperialism to undermine the revolution through its youth.” It was like a faint drizzle running over an impervious surface. The government is right to be worried; these young people who have entered the university will never become good soldiers or fanatics. The clay from which they are made cannot be molded.

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Who Is Filling Cuba’s University Classrooms?

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A Caricature of a Cuban Woman

Woman drinking (14ymedio) 14yMEDIO, Yoani Sanchez, Havana, 22 August 2014 — A woman on national television said that her husband “helps” her with some household chores. To many, the phrase may sound like the highest aspiration of every woman. Another lady asserts that her husband behaves like a “Federated man,” an allusion to the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), which today is celebrating its 54th anniversary. As for me, on this side of the screen, I feel sorry for them in the face of such meekness

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Woman drinking (14ymedio)

Woman drinking (14ymedio)

14yMEDIO, Yoani Sanchez, Havana, 22 August 2014 — A woman on national television said that her husband “helps” her with some household chores. To many, the phrase may sound like the highest aspiration of every woman. Another lady asserts that her husband behaves like a “Federated man,” an allusion to the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), which today is celebrating its 54th anniversary. As for me, on this side of the screen, I feel sorry for them in the face of such meekness. Instead of the urgent demands they should mention, all I hear is this appreciation directed to a power as manly as it is deaf.

It’s not about “helping” to wash a plate or watch the kids, nor tiny illusory gender quotas that hide so much discrimination like a slap. The problem is that economic and political power remains mainly in masculine hands. What percentage of car owners are women? How many acres of land are owned or leased by women. How many Cuban ambassadors on missions abroad wear skirts? Can anyone recite the number of men who request paternity leave to take care of their newborns? How many young men are stopped by the police each day to warn them they can’t walk with a tourist? Who mostly attends the parent meetings at the schools?

Please, don’t try to “put us to sleep” with figures in the style of, “65 percent of our cadres and 50 percent of our grassroots leaders are women.” The only thing this statistic means is that more responsibility falls on our shoulders, which means neither a high decision-making level nor greater rights. At least such a triumphalist phrase clarifies that there are “grassroots leaders,” because we know that decisions at the highest level are made by men who grew up under the precepts that we women are beautiful ornaments to have at hand… always and as long as we keep our mouths shut.

I feel sorry for the docile and timid feminist movement that exists in my country. Ashamed for those ladies with their ridiculous necklaces and abundant makeup who appear in the official media to tell us that “the Cuban woman has been the greatest ally of the Revolution.” Words spoken at the same moment when a company director is sexually harassing his secretary, when a beaten woman can’t get a restraining order against her abusive husband, when a policeman tells the victim of a sexual assault, “Well, with that skirt you’re wearing…” and the government recruits shock troops for an act of repudiation against the Ladies in White.

Women are the sector of the population that has the most reason to shout their displeasure. Because half a century after the founding of the caricature of an organization that is the Federation of Cuban Women, we are neither more free, nor more powerful, nor even more independent.

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A Caricature of a Cuban Woman

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