The Lost Generation?: Education and the New Cuban Citizen Identity

• In Event: Educating the New Century Cuban Citizen

Abstract

Many Cubans today refer to the problem of youth – a ‘lost’ generation, deficient in values, patriotism and political commitment. Such fears, however, are nothing new.

During the ‘Rectification’ of the mid to late 1980s, when complacency in a relatively stable economic, social and political context was viewed as the key threat to revolutionary values among the young, new curricula and textbooks were designed for historia de Cuba and for the brand new subject, educación cívica. By the time these texts were in use in schools, however, the fall of socialism in Europe had changed Cuba dramatically and irrevocably. Crisis overtook complacency, and education in the 1990s and early 2000s took place against a background of hunger, rising inequality and moral compromises made by the state and individuals in the struggle to survive.

This paper analyses the texts alongside interview evidence to assess the extent to which young Cubans, growing up in this new reality, have been able to assimilate their messages and develop the values and citizen behaviours of a twenty-first century buen revolucionario.

Author

• Rosemary Smith, University of Nottingham