CUBA: An Island off Indoctrination

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The students claim not to miss their homelands, but there is a certain mechanical, programmed quality to the answers they give to questions about their future. Asked about her ambitions, a 16-year-old Angolan girl responded, "My desire is to continue my career to help my country. It is for Angola to decide whether I stay in Cuba to get my higher education." To the same question, a young Mozambican boy answered, "The party in Mozambique will be my guide. I would like to continue my studies, but if it is decided otherwise, I will return home."

Most of the students on the Isle of Youth will eventually return to their homelands, and they fervently express the wish to do so. Castro, in setting up this educational program, at some cost to Cuba, has reinforced his claim to leadership of the Third World. He has taken largely unformed young Africans and Latin Americans from a peasant society and turned them into disciplined young technicians, thoroughly indoctrinated in the tenets of Marxism-Leninism. Inevitably, the graduates of the Isle of Youth will have a profound impact on the spread and consolidation of socialist movements in troubled nations for many years to come.