XXI Century Propaganda

Juventud Rebelde, another of the Regime's propaganda tentacles has taken to imitating the free press by conducting polls and investigative reporting investigations.

The XXI century propaganda is then fed to the free press agencies which eat it up as if it were real journalism.

One such project was an investigatigation of government run businesses, concluding that there's more to the lousy service than the Cuban workers. They wound up blaming the system and said that they were going to have some economists study it.

Of course ,anything that gets published on the island is propaganda, giving the regime cover to make the changes they want to make and pretending that its what the people wanted.

Their gameplan is almost a century old now, and we know all the plays.

Newsweek has taken a poll conducted by "Juventud Rebelde" seriously and build a nice little piece around it.

The regime knows that it needs to make changes. Like we said yesterday, there are 11,000,000 expecting it.

So this "poll" will provide a glimpse as to where the new leadership expects to take Cuba.

It’s a touchingly quaint wish list for a modern world. Freedom to travel. Retail computer stores. A country free from economic hardship—and one that doesn’t give preferential access to those using foreign currency. But for Cuba’s increasingly disaffected and restless youth, this is the stuff of their dreams and aspirations.

In any other country, a survey asking young people what kind of nation they want to see in the year 2020 would hardly be fodder for the pundits. But in a nation that rarely gives its youth a voice—and seldom divulges the results of government opinion polls—the decision to publish a recent survey in the country’s official youth newspaper took on its own significance.

there's this gem:

That has not escaped the attention of the regime’s top leadership. “These young people have more information and more consumer expectations than those at the start of the revolution,” acknowledged Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque in an unusually candid speech in 2005. “Sometimes I am sure that when you speak of free health care and education, many of them say, ‘Oh please, don’t come to me with that same old speech.’”

and this:

“The regime knows it has a time bomb on its hands,” says Rolando Rodríguez Lobaina of the Cuban Democratic Youth Movement. “It has no confidence in a
transfer of power to these young people.”

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but their is hope for the lefties as evidenced by Castro apologist , Julia Sweig , wishful thinking.

Young Cubans may appear sullen and thoroughly dissatisfied with the status quo in their country. But their political apathy and inaction to date may reflect a frank recognition they would be no match for the repressive machinery of an entrenched totalitarian government on the streets of Cuba. “I don’t really think youth can be a source of major instability,” says the CFR’s Sweig. “Providing young people with a sense that they have a stake in Cuba’s future is a huge challenge on Raúl’s plate, but the regime pretty much has a handle on that.” Perhaps the real test will only come when both Castro brothers are gone and their heirs will have to establish their own claims to legitimacy in the eyes of Cuba’s youth.

Young people in Cuba are brave but not foolish. they bide their time. I would like to remind everyone of the tremendous amount of courage that it takes to set out in the open sea to seek freedom and opportunity. Just because they don't want to commit suicide doesn't mean they aren't going to take a chance. They are willing to wait till after the funeral, but changes need to start or things will get ugly.

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