Just because they’re going hungry and have no future, it doesn’t mean young Cubans can’t be happy in the communist totalitarian hellhole where they live. That is according to the Castro dictatorship’s Communist Youth Union. The government-controlled organization has issued a directive to Cuba’s young people, who are suffering through the end stages of the destruction and misery wrought by socialism, to stay in Cuba create their own happiness. That happiness, however, must be within the bounds of the socialist revolution. This is socialism in action.
Via Diario de Cuba (my translation):
Regime tells young people to create their own happiness… inside Cuba and under revolutionary principles
In the midst of the anachronism suffered by the Communist Youth Union (UJC), the Cuban regime demanded that the new generations stay in the country to “create their own happiness and the collective,” in accordance with the motto of the XII Congress, and opening the doors for foreigners “who identify with the principles of the revolution” to join the ranks of the decimated organization.
“The challenges remain enormous, but the Revolution believes in the youth,” said Miguel Díaz-Canel at the event’s closing, as reported by state-run news agency ACN. According to the ruler, in the current socioeconomic crisis that plunges Cubans into despair and drives them to emigrate, young communists “have found their Moncada and assault it every day.”
“The UJC has the task of continuing to be the vanguard of a joyful and profound youth and of uniting and motivating the youth universe under its banners, beyond its militancy,” he said.
He celebrated that the Congress reflected “without euphemisms” on “the painful emigration of the young population” going through Cuba but also said that it’s “time to talk about those who are here and now, those who sustain the country and the Revolution with their effort under the same economic needs,” which he always attributed to the US embargo as a supposed economic and cultural war.
For the ruler, the “great merit of Cuban youth living, studying, and working here, amidst transportation problems, blackouts, inflation, and other evils,” associated with what he described as “our shortcomings, is that they leap over all that and go out every day to fight to make Cuba a better country.”
He praised the “revolutionaries” who “recognize the daily difficulties and confront them and try to change them.” Díaz-Canel asked communist youth for a stronger effort in defending the regime, to “sustain the work that our parents won for us by standing tall.”
In an earlier speech, the head of the Ideological Department of the Central Committee of the Party, Rogelio Polanco, also made demands on communist youth on the island: “continue to defend and do what patriotic Cubans must do, be more and more Martianos, Fidelistas, more Marxists,” according to a television report.
Polanco also urged the new generations to “change the sense of happiness” that most young people find by leaving their country.
“Let our sense of happiness be different from the sense of happiness they want to impose on us, which is not about accumulating material things; but let the sense of happiness be this one, of seeking collective happiness in our spirituality, in our solidarity, in socializing our life here, in the conditions of a nation that wants justice for all,” Polanco insisted.
New statutes and new leadership
The XII Congress of the UJC appointed Meyvis Estévez Echavarría as the first secretary of the National Committee of the organization, which in an attempt to expand its dwindling ranks has opened its doors to foreigners and extended the age limit for membership with the approval of new statutes.
Estévez Echavarría, who replaces Aylín Álvarez García at the helm of the organization, previously served as the second secretary.
In the words of the appointed, at the Congress “a secure continuity has been reaffirmed, a determination that frightens the adversary and strengthens the newest generation.”
“If defending this land entails the daring to continue dreaming, we must count on this generation, and if safeguarding so many beautiful things implies multiplying Fidel, Raúl, Mariana Grajales, Celia, and Vilma one thousand times, there is no doubt that we will always be like them,” rallied the young woman as she read a statement handed over to the regime’s historical figure José Ramón Machado Ventura but destined for General Raúl Castro.
Cuban authorities have been extremely concerned since 2022 about the disinterest of UJC militants in joining the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC). In March of that year, at a meeting of the organization chaired by Miguel Díaz-Canel, the Secretary of Organization of the Central Committee of the PCC, Roberto Morales Ojeda, described as “worrisome” the number of young people who do not transition from the UJC to the PCC and recommended extending political-ideological work not only to their workplaces or places of study but also to “digital environments.”
The UJC does not provide figures for its membership. The newspaper Juventud Rebelde said in 2008 that membership was around 600,000 militants, but it probably does not exceed 390,000 members, according to estimates by journalist Roberto Álvarez Quiñones in an article published in DIARIO DE CUBA.
In January, the audio of a meeting about the request for resignation of a UJC member from her Base Committee was leaked. The material exposed the different interventions of leaders and members of the organization and constituted further evidence of the growing disinterest of Cuban youth in maintaining any political ties with the regime and its concern in this regard.
“Create your happiness.” Happiness, in a miserable third-world hellhole where nothing works or makes sense, except for those on top. The irony is so rich they must not get how absurd it sounds–or maybe they do, but flagrant BS is all they have to offer. Yeah, the young intend to be happy, outside of Cuba.