14
PARTISAN REVIEW
For a spirited "revolutionary" every word has its telling effects.
Cuban children's hands may be washed, but special attention
is paid to their brains; in their primers "F" is for Fidel, "M" is for
Marx, "B" is for Brezhnev. The same alphabet soup is served to
adolescents, but if they want to finish their studies they will not only
have to pass the course in Marxism-Leninism, they will also have to
worship ideology, almost as if it were the cult to your personality.
The libraries on the Island, trampled by Attila's horse, have
amputated every heterodoxy ... Mao Tse Tung's, for example. But
the sacrilegious books are carried inside profane ones, and they are
read secretly, on horseback, forgetting the red scourge that burns
everything to ashes.
You have hung a slogan from
1984
in every school :
"Inside 'the' Revolution everything, outside 'the' Revolution
nothing."
Even the youngest children translate it correctly: "For the rich
-leaders, athletes, the military, the police - everything; for the
poor, what's left over."
And in fact, the children of "Revolution's" privileged few attend
special luxurious schools to which they are driven in government
cars.
You have built a modern school in the Municipality of Moa for
the offspring of the Soviet colonists.
More than seventy-eight percent of the population was illiterate
on Independence Day, 1898, and there was over twenty-one percent
illiteracy when you came to power twenty-five years ago. The
Cuban people hoped to wipe out this stain, and the most pessimistic
estimated that it would be eradicated by the 1970s; the advent of
Communism has interfered with this victory.
Today the number of university students per one thousand
inhabitants is half of what it was when you took over, and the
Education budget has decreased by the same proportion.
The exiles stand out because of their limited vocabularies;
university students usually have to repeat their studies when they do
manage to escape, since they are at a level only slightly higher than
that of an ordinary high school graduate.
Generations of Cubans trapped between denunciation and
catechism, adulation and tedium.
Stepmother "Revolution" treats the young as if they were spoiled
babies in the hope that as adults they will regress to submissive in–
fancy.
