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To be a young communist
One of the most pleasant tasks of a
revolutionary is observing over the years of revolution how the
institutions that were born at the very beginning are taking
shape, being refined and strengthened; how they are being turned
into real institutions with power, vigor and authority among the
masses. Those organizations that started off on a small scale
with numerous difficulties and hesitations became, through daily
work and contact with the masses, powerful representatives of
today’s revolutionary movement.
The Union of Young Communists [UJC], with
different names and organizational forms, is almost as old as
the revolution. At the beginning it emerged out of the Rebel
Army — perhaps that’s where it also got its initial name [Association
of Young Rebels]. But it was an organization linked to the army
in order to introduce Cuba’s youth to the massive tasks of
national defense, the most urgent problem at the time and the
one requiring the most rapid solution.
The Association of Young Rebels and the
Revolutionary National Militia grew out of what used to be the
Rebel Army’s Department of Instruction. Later, each took on a
life of its own. One became a powerful formation of the armed
people, representing the armed people, with a standing of its
own but united with our army in the tasks of defense. The other
became an organization whose purpose was the political
advancement of Cuban youth.
Later, as the revolution was consolidated and
we could finally talk about the new tasks ahead, compañero
Fidel proposed changing the name of the organization, a change
of name that fully expresses a principle. The UJC has its face
to the future. It is organized with the bright future of
socialist society in mind, after we travel the difficult road we
are now on of constructing a new society, then the road of
completely solidifying the class dictatorship expressed
throughout the socialist stage of society, to finally arrive at
a society without classes, the perfect society, the society you
will be in charge of building, guiding and leading in the future.
For that, the UJC raises as its symbols those of all Cubans:
study, work and the rifle. On its medallions appear two of the
finest examples of Cuban youth, both of whom met tragic deaths
before being able to witness the final results of this battle we
are all engaged in: Julio Antonio Mella and Camilo Cienfuegos.
On this second anniversary, at this time of
hectic construction, of ongoing preparations for the country’s
defense and of the speediest possible technical and
technological advance, we must always ask ourselves first and
foremost: What is the Union of Young Communists and what should
it be?
The Union of Young Communists should be
defined by a single word: vanguard. You, compañeros, must be
the vanguard of all movements, the first to be ready to make the
sacrifices demanded by the revolution, whatever they might be.
You must be the first in work, the first in study, the first in
defense of the country. You must view this task not only as the
full expression of Cuba’s youth, not only as a task of the
organized masses, but as the daily task of each and every member
of the UJC. In order to do that, you have to set yourself real,
concrete tasks, tasks in your daily work that won’t allow the
slightest letup.
The job of organizing must constantly be
linked to all the work carried out by the UJC. Organization is
the key to grasping the initiatives presented by the revolution’s
leaders, the many initiatives proposed by our Prime Minister,
and the initiatives from the working class, which should also
lead to precise directives and ideas for subsequent action.
Without organization, ideas, after an initial momentum, start
losing their effect. They become routine, degenerate into
conformity, and end up simply a memory. I make this warning
because too often, in this short but rich period of our
revolution, many great initiatives have failed. They have been
forgotten because of the lack of the organizational apparatus
needed to keep them going and accomplish something.
At the same time, each and every one of you
should know that being a Young Communist, belonging to the UJC,
is not a favor someone has done for you, nor is it a favor that
you are doing for the state or the revolution. Membership in the
UJC should be the highest honor for a young person in the new
society, an honor that you fight for at all times. In addition,
the honor of remaining in and keeping a high individual standing
in the UJC should be an ongoing effort. In that way we will
advance even faster, as we become used to thinking collectively
and acting on the initiatives of the working masses and of our
top leaders. At the same time, in everything we do as
individuals, we should always be making sure our actions will
not tarnish our own name or the name of the association to which
we belong.
Now, two years later, we can look back and
observe the results of our work. The UJC has tremendous
achievements, one of the most important and spectacular being in
defense.
Those young people, or some of them, who first
climbed the five peaks of Turquino, others who were enrolled in
a whole series of military organizations, all those who picked
up their rifles at moments of danger — they were ready to
defend the revolution each and every place where an invasion or
enemy action was expected. The highest honor, that of being able
to defend our revolution, fell to the young people at Playa
Girón. At Playa Girón they had the honor of defending the
institutions we have created through sacrifice, defending the
accomplishments won by all the people over years of struggle.
Our entire revolution was defended there in 72 hours of battle.
The intention of the enemy was to create a sufficiently strong
beachhead there, with an airfield that would allow it to attack
our entire territory, to bomb it mercilessly, reduce our
factories to ashes and our means of communication to dust, ruin
our agriculture — in a word, to sow chaos across the country.
But our people’s decisive action wiped out that imperialist
attack in only 72 hours. There, young people, many of them still
children, were covered in glory. Some of them are here as
examples of that heroic youth. As for others, only their memory
remains, spurring us on to new battles that we will surely have
to fight, to new heroic responses in the face of imperialist
attack.
At the moment when the country’s defense was
our most important task, the youth were there. Today, defense is
still at the top of our concerns. But we should not forget that
the watchword that guides the Young Communists — study, work
and the rifle — is a unified whole. The country cannot be
defended with arms alone. We must also defend the country by
building it with our work and preparing the new technical cadres
to speed up its development in the coming years. This is
enormously important now, just as important as armed defense.
When these problems were raised, the youth once again were there.
Youth brigades, responding to the call of the revolution,
invaded every corner of the country, and so after a few months
of hard battle in which there were also martyrs of our
revolution — martyrs in education — we were able to announce
something new in Latin America: Cuba was a territory free of
illiteracy in the Americas.
Study at all levels is also a task of today’s
youth; study combined with work, as in the case of those
students picking coffee in Oriente, using their vacations to
pick that bean so important to our country, to our foreign trade
and to ourselves, who consume a tremendous amount of coffee
every day. That task is similar to the literacy campaign. It is
a task of sacrifice that is carried out joyfully, bringing
student compañeros together once more in the mountains of our
country, taking their revolutionary message.
This task is very important because the UJC,
the Young Communists, not only give in this work but also
receive. In some cases they receive more than they give. They
receive new experiences: new experiences in human contact, new
experiences in seeing how our peasants live, in learning what
life and work are like in the most out-of-the-way places, in
everything that has to be done to bring those areas up to the
same level as the cities and to make the countryside a better
place to live. They receive experience and revolutionary
maturity. Compañeros who go through the tasks of teaching
reading and writing or picking coffee, of being in direct
contact with our people, helping them while far away from home,
receive — and I can vouch for this — much more than they
give. And they give a lot!
This is the kind of education that best suits
youth who are being educated for communism. It is a kind of
education in which work stops being an obsession, as it is in
the capitalist world, and becomes a pleasant social duty, done
joyfully to the rhythm of revolutionary songs, amid the most
fraternal camaraderie and human relationships that are mutually
invigorating and uplifting.
In addition, the UJC has advanced a lot in its
organization. There is a big difference between that weak embryo
that was formed as a branch of the Rebel Army and this
organization today. There are Young Communists all over, in
every workplace, in every administrative body. Wherever they can
have an effect, there they are, Young Communists working for the
revolution. The organizational progress must also be considered
an important achievement of the UJC.
Nevertheless, compañeros, there have been
many problems along this difficult road, big difficulties, gross
errors, and we have not always been able to overcome them all.
It is obvious that the Union of Young Communists, as a youth
organization, a younger brother of the Integrated Revolutionary
Organizations, must drink from the fountain of experiences of
compañeros who have worked longer in all the tasks of the
revolution. It is obvious that they should always listen, and
listen with respect, to the voice of that experience. But the
youth also must create. Youth that does not create is really an
anomaly. The UJC has been a bit lacking in that creative spirit.
Through its leadership it has been too docile, too respectful
and not decisive in looking at problems on its own. Now that is
breaking down. compañero Joel [Iglesias] was telling us about
the initiatives regarding work on state farms. That is an
example of how total dependency on the older organization, which
became an absurdity, is beginning to break down, of how the
youth are beginning to think for themselves.
Because we, and our youth along with us, are
recovering from an illness that fortunately was not a very long
one but that had a lot to do with the ideological development of
our revolution. We are all convalescing from the illness called
sectarianism. What did sectarianism lead to? It led to
mechanical imitation; it led to formal analyses; it led to
separation of the leadership from the masses. It led to these
things even within our National Directorate, and it had a direct
reflection here in the UJC.
If we, also disoriented by sectarianism, could
not hear the voice of the people, which is the wisest and most
instructive voice; if we could not feel the pulse of the people
to be able to turn it into concrete ideas, precise guidelines,
how could we communicate these guidelines to the UJC? Since the
dependency was absolute and the docility very great, the UJC was
like a small boat adrift, depending upon the big ship, our
Integrated Revolutionary Organizations, which was also adrift.
So, the UJC took a series of minor initiatives, all it was
capable of then, which at times became transformed into crude
slogans, manifestations of a lack of ideological depth.
Compañero Fidel made a series of criticisms
of extremism and sloganeering, some well known to all of you
such as “The ORI lights the way” and “We are socialists,
go, go, go… ” All those things you are so familiar with and
that Fidel criticized were a reflection of the illness affecting
our revolution. That era is over. We have completely wiped it
out.
Nevertheless, organizations always lag behind
a bit. It’s like a disease that makes a person lose
consciousness. Once the illness goes away, the brain recuperates
and mental clarity returns, but the arms and legs remain
slightly uncoordinated. Those first days after getting out of
bed, walking is shaky, then little by little it becomes surer.
That is the road we are now on. And we must objectively define
and analyze all our organizations so we can continue our
housecleaning. We must realize that we are still walking shakily
so as not to fall, not to trip and fall to the ground. We must
understand our weaknesses in order to eliminate them and gain
strength.
This lack of initiative is due to a
longstanding ignorance of the dialectic that moves mass
organizations, forgetting that an organization like the UJC
cannot be a leadership organization that simply sends directives
to the ranks all the time and doesn’t listen to anything they
have to say. It was thought that the UJC or all Cuba’s other
organizations had one-way lines, one-way lines from the
leadership to the ranks, without another line that came the
other way and brought communication back from the ranks. It is
this constant two-way exchange of experiences and ideas that
should produce the most important guidelines, those that can
focus the work of our youth. At the same time this can help
identify the weakest areas of work, the areas where there is a
slackening off.
We still see today how the youth — heroes
almost like in the novels — who can give their lives a hundred
times over for the revolution, who can respond as one to
whatever specific task they are called upon for, nevertheless
sometimes do not show up at work because they had a UJC meeting.
Or because they stayed up late the night before discussing some
initiative of the youth organization. Or sometimes for no reason
at all, with no justifiable reason. So when a volunteer work
brigade looks around to see where the Young Communists are, they
are often absent; they haven’t shown up. The leader had a
meeting to attend, another one was sick, still another was not
really told about the work.
The result is that the fundamental attitude,
the attitude of being a vanguard of the people, the attitude of
that moving, living example that drives everybody forward as did
the youth at Playa Girón — that attitude is not duplicated at
work. The seriousness that today’s youth must have in meeting
its great commitments — and the major commitment is the
construction of socialist society — is not reflected in actual
work. There are big weaknesses and we must work on them, work at
organizing, work at defining the sore spot, the area with
weaknesses to be corrected. Each one of you has to work on
having it very clear in your consciousness that you cannot be a
good communist if you think about the revolution only at the
moment of decisive sacrifice, at the moment of combat, of heroic
adventure, of what is out of the plain and ordinary, but in your
work you are mediocre or less than mediocre. How can that be?
You already bear the name Young Communists, a
name we as a leadership organization, as a leadership party, do
not yet have. You have to build a future in which work will be
man’s greatest dignity, a social duty, a pleasure given to
man, the most creative activity there is. Everyone will have to
be interested in their work and the work of others, in society’s
daily advance. How can it be that you who bear that name today
can disdain work? There is a weakness here, a weakness in
organization, in clarifying what work is.
This is a natural human weakness. People —
all of us, it seems to me — much prefer something that breaks
the monotony of life, something every once in a while that
suddenly reminds us of our own personal worth, of our worth
within society. I can imagine the pride of those compañeros who
were manning an antiaircraft battery, for example, defending
their homeland from Yankee planes. Suddenly, one of them is
lucky enough to see his bullets hit an enemy plane. Clearly,
that is the happiest moment of a man’s life, something never
to be forgotten. Those compañeros who lived through that
experience will never forget it. We have to defend our
revolution, that revolution we are building, every day. And in
order to defend it we have to make it, build it, fortify it,
with the work that youth doesn’t like today, or at least gets
left as the last of its duties. That is an old-fashioned
mentality that dates back to the capitalist world, where work
was indeed a duty and a necessity, but a sad duty and necessity.
Why does that happen? Because we still have
not been able to give work its true content. We have not been
able to imbue the worker with a consciousness of the importance
of that creative act that he performs every day. The worker and
the machine, the worker and the object to which he applies his
labor — these are still different and antagonistic things.
That has to be changed, because new generations must be formed
whose main interest is work and who know how to find in work a
permanent and constantly changing source of fresh excitement.
They need to make work something creative, something new. That
is perhaps the weakest point in our UJC today, and that is why I
am harping on it. That’s why, amidst the happiness of
celebrating your anniversary, I am adding a small drop of
bitterness in order to touch that sensitive spot, and to call on
the youth to respond.
Today we held a meeting at the Ministry [of
Industry] where we discussed emulation. Many of you have
probably already discussed emulation at your workplaces and have
read that long paper about it. What is the problem with
emulation, compañeros? The problem is that emulation cannot be
led by papers containing rules, orders and models. Rules and
models are necessary later on in order to compare the work of
enthusiastic people who are involved in emulation. When two
compañeros begin an emulation with each one producing something
on a machine, after a while they find they have to set up some
rule to know who is getting the most out of his machine, to
determine product quality, the number of hours worked, what
shape the machines are in when they finish, how they are taken
care of, any number of things.
But if instead of giving this set of rules to
these two compañeros who are involved in emulation, all we do
is give the set of rules to two others who are thinking only
about getting home, then what good are the rules? What purpose
do they serve? We often set rules and models for something that
does not exist. Models must have content. Rules have to limit
and define an already created situation. Rules must be the
result of emulation, carried out anarchistically if you will,
yes, but enthusiastically, overflowing in every workplace in
Cuba, and then, automatically, the need for rules will appear.
But doing emulation for the sake of a set of rules, no. That’s
how we have dealt with a lot of problems. That’s how formal we’ve
been in dealing with a lot of things.
I asked at that meeting why the secretary of
the Young Communists hadn’t been there, or how many times he
had been there. He had been there once or a few times, and other
Young Communists had never attended. But in the course of the
meeting, as we were discussing this and other problems, the
Young Communists and the party nucleus and the women and the
Committees for the Defense of the Revolution and the union —
everyone — naturally became very enthusiastic. Or at least
they were filled with internal resentment, with bitterness, with
a desire to improve, with a desire to show they could do what
has not been done: motivate people. And suddenly, everybody made
a commitment that the whole ministry would become involved in
emulation on all levels, that they would discuss rules later,
after setting up the emulation, and that within two weeks the
whole ministry would be actively involved in emulation. That is
mobilization. That is people who have already understood and
sensed — because each of those compañeros is a great
compañero — that there was a weakness in their work. Their
dignity was wounded, and they went about taking care of the
problem.
That is what has to be done, remembering that
work is the most important thing. Pardon me if I repeat it once
again, but the point is that without work there is nothing. All
the riches in the world, all humanity’s values, are nothing
but accumulated work. Without that, nothing can exist. Without
the extra work that creates more surpluses for new factories and
social institutions, the country will not advance. No matter how
strong our armies are, we will always have a slow rhythm of
growth. We have to break out of this. We have to break with all
the old errors, hold them up to the light of day, analyze them
everywhere, and then correct them.
Now, compañeros, I wanted to share my opinion
as a national leader of the ORI on what a Young Communist should
be, to see if we all agree. I believe that the first thing that
must characterize a Young Communist is the honor he feels in
being a Young Communist, an honor that moves him to let the
world know he is a Young Communist. It doesn’t make him go
underground, nor does he reduce it to formulas. He expresses
that honor at all times, so that it comes from the bottom of his
soul, and he wants to show it because it is his greatest pride.
In addition to that, he should have a great sense of duty, a
sense of duty toward the society we are building, toward our
fellow men as human beings and toward all men around the world.
That is something that must characterize the Young Communist.
And along with that: deep sensitivity to all problems,
sensitivity to injustice; a spirit that rebels against every
wrong, whoever commits it; questioning anything not understood,
discussing and asking for clarification on whatever is not clear;
declaring war on formalism of all types; always being open to
new experiences in order to apply the many years of experience
of humanity’s advance along the road to socialism to our
country’s concrete conditions, to the realities that exist in
Cuba. Each and every one of you must think about how to change
reality, how to make it better.
The Young Communist must always strive to be
the best at everything, struggle to be the best, feel upset when
he is not and fight to improve, to be the best. Of course, we
cannot all be the best. But we can be among the best, in the
vanguard. We can be a living example, a model for those
compañeros who do not belong to the Young Communists, an
example for older men and women who have lost some of that
youthful enthusiasm, who have lost a certain faith in life, and
who always respond well to example. That is another task of
Young Communists. Together with that there should be a great
spirit of sacrifice, not only in heroic ventures but at all
times, sacrificing to help the next compañero in small tasks so
he can finish his work, so he can do his work at school, in his
studies, so he can improve in any way.
Always paying attention to the mass of human
beings he lives among — that is, every Young Communist must be
essentially human and be so human that he draws closer to
humanity’s best qualities, that he distills the best of what
man is through work, study, through ongoing solidarity with the
people and all the peoples of the world. Developing to the
utmost the sensitivity to feel anguished when a man is murdered
in any corner of the world and to feel enthusiasm when a new
banner of freedom is raised in any corner of the world.
The Young Communist cannot be limited by
national borders. The Young Communist must practice proletarian
internationalism and feel it as his own, reminding himself and
all of us — Young Communists and those aspiring to be
communists here in Cuba — that we are a real and palpable
example for all our America, and for more than our America, for
the other countries of the world also fighting on other
continents for freedom, against colonialism, against
neocolonialism, against imperialism, against all forms of
oppression by unjust systems. He must always remember that we
are a flaming torch, that just as we are all individually a
model for the people of Cuba, we are also a model for the
peoples of Latin America and the oppressed peoples of the world
who are fighting for their freedom. We must be worthy of that
example. At every moment and every hour we must be worthy of
that example. That is what we think a Young Communist should be.
If someone says we are just romantics,
inveterate idealists, thinking the impossible, that the masses
of people cannot be turned into almost perfect human beings, we
will have to answer a thousand and one times: Yes, it can be
done; we are right. The people as a whole can advance. They can
wipe out all those little human vices as we have been doing in
Cuba over these four years of revolution, improving themselves
as we all improve ourselves daily, intransigently casting off
all those who fall back, who cannot march to the rhythm of the
Cuban revolution.
So it has to be, so it should be, and so it
will be, compañeros. So it will be because you are Young
Communists, creators of the perfect society, human beings
destined to live in a new world where everything decrepit,
everything old, everything that represents the society whose
foundations have just been destroyed will have definitively
disappeared. To reach that goal we have to work every day, work
in the inner sense of improving ourselves, of gaining knowledge
and understanding about the world around us, of inquiring,
finding out, and knowing why things are the way they are and
always considering humanity’s great problems as our own.
Thus, at any given moment, on an ordinary day
in the years ahead, after much sacrifice… yes, after seeing
ourselves perhaps many times on the brink of destruction,
perhaps after seeing our factories destroyed and having rebuilt
them, after the death and massacre of many of us and the
reconstruction of what is destroyed… After all this, on an
ordinary day, almost without noticing it, we will have created
— together with the other peoples of the world — communist
society, our ideal.
Compañeros, speaking to the youth is a very
pleasant task. You feel able to communicate some things and you
feel that the youth understand. There are many more things I
would like to say to you about all our efforts, our desires,
about how, nevertheless, we have to start all over after moments
of weakness, about how contact with the people — the purity
and ideals of the people — fills us with new revolutionary
fervor. There are many more things to talk about, but we too
have duties to carry out.
By the way, I will take this opportunity to
explain to you why I am saying goodbye to you, with an ulterior
motive, perhaps. I am saying goodbye because I am going to
fulfill my duty as a volunteer worker at a textile factory. We
have been working there for some time now, involved in an
emulation with the Consolidated Spinning and Textile Enterprise
in another textile plant, and we are also emulating with the
Central Planning Board, which works in another textile plant. I
want to tell you honestly that the Ministry of Industry is in
last place in the emulation. We have to make a bigger, greater
effort, repeatedly, to move ahead, to meet the goals we
ourselves set of being the best, of aspiring to be the best,
because it hurts us to be last in socialist emulation. What
happened is simply what has happened to a lot of you. The
emulation is cold, a little bit artificial, and we have not
known how to get in direct contact with the mass of workers in
that industry. We have a meeting tomorrow to discuss these
problems and try to resolve all of them, to find a common ground,
a common language, an absolute identity between the workers from
that industry and us workers from the Ministry. After we do that,
I am sure our output will shoot up, and we will be able to at
least fight a clean, honorable battle for first place. At any
rate, at next year’s meeting we will tell you what happens. So
until then.
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