Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values: Educating the New Socialist Citizen

Chapter Four. 1986–2000: Rectification and the Special Period

Chapter 4 1986–2000: Rectification and the Special Period While the Cuban state tried to appeal to the youth with measures to rejuvenate the Young Communists (UJC) in the early 1980s, the timing collided with the Rectification Campaign. The Rectification Campaign was an austerity program, initiated in 1986, that gave ideology an expanded role in daily life and economic management. This program undid many of the economic reforms of earlier years. As Cuban socialism tried to respond to the concerns of the young people, few economic and political opportunities were available. Moreover, with the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, the revolutionary government had to confront its worst political and economic crisis ever. This chapter examines the intersection of economic and educational measures from the mid-1980s until 2000, providing a backdrop for the ethnographic chapters that follow. The Rectification Campaign International and domestic tensions influenced an economic, political and ideological turning point marked by the Third Congress of the Cuban Communist Party in 1986. The second session of the Third Party Congress provided the occasion for the launch of a “process of rectification of the errors and negative tendencies in all spheres of society” that was supposed to resolve the cumulative problems of socialist development (Granma 1987b, 3). The economic recession started in 1982–1983 in the United States and other industrialized nations, hitting them hard, and the socialist countries did not escape its negative effects. In contrast to the economic and political liberalization that occurred in other former socialist countries, however, Cuba’s 94 Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values Rectification Campaign took place in the context of centralized planning and a socialist state (Azicri 1988; Lutjens 1996). The Cuban Rectification Campaign was formally introduced in 1986, almost at the same time that glasnost and perestroika were becoming household words with clear meanings in the Soviet Union. By comparison, the meaning and content of the Rectification Campaign have never been obvious, even for those involved in it. Some Cubans initially saw the Rectification Campaign as a series of readjustments of the economic mechanisms within the System of Economic Management and Planning (Sistema de Dirección y Planificación de la Economía, SDPE). Some have seen it as a catch-all label for political and economic measures that had to be taken in the aftermath of dramatic decreases in foreign exchange earnings in the mid-1980s. Some have understood it as a mechanism for Castro to weed out technocrats at higher levels. Others, at least in its early days, saw it as a critical point at which the basic structure and workings of the revolution would be reexamined (Bengelsdorf 1994). On the street, Medea Benjamin (1990, 18) reported, the Rectification Campaign came to be labeled the espera estoica, the “long stoic wait” (a play on the word perestroika). Part of the basis of the Rectification Campaign was Castro’s general critique of the reliance on market forces and motivations—features that were at the heart of Gorbachev’s reforms and similar changes in China and in Eastern Europe. These reforms complicated Cuban relations with the USSR. “Perestroika,” Fidel asserted, “is another man’s wife. I don’t want to get involved ” (NewYorkTimes 1989, A1). In partial agreement, Castro, other Cuban officials, and the mass media focused on some commonalities between Gorbachev ’s reforms and Castro’s rectification measures, such as the punishment of corrupt officials (Domínguez 1993). Castro seemed to think that the deficiencies in socialism required more cadres with a revolutionary consciousness at all levels: We are not going to the heart of the matter. . . . We are not dealing with our system’s—our socialism’s—deficiencies. . . . There is a problem of conciencia . . . . To what extent do we really manifest political, revolutionary, social conciencia? We manifest it often . . . incredibly, admirably, extraordinarily. . . . But, in day-to-day life we are lacking conciencia. (Castro 1989, 1) Conciencia, not autonomous institutions and participation, was the essence of good politics. How to maintain conciencia and still have the economy functioning with 1986–2000 95 the attributes of central planning was at the heart of Cuba’s economic policy planning. The economic mechanisms built into the system in the late 1970s, such as self-financing, enterprise profitability, decentralization, and higher productivity rates, led to abuses and distortions. The problem arose in cases such as the allowance of farmers’ markets in 1980, which benefited the consumers and farmers but also caused social...