Why Was There No Student Strike For Climate Change In Cuba?

A young woman shouts slogans through a megaphone during a march for the environment in Santiago de Chile. (EFE)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez, Generation Y, Havana, 16 March 2019 — Greta Thunberg, age 16, is quiet and shy. The Swedish teenager resembles any Cuban woman of that age who has understood that the world is not the neat and clean place described in children’s stories.

Her concern for climate change led her to skip school every Friday to demand politicians take effective actions that protect the environment, an attitude that has spread to schoolchildren in several European cities and has crossed the Atlantic to infect thousands of children in Latin America. So far in Cuba however, no student in primary, secondary high school or university has joined the initiative.

But the fact that, last Friday, the streets of Havana and other cities on the island were not filled with youthful faces demanding cuts in carbon dioxide emission, or the urgent implementation of policies to save the planet, does not mean – at all – that Cuban children and adolescents are not thinking about these issues.

What it shows is the lack of autonomy and of rights that leaves them unable to express their dissatisfaction. Nor is the majority apathetic and insensitive to environmental issues, as adults often want to believe, with that nefarious phrase, “young people are a lost cause.” Nor is Sweden so far away that Cuban young people are not aware of the earthquake of activism being launched by Thunberg.

Through social networks, internet access on mobile phones and conversations between friends, it is easy to hear about the story of the young woman who stood for weeks alone in a square in Stockholm to inspire thousands of people throughout the world. Thus, at least in this case, the justification of misinformation or ignorance is not valid. Nor, in Cuba, is it a valid argument to say – as the official press likes to repeat – that we do not have the serious environmental problems “of the developed world.” It is enough to see the long column of smoke that rises every morning from the Ñico López Refinery in Havana, to realize the seriousness of the situation.

Beyond the excessive local emissions or the specific contamination of an area, the protests initiated by Thunberg try to draw attention to the fact that this is a global problem that concerns us all. Why, then, have young Cubans not followed the path of Ecuadorians, Brazilians, Mexicans, Chileans and Argentines who have joined the demand she initiated? The answer is not indifference, but fear.

Not one of the structures that include students and young people on this Island is designed to let them act with their own voice. The José Martí Organization of Pioneers, for younger children, the Federation of Secondary Students, and the Federation of University Students are organizations used by power to transmit down to the new generations, not platforms for representation, demands and pressure from those generations up to the authorities.

If the Plaza of the Revolution does not order them to take to the streets they do not do so, and, sadly, this “orientation” comes only for ideological purposes, such as protesting against the White House, demanding the release of a Cuban spy or participating in a act of repudiation against dissidents on the island.

They are entities designed to muzzle the voices of young people rather than amplify them. This explains why the example of Greta Thunberg has been met in Cuba with silence.

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