Cubanet, Miriam Celaya, West Palm Beach, Florida, 13 April 2016 — The video has gone viral in the internet in just over 24 hours — between Monday afternoon, April 11th 2016, and the early hours of Tuesday night — it had been shared 42,000 times, it had been viewed almost 4 million times, and the count continued to rise exponentially. The images speak louder than words: children as young as 7 or 8 years old, in school uniform, contort in the frenzy of a lewd dance in what is obviously a Cuban elementary school. Around them, voices can be heard (their teachers or some other adult in charge of their care and their education?) encouraging them cheerfully, obviously enjoying the spectacle.
The kindest adjectives that could describe those responsible for this act are aberration, atrocity, perversity and depravity.
The children’s bodies curl and bow with spasmodic thrusts to the rhythm of music. The girl raises her slender leg up to the boy’s waist or she turns back, bringing her child’s buttocks close to the boy’s pelvis, who also rhythmically imitates sexual gestures characteristic of adults in full intimacy. At one point in the dance, the boy lays on the ground while his “dance” companion crouches down with her legs open as she continues her writhing over the boy’s lower abdomen, while the general revelry reaches its highpoint all around them.
Such unusual entertainment, worthy of a brothel or a nightclub of the worst category, goes on for five and a half minutes to the distress of any decent spectator, and to the delight of those who continue to encourage the dancers, with not one teacher or school authority putting an end the lustful dance.
These innocent children, with their bandanas around their necks, their white shirts and their scarce few feet in stature are most likely the very same ones that swear each morning to “be like Che,” sing the national anthem or salute the tri-color flag. It is difficult to imagine what other, more responsible parents, who are committed to their families might think about the peculiar “recreational and cultural environment” that their children are being brought up in, and of the benefits offered by the highly praised free education, supreme jewel of the Cuban educational system, much hailed in international forums and organizations as the role model to be followed, even by developed countries.
Here we have a single video that stands as irrefutable testimony to the truth that the many voices of the independent civil society have been reporting for years: the colossal loss of moral values in Cuban society, the shocking deterioration of schoolteachers and “educators” that directly affects the deformation of the younger generations, the immorality invading countless homes and Cuban families, whose members welcome their children’s precocity and shamelessness, children who are being deprived of the gentle naïveté of childhood before of their first decade of life. Will defenders of the Castro regime reiterate this time that this is a fabrication of the enemies of the revolution?
There are certainly numerous factors that have contributed to all this moral collapse: the appalling housing conditions that make tens of thousands of families live together in the greatest promiscuity — where adults and children share the same tight spaces and sometimes even the same beds — perennial material deprivation, despair, widespread social corruption and the fight for survival. A characteristic degenerative process of the socio-political system imposed on Cubans for nearly six decades.
There might be some who will shrug their shoulders or label as prudes those of us who have become disturbed and felt disgust at the images displayed in the video, but these young children, thus exposed, have actually been innocent victims of those who should look out for their care and their education: their parents, their teachers and their political system that hypocritically portrays itself as the guardian of childhood.
The children’s rights have been stripped of the protection of adults, as have their rights to grow in a safe and dignified environment, to not be exposed publicly, and to receive an appropriate education within the parameters and universally recognized moral behaviors. Without exaggeration, we are witnessing the consecration of a crime that should be judged and condemned by peoples of all decent and civilized societies. What do agencies and institutions responsible for protecting children have to say now? Will they keep silent before this atrocity so they can continue applauding condescendingly the amazing Cuban official statistics and the fabulous “achievements” of revolutionary education?
However, the matter is not lacking in a strong symbolic charge. The danse macabre of these lewd schoolchildren seems to embody the funeral ritual that had had once been a solid educational system shaping generations of professionals with highest qualifications and the broadest of educations.
As for the Cuban authorities, we’ll have to wait and see this time how they will manage to endorse this despicable crime to some twisted “maneuver of the right in collusion with Imperialism”. Their work is cutout for them.
Translated by Norma Whiting
