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Cuban immigration law is perhaps one of the strictest on the planet for a foreigner who settles in the national territory. For decades, living here was a privilege allowed only to the “comrades” of Eastern Europe, apprentice guerrillas, and political refugees from Latin American dictatorships. Diplomatic personnel and some chosen academics completed the map of natives of other countries who would stay in Cuba more or less permanently.

The island ceased to be a country of immigrants, where the crucible of identity joined together cultures far and near. Chinese, French, Arabs, Haitians, Spaniards and Poles, among many others, brought their customs, culinary recipes, and entrepreneurial initiatives to achieve the wonder of diversity. Today it is rare to see gathered around family tables people who were not born here.

At the end of 2014, the National Bureau of Statistics announced that the number of foreign residents in Cuba in 2011 represented just 0.05% of the population. A figure that contrasts with the 128,392 foreigners – 1.3% of the population – that we shared the island with in 1981. Two factors explain the sharp drop in foreign residents: the implosion, in the 1990s, of the socialist camp, whence the “technicals” of yesteryear; and, above all, because our country long ago ceased to be a nation of opportunities.

While foreign residents were leaving, temporary visitors were becoming an economic “lifeline” in the face of an increasing material misery. These latter were, for a long time, the only ones with hard currency, and with it the ability to buy shampoo in the “diplotiendas” (diplomat stores), and to experience the enormous luxury of enjoying a cold beer in a hotel bar. The tourist became the Prince Charming of many young Cuban women’s dreams, the son-in-law that every father-in-law wanted, and the preferred tenant of rooms for rent.

Even today foreigners are seen by many Cubans as wallets with legs who walk the streets, which must be emptied of every coin. It is difficult for a foreigner in Cuba to determine to what extent the friendliness they come across in the streets is the natural kindness of our people, versus a histrionic performance the objective of which is to get one’s hand in their pocket.

Cubans have lost the habit of living – equal to equal – with “the other.” Sharing jobs with immigrants, accepting that people speak different languages on a public bus. Our kitchens have been impoverished by lack of contact with other gastronomic experiences, we have become less universal and markedly more “islanders” in the worst sense of the word. We have lost the capacity to tolerate and welcome other ways of doing, speaking and living.

How will we react when our country becomes a destination for immigrants? Will they be condemned to the worst jobs? Will xenophobic groups emerge that reject those who come from overseas? Will there be NGOs to protect them? Programs to help them integrate? Politicians who don’t fear them? All these questions need to be answered in a shorter time frame than we think. Cuba could again be, very soon, a nation of people who come from many places.

Meanwhile, Ernesto Guevara, who inspired the motto of the Pioneer organization now celebrating its 47^th anniversary, has become the face on T-shirts, paintings and ashtrays sold to tourists. In the midst of a political scenario where the Cuban Government serves as a mediator for peace between the Colombian guerrillas, Guevara’s call to create “two, three, many Vietnams” sounds like the advice of a madman eager for the Apocalypse and dreams of the end days.

Those enthusiasts who inaugurated the OPJM, today sneer at the Pioneer salute that obliges the fingers of the right hand to join together “demanding the indissoluble union of the peoples of the five continents.” The military gesture must be performed with the elbow at a 90 degree angle to ratify that “collective interests are put above the personal.” This, in these times of “every man for himself,” driven by the economic shock therapy decreed by the Government itself.

In this time of makeovers, where Cuban television broadcasts homilies and speeches by American officials, it is surprising that they have not eliminated this purely ideological organization that absorbs Cuban children. In the midst of so many daily priorities, we parents have also strongly demanded that our children not be soldiers of a political experiment from such a young age.

The OPJM also brings with it decades remote from reality. Like in 1991, when in the midst of the collapse of the Special Period, the first Pioneer Congress was held under the slogan, “We are happy here.” People still had the energy to mock the phrase and there are those who insist it was painted along the outer wall of Colon Cemetery in Havana. An awkward joke, but so was, and is, the pioneer movement.

And the mockery hasn’t ended. In the room of a friend from elementary school there is a fading photo of his Pioneer initiation day. It is black and white, although time has given it a golden tone that makes it more unreal and distant. “That was a time when I could not see,” jokes the forty-something.

He alludes sarcastically to the popular joke of a boy who comes to school and tells his teacher that his pet cat just gave birth to ten kittens. A few days later the concerned teacher asks about the health of the litter and receives the unusual response, “Five of the kittens opened their eyes, and the rest remain communists,” said the boy sharply. “I was like that, I didn’t see what was in front of my nose,” my playful colleague explains. Now, he has a look that scrutinizes everything, tacitly accepting nothing.

Nearly half a century after the creation of the OPJM, children who begin their studies in Cuban schools are forced to repeat its anachronistic slogan. The mothers who sheltered them in their wombs also shouted it, and even their grandparents did, with their neck veins swollen, full of conviction that Communism would arrive any minute now.

The piece of cloth that on this morning of 8 October is tied around the necks of thousands of Cuban children still has the shape of an isosceles triangle in which the vertices mean “study, work and fight for the conquests of the Revolution.” The ritual, which has become routine, keeps intact its burden of ideology and imposition. It is the gesture of the winners that marks the children of the vanquished, the hot iron stamping conqueror on the offspring of the conquered.