FERNANDO ARRABAL
13
Three quarters of the tobacco harvesters in Pinar del Rio and
Villas are children and teenagers.
Etc.
To please you, Felipe Perez Roque, President of the National
Federation of Middle School Students, announced:
"We will increase our farm labor, the harvesting of citrus fruits
and the gathering of raw materials by young people, so that
the profits will cover the costs of education
and the balance can be used by our soldiers."
Another of your subordinates at the same "Assembly for
Communist Education," was more precise:
"The Pioneers" (children between the ages of six and twelve)
"will harvest 84 million kilograms of citrus fruits for export."
Yes, Poor Cuba!
Cuba is an island prison that one sometimes leaves to go to a
smaller prison called concentration camp.
In this vile place children, high school students, college students
and their parents, without a voice and without a vote, have no power
to make decisions.
The Party, pregnant with authority, gives birth to its inexorable
decrees and chooses the school, the curriculum and the career "for
the good of 'Revolution'''-
AMGR
Teenagers, lying in the discipline-colored ruins, sleep with the
angel of dreams and dream they are escaping to a silent country
where poppies are not red.
Under scrutiny from the moment they take their first steps,
young Cubans move from the UPC (Union of Cuban Pioneers) to
the FEEM (the Federation of Middle School Students) and finally, if
they belong to the minority that reaches higher education, to the
FEU (Federation of University Students) as if they were walking
through different compartments in the same cage .
Your guardians watch, night and day, so that they do not cut
the umbilical cord that attaches them to Mama "Revolution .."
You, who pretend to be the incarnation of rebellion, demand
that the exemplary hero of a Pioneer's first years be a Soviet boy,
keen-eyed and quick tongued, who betrayed his father and his
grandmother. Just as keen and just as quick,
"Revolution"
shot them.
