Castro's Death Reminds Aging Cuba of Generation Gap

Castro's Death Reminds Aging Cuba of Generation Gap
December 02, 2016 10:45 PM
Reuters

SANTA CLARA/HAVANA —
Fidel Castro's death has highlighted a yawning generational gap between
older Cubans who remember grim poverty before his 1959 revolution, and
youngsters who appreciate free health care and education but fear the
21st century is leaving them behind.

Julio Lopez, 77, belongs firmly to the first group. He was a hungry,
barefoot 14-year-old in 1956 when he first met Castro, who was just
beginning his revolution in the Sierra Madre mountains.

For Lopez, who lives in the central city of Santa Clara and wears an old
olive green uniform draped in medals, Castro was a Christ-like figure
who brought meaning and dignity to a life marked by deprivations.

"We were 12 brothers, we slept on the dirt floor, heated by a fire. We
had no medicine, it was extreme poverty," said Lopez, of his life before
he joined Castro's band of fighters in a war against U.S.-backed
strongman Fulgencio Batista.

Illiterate until Castro's friend Ernesto "Che" Guevara taught him to
write his name, Lopez went on to train as a mechanic.

"After the war ended, there was not one child in Cuba who did not have a
school to go to," said the veteran, who traveled the world, fighting
with Cuba's left-wing allies in Angola and working in Iran, Libya and
Vietnam.

Since Castro died last Friday, young and old alike have eulogized his
successes in providing free health and education for all after the
revolution.

But while for veterans like Lopez those gains make Castro's legacy
unassailable, for Millennials like law graduate-turned roadside
electronics repairman Ivan Garcia Milan, 30, it is time the island's
Communist government embraced deeper economic changes.

Cuba churns out far more graduates than it can employ.

Economic reforms pushed through by President Raul Castro since he took
over from his brother a decade ago have opened some opportunities in a
fledgling private sector but the changes are slow-moving and younger
Cubans are keenly aware of what they are missing.

Sitting at a small table in the doorway to his family's home in bustling
central Havana, repairing a pair of headphones, Garcia said that as the
world evolves, so should Cuba.

"Fidel was a respected figure, a political compass. But you can't change
things if you put politics before the economy ... We don't want to end
up like North Korea," he added, a large cut-glass stud earring in his
left ear and a smart watch on his wrist. "They say one is only set free
when your father has died. Well, the father has died."

Most Cubans have only known an economy addled by a mix of socialist
policies at home and a decades-old U.S. economic embargo.

In contrast to earlier generations, younger Cubans have been tantalized
in recent years with the possibility of change.

'Stirred Up'

Raul Castro's reforms have allowed people to set up small businesses and
travel abroad, and in late 2014 he agreed with President Barack Obama to
put an end to more than half a century of animosity with the United States.

For veterans like Lopez, the changes are good, and timely.

But modernization has not been deep enough for the young, who keep track
of the fast-changing outside world through mobile phones, patchy
Internet and foreign visitors.

Raul Castro vows to step down in early 2018. He will likely hand power
to Miguel Diaz-Canel, at 56 a relative youngster inside the Communist
Party leadership.

But despite making some comments about the need to liberalize Cuba's
state-controlled media and improve Internet access, little is known
about Diaz-Canel's views on the economy.

"As we say on the street, he still hasn't fired the first shot," said
Abraham Jimenez, a 27-year-old who heads The Sneeze, one of Cuba's first
independent, web-based media outlets. "We have to wait, I wouldn't like
to guess what the scenario might be."

With reforms moving slowly and concerns U.S. President-elect Donald
Trump might reverse Obama's policy of closer ties to Cuba, some here are
looking to find opportunities abroad.

"The youth in Cuba is a little bit stirred up because there are a lot of
people who don't have enough money to buy things.

There is work but the salaries are pathetic," said Luis Garcia, 23, a
medical student who was planning to emigrate to Germany.

There, he said, he would earn more working in a clothes shop than as a
doctor in Cuba.

"It's a shame to abandon medicine, but I have to do it to help my
family," said Garcia, smartly dressed in a lilac shirt, dark pinstriped
trousers and large sunglasses.

Driven partly by concerns the United States might soon end a special
policy that allows Cubans who reach U.S. land to stay, there has been a
new surge in migration.

In the first 10 months of the 2016 U.S. fiscal year, 46,635 Cubans
reached the United States, according to official data crunched by the
Pew Research Center, almost double the number who arrived in the whole
of fiscal year 2014.

Making it all the more urgent to stem the flow of educated youths
leaving the country, Cuba also has one of the region's oldest
populations, a result of an impressive life expectancy of 78 years and a
birth rate of just 1.45 children per woman.

For those who do stay, the trappings of modern life are infuriatingly
hard to grasp.

A civil engineer working on bridge, road and building construction for
around $25 a month, 29-year-old Roberto is frustrated he has to go to a
local park to get a WiFi signal on his phone, and decide whether to buy
clothes or extra food in a given month.

He only gets by supplementing his state wage with other odd jobs.

"We'd like to have more freedoms, to be able to surf the internet, to
have better wages," he said, as dozens of fellow Cubans stood in the
park seeking a signal in one of Havana's WiFi hot spots.

"Times are changing, and so is the way people think," he added. "But
there are values stemming from the revolution that no-one wants to lose,
like free health and education."

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