CUBA
Cuban: System `not ideal'
In a speech to youths, the one-time leader of Cuba's Communist Youth
admitted that the system has had its failings but urged them to not give
in to capitalism's `siren song.'
BY WILL WEISSERT
Associated Press
HAVANA --
One of the most-visible faces of Cuba's caretaker government urged the
island's young people to ignore capitalism's ''siren song,'' while
acknowledging that the country's current communist system was not as
''ideal'' as had been desired.
Marking the 45th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Youth
Union on Wednesday, Vice President and Cabinet Secretary Carlos Lage
said the revolution that Fidel Castro led by toppling dictator Fulgencio
Batista in 1959 will have to live on in a generation that may be unsure
of what it is rebelling against.
''We always knew the biggest challenge of socialism is to instill in
young people a communist conscience and rejection of capitalism, without
having lived in it, without having seen the moral damage it produces,''
Lage said, addressing a packed house at Havana's Karl Marx Theater.
Part the union's job now, he said, is to help make young people ''immune
to the siren song'' of capitalism.''
Lage is a key member of the provisional government headed by 75-year-old
defense minister Raúl Castro, who took power when his brother Fidel
stepped down temporarily following emergency intestinal surgery last summer.
Fidel Castro has not been seen in public since, but life on the island
has been little changed and top government leaders have insisted the
80-year-old leader is on the mend.
Himself a former Communist Youth Union leader, Lage said today's Cuban
teenagers were born in the lean years after the Soviet Union collapsed
and generous subsidies and trade dried up, provoking chronic shortages.
Speaking frankly about the era known as the ''special period,'' Lage
said the economic deprivations of that time brought a stark end to the
1980s, when the island flourished.
''You all were born or grew up when electricity was out for 10 hours or
more a day, medicines were scarce, there was a dramatic shortage of
food, and public transportation could barely be found, even on the
streets of the capital,'' he said.
Lage said the limited free-market concessions the government made then
to help stabilize the economy have since created ''bitter
contradictions'' and forced Cuban society ``to watch deformities and
inequalities grow.''
He acknowledged that the current communist system was ``not as ideal as
the one we wished for, or achieved years ago.''
He continued: ''Even aware of our justified dissatisfaction, our people
today enjoy rights that for billions of people on the planet aren't even
imaginable,'' he said. ``Free access to education and healthcare from
one extreme of the island to the other. In our country, no one lacks the
opportunity to study, or a job.''
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