Bad Handwriting in La Joven Cuba (19) / Regina Coyula

For Julián Gutiérrez Alonso for changing your mindset.

There are no clues about the author, so I presume after reading the text that he is a young student at the University of Matanzas.

Thinking differently means not to think the opposite. It is to find elements that improve society and thought, in the case in question. On cannot ignore scientific and technical development or make reductions and dogmatic generalizations.

You have been trapped in your own words. If in capitalism higher education is elitist, how can you say in the next paragraph that there is a shortage of unskilled labor. I’m not aware of how all the universities in the world work, but I know good scholarships are awarded to low-income students. Even in Canada and Spain (I don’t know if it is inall the universities and I do not know if it happens in other countries), there is no requirement to pay back the scholarship. There are state universities, there are programs for distance education and evening classes, much used by workers with a desire to excel.

I understand in your work, and I agree, that the State should not guarantee a job for graduates, but places should be occupied based on competition. Comprehensiveness, according to how the term is used in Cuba, is not synonymous with competence. Anyone can graduate if it is their aspiration, but getting a good job will be an additional incentive to be a better student.

[You say] Those without access to professional posts have secured technical jobs and even jobs as workers, but under the premise that the wages paid for the position they hold include a premium for the knowledge they have.

No. I do not think you have to reward students who may have been mediocre. If they are good, they will demonstrate it, because they have studied their career as a vocation, not because it was their lot. If they are not satisfied, they can always open their own business. The State should abandon the paternalistic position of guaranteeing jobs, in fact, it should stop interfering in that process.

Never disregard economic motivation. The best jobs are almost without exception associated with higher wages, fifty years of socialism failed to create wealth with a conscience. Capitalism, with all the evils that you find in it, has not ceased to create wealth that ends up benefiting the whole world irrespective of ideologies and systems. To change your mindset in your case, you could begin by seeing that not everything in capitalism is bad and not everything in socialism is good.

November 9 2011