Who Is Filling Cuba's University Classrooms?

Yoani Sanchez - Award-winning Cuban blogger

Who Is Filling Cuba's University Classrooms?
Updated: 09/02/2014 6:59 pm EDT

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.

Source: Who Is Filling Cuba's University Classrooms? | Yoani Sanchez -
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yoani-sanchez/who-is-filling-cubas-univ_b_5755356.html