What Are They Doing to Our Children?
By Ammi
HAVANA TIMES – I’m convinced that in order for a child to have a good childhood they must have the right to a name, a family, an education, food, healthcare, someone to protect them, for them not to work, or be discriminated against, or abused. A child has to be a child, above all else.
The more distant parents are from their children, the more vulnerable their children become. When I say “distant”, I am also referring to the time they are in school, where we leave a lot of teaching responsibility to teachers, without seeing the dangers this implies.
Living in Cuba is also a challenge for making, giving birth to, raising and educating our children. This totalitarian system has made sure to add allies to its Communist ranks, and so they have banked on the fragility of these tender infant minds, where they cultivate the poorly named “love for the Homeland”. People should love their Homeland out of their own free will and not because revolutionary “heroes” have been drilled into their heads as absurd idols.
It’s important to help children understand what rights they have. It isn’t at all easy, but one thing that is key is the need to “stop” forcefully imposing things on them to indoctrinate them where they see everything as black and white.
We are completely responsible for awakening an unlimited imagination in our children.
Many children, like my son, have no idea what the legendary slogan: “pioneers for Communism, let’s be like Che” means. It’s strange for him to be like someone who he has never met, somebody who isn’t mummy or daddy.
There are many slogans like this one, many other ways of introducing them into politics they don’t understand, or know about or only know a little bit about, the bit that has been dressed up so they find it inspiring, and an example to follow in their young age.
I know that this might be a controversial issue and it may spark many different opinions, but it’s also true that imposing any idea on a child, both religious and political, is criminal.
I believe that we should leave this job for parents and not leave it to the State to do this. It is a violation of children’s rights, in my humble opinion. The right to be a person of free will, to choose the path they want in life and work on the kind of human being they want to be in the future.
I am afraid for my son, I don’t want him to become a puppet, a military prototype of silence and repression. What are they doing to our children?
I agree with what Stephen has written, but in his final paragraph he omitted to say that BY LAW in Cuba, parents teaching their own children in their own homes anything that is counter to communism is punishable by THREE YEARS in jail.
Remember, there is a President of the CDR on every block of every village, town and city in Cuba, and it is their function and that of teachers, to report to MININT any signs of anyone -including children- displaying “counter-revolutionary ” thought or actions.
Indoctrination occurs in many societies but perhaps not as blatantly as what the children must endure in Cuba.
Nick metaphorically referred to religion as a type of indoctrination which, according to him, existed in his sphere of childhood education. I don’t know whether this religious rigor still exists today because parents do have choices regarding their children’s education.
Here in Canada a parent can choose to send their child to a religious school or a public school where religion is not mentioned. Indoctrination is unacceptable and is not practiced. In fact, in some primary/high schools if parents feel that what their children are exposed to is morally repugnant they will ask their Board of Education to remove said material from the curriculum.
An example, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a popular British novel perhaps with a few explicit sex situations in the writing, was petitioned by parents in one school area to be banished from the school curriculum and library. Parents do have a say. Not so in Cuba as Ammi disagrees and rightly so.
The point Ammi is making is her children are a captive audiences to whatever the Cuban Ministry dictates is pedagogically and politically correct for her children. The parents have no say. That is what it is like living in a totalitarian state.
The state authorities have complete control of the state’s education system. The state authorities automatically will decree that history as seen through the prism of socialism, communism, Revolution or whatever ideology the elites decide is correct is totally solidified among the very young.
To not have children exposed daily to this indoctrination could result in the aims, aspirations, goals of the Revolution to be forgotten and/or misinterpreted. That cannot happen. That would be a major disaster and defeat for the authoritarian elites to have not properly indoctrinated the very young. Without the rejuvenation of those Revolutionary ideals as portrayed by “heroes” of the Revolution, the whole agenda could go astray.
The only solution is for parents to take an active role in their children’s education at home and to teach them to think for themselves and try to expose them to other educational material, if that is possible.
Ammi makes a very valid point.
When I was a kid in school in England no-one mentioned Che Guevara. I grew up in complete ignorance of the Cuban Revolution. I was therefore spared any reference to these goings-on.
But what they did try and blow my mind with was this supernatural idea that the whole word was made by some old bearded head honcho that resides in the sky.
And if I was a bad lad then this sky dwelling big boss man was gonna send me down to the fires far beneath the ground for evermore.
When my forebears were at school they were taught how the British were born to rule the world and were inherently superior to other nationalities or races.
When you’re a kid there’s always gonna be someone trying to scare the living daylights out of you or fill yer head with some kinda far fetched BULLSH*T story.
Good Luck with that.