CUBA: Youth Festival Seeks Change

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Aug 2 1997 (IPS) - They may speak differently, and have different customs, but the majority of 11,000 young people gathered in Cuba this weekend agree the world is in need of change.

For the participants at the 14th Festival of Youth it is inconceivable that at the doors of the new millenium some workers in the world are still fighting for an eight-hour work day; or that in a country like Japan, a young woman must put up with sexual harassment from her boss in order to keep her job.

These and other stories abound in Havana … a black man is killed by police because of the colour of his skin, a child dies of a drug overdose, children grow up without ever seeing a book, women die through back-alley abortions and the lives of teenage girls are ruined by genital mutilation.

Young people from more than 117 countries are attending the festival which began July 28 and continues until Aug. 5. After eight years since the last gathering in North Korea, the current festival seeks to revive a movement that appeared to have died in the late 1980s with the disappearance of the socialist bloc.

The festival has attracted more than 10,000 delegates who are participating in cultureal activities and debates on the environment, human rights, democracy, jobs, globalisation, education, peace and disarmament, science, women’s issues and youth.

“In the past 48 hours, 93,150 people in the Third World died of curable diseases, 20,217 children died at birth and only 767,123 Latin Americans had access to health services,” Cuban Foreign Minister Roberto Robaina said Wednesday. Around 100 million minors are living in the streets, a breeding ground for drug consumption. Of them, 40 million are Latin Americans, 30 million Asians and 10 million Africans.

Robaina said that “for the majority of inhabitants of our planet, the struggle for human rights is truly difficult when there are millions of illiterate people, thousands of refugees, and a structural poverty that insults the development of the intellect.”

Cuba’s Environment Minister Rosa Elena Simeon said “the world economy grew 3.8 percent in 1996, but wealth is becoming increasingly polarised, and there are 500 million people in the world who breath polluted air, one billion without clean water, and two billion without sanitation.”

“The means exist to make the world turn differently,” said a Latin American delegate, who cited U.N. sources saying that “poverty in the world could be eliminated with 80 billion dollars.”

Participants highlighted the fact that 358 people in the world have accumulated 726 trillion dollars, and possess the equivalent of the per capital income of 45 percent of the world population.

In developing countries there are some 900 million jobless, and more than 800 million children without possibilities of schooling, who thus are added to the list of the illiterates and potential unemployed.

A debate on peace and disarmament underlined the contradiction between today’s reality and the fact that to make one nuclear bomb is equivalent to the education budget of 23 developing countries. For the cost of one tank, schools for 30,000 children could be built and, according to available statistics, the proportion of military spending at the end of this cnetury eceeds world economic growth by two percent.

“In the last 2,000 years of modern history, the world has seen more than 5,000 wars, which have left deaths, refugees, and incalculable damages and economic losses,” said Patricia Reyes from the Dominican Republic.

Nevertheless, she added, “the big producers of arms play at war, divide, confront and squash the Third World. They count their millions of dollars over their dead and martyred, to later talk about humanitarian aid and intervention to protect democracy.”