Cuban children and young people open their arms to life in April. On the fourth day of the fourth month of the year, like today, children’s innocence and youthful enthusiasm were founded forever with the immense responsibility of contributing to the national future and that of humanity.
Sixty-four calendars ago, on this date, but in 1961, the Organization of Pioneers of Cuba was born, renamed in 1977 to honor that great preacher of practical instruction and the sowing of civic values: José Martí.
In the classrooms they embrace the Homeland and, while their parents adjust the scarves, they are possessed by a deep happiness, beyond the natural joy of the first ages before a gift.
Teachers dedicated to the difficult but essential task of forging good people motivate them to participate in society, from that small great country called school. They also teach how to converse with heroes.
The transformation of barracks into schools represented an ineffable change: in the places where the future ended, they began to fertilize it. On February 24, 1960, when handing over a fortress to the Ministry of Education, Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz said about the children: “They must be cared for (…) as the pillars on which a truly beautiful work is founded”.
Another bastion of the Revolution resides in the Young Communist League, born a year later, but also on April 4, 1962. At the closing of the First Congress of the Association of Young Rebels -linked to the figure of Che Guevara-, Fidel proposed the current name, summarized in three letters with telluric force: UJC.
It came to welcome in its bosom young people determined to march at the forefront of the great challenges and victories of the country, from the internationalist missions to the confrontation of terrorism, and to every impossible turned into reality.
In times of enormous dangers, surrounded by threats to the very existence of this dream, we can make any mistake but give in to the “great sin of the old youth” mentioned by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado.
With the rebelliousness and loyalty of those who showed us the way, our faith in the future will be able to overcome circumstantial difficulties.
The struggle seems endless, but there are plenty of reasons to sustain it if we find in each other the true source of eternal youth.