Members of the Christian Liberation (MCL) and the project Movement Cuba Decides delivered Thursday to the National Assembly over 10,000 signatures of citizens requesting a plebiscite for Cubans to decide on the system in which they want to live.
On Thursday morning several activists delivered 10,000 signatures on the Varela Project (above), which are in addition to the 25,404 signatures previously provided to this legislative body, 14Y Medio reports:
Participating in the delivery were Rosa Maria Rodriguez from the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL), Saily Navarro and Rosa Maria Paya, members of the Cuba Decides campaign, along with former political prisoner of the 2003 Black Spring, Felix Navarro.
Meanwhile, in the wake of President Barack Obama’s visit to the island, Council on Foreign Relations analyst Elliott Abrams takes issue with idealistic portrayals of the Cuban education system.
The Castro regime has indeed invested heavily in the educational system, but for reasons of ideological indoctrination rather than because the authorities “value” the children of Cuba, notes Abrams, a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy. As a Brookings Institution study of education in post-Communist societies put it,
Communist societies such as Cuba consider ideas weapons in the class struggle. They stress the function of education in facilitating political indoctrination of the population…. Countries such as Cuba have had total command of education and have used it to indoctrinate children in schools. The system also controls mass media by creating a monopoly on the information and interpretations Cubans use to make sense of their social world.
