HAVANA, August 14, 1996. (APIC).- Unquestionably it is a long term business to stay in power, even if there are those who have found out, rather late, what's behind it, masked as culture and education, not being able to foresee its true reaches and on time to prevent the harm being done to our people.
Under Castroism you can almost equate mathematically education and indoctrination, since education is molded and imposed by the regime according to its convenience. In the first years of life and later to the youth, they are formed in an adapted frame of mind, manufactured and finished within socialism, which turns them into beings unable to solve their own problems, which is typical of all totalitarian systems.
Every business requires investments, and it is true that the government invested resources so that every Cuban citizen would receive the desired education. The subjects taught were geared to enrich the communist mentality. It also created in the individuals many doubts, due to the contradictions within.
Under normal education conditions it has been proven that children are more creative before entering school than they are upon leaving them. Within socialism, school life kills this virtue, because it encourages patterned thoughts and gives conventional answers.
What can you expect from a doctrinaire education? What does education think about the initiatives of the system?
Education, aside from teaching children how to write, to add and to read, must inform individuals as to their ability to use flexibility in their reasoning processes, which all human beings potentially have. Initiative and culture will only be had by those who are capable of engaging in its systematic search, of going beyond and not to conform.
An individual with an autonomous thought, capable of actions with initiative, with a mind of his own, not authorized, inspires suspicion. Hence the imposition of ideas, which replaces his or at the very least forces the individual to hide them deep within himself, keeping him from his own ideology. The creative inability causes the stagnation of all sources of social life, in which bureaucracy and corruption emerge, negative tendencies of moral principles,and social passivity, where falsehoods are accepted as truths.
The first thing which must happen in Cuba, and perhaps the most difficult, is to change the schemes, in order to reach an orientation of all the social strata. It is useless to reduce everything to a simple change of leaders. In the best of cases, that would take us to another dictatorship. What we can do well now, will be, what we can accomplish in future generations.