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http://www.juventudrebelde.cu/cuba/2009-03-15/no-hay-rebelde-sin-causa/ There is no “rebel” without a cause.
The strains in the paths of other human beings almost always begin very close to us. Not infrequently, we live with them while the societal structures or sensibilities necessary to neutralize them fail.
By: Marianela Martín González
Correo: digital@jrebelde.cip.cu March 15, 2009 00:50:48 GMT
As if it was a war trophy, he shows me a wound that he received three months ago in a street fight, when «he didn’t give to Cesar what is Cesar’s». Shirtless, a 15-year old who tells us to call him Yunior is presented to us, while we talk with Havana’s “disvinculadas,” youth who hold neither formal employment nor study.
We try to find out what they owe to “the emperor” but it’s in vain. This young person is defiant even when he stops speaking. He touches the wound on his abdomen and smiles “men-things, lady, possibly Orinoco things.”
María Mercedes Estupiñán, an elderly woman that shouts out the sale of “hot peanuts” on Obispo Street, says she knows the boy, but it’s better to speak where they can’t see us “because this young man can make anyone’s life more difficult.”
She says that when he was young, the neighbors passed food below his door to feed him because sometimes he was left alone for up to three days, locked in a small room of an apartment building next to where we are talking.
The old woman finished the story by saying: “its not only material necessities, it’s the lack of care and attention by some parents that is ruining a group of young people. This same boy would not be how he is today if he had had good parents by his side that took care of him. There is no rebel without a cause.”
On Obispo Street, Mikel Valdés says that he does not work for the state because he earns more on the black market reselling what other people give him than committing himself to a work place, because when he goes to cash in his pay check it only lasts for two or three days.
“My brother graduated as a Physics professor. He had to work like a dog for five years at the university and despite working in a middle school, I always had to give him some money so he could make it to the end of the month.”
Saying that his nickname is El Wicho, he tells us that for people like him, who studied until 9th grade, there are only badly paid and non-attractive job offers. We asked him why he did not study longer and the response is resounding “one way or another the salary is not enough. It’s better to risk everything than work for nothing.”
Some authors define criminal prevention as the collection of methods and indicators elaborated by the state, political and popular organizations, or state entities to reduce crime, its causes, and consequences. For other academics it’s a dynamic and positive intervention that neutralizes its causes and roots.
JR’s conversations with young people that have strayed outside of social norms include reflections by fathers and institutions that play a predominant role in the conduction of and prevention for new generations.
Fractured Adolescence
“There are boys who are very fractured and broken by the time they reach adolescence. Antisocial behavior many times has its origin in dysfunctional homes, where they live on the fringes of the law, fight for economic necessities, the distribution of duties, in regards to the physical spaces of the home that are many times insufficient,” lawyer and Criminology expert Félix Cooppinger Uribe said.
In reference to the judicial responsibility for these young people when they commit acts condemned under the law, Cooppinger clarifies that from a legal point of view the responsibility falls on the natural person starting when the person is 16 years old at the age when they commit the punishable act.
“According to article 16.1.2 of thee existing Cuban Penal Code and the current Civil Code, which stipulates it in article 9.1, the parents or guardians are responsible for damages caused by minors or the handicapped that are under their custody and care.
It’s easy to understand why young people become more violent during this stage. And it’s because the control of behavior is marked, in good measure, by social approval.
The scholar added that at this young age, the domestic comes to occupy a notable place in the determination of conduct. However, this road depends on the conditions of life and education in which the individual has been immersed throughout their development.
For social prevention in Cuban there is a strategy designed that includes study plans, audiovisual programming, radio programs, and other methods with the objective of educating society.
Jointly with the MINSAP, there are programs to intervene in drug addiction, another problems that needs attending.
Eugenio Salgado Ramírez, father of 5, three of them male, says that you can’t get blood out of a stone. “If the boys witness violence or other illegal acts in the house, what happens on the streets is what we see and dislike so much: boys hanging off of the bus, yelling, or snatching the purse of a passer-by.”
The patch before the leak
“Give the deaf man a voice and the crippled man wings. Bless our rice, our minute, as if you were not an accomplice to the mourning of the heart,” are the last lines of a strange song by subcomandante Marcos and Joaquín Sabina. They would serve as the perfect sounding board for so many stories heard while we tackled the subject of social prevention.
In the headquarters of the Social Workers in the neighborhood of Colón, we speak with someone that does not want to identify themselves but allows us to use his life story. This man began by hanging out with bad company, which concluded in a 12 year prison sentence.
“My family was like any other, but one day my parents separated and I had to go with my father and my sister stayed with my mother. All of the problems that my father had made it so that we barely saw or spoke to one another. He didn’t want the nuisance of having a son that mothers take on.”
He remembers how games far from the house, without time limits and far from the reach of the eyes of responsible adults, contributed to his fate becoming strained and he would end up sleeping in the La Pera Park for some time, without anyone caring about his attitude.
“I began to believe myself to be the hero of Colón neighborhood. Being novice, I drank rum, smoked, and copyed the cool guys on the street. I thought it was normal for my age. I dropped out of school in sixth grad. One day they caught me and they prosecuted me for committing robbery by force; I had to complete a sentence of more than 10 years, which lasted until November 31, 2007, when they gave me conditional freedom.”
“In the camps where I completed part of my sentence they taught me how to cook very well and how to sew. I improved myself and learned computing but I swore to them that it would have been better to be illiterate and not have had to go to prison.
All of this and more I could have done on the street, calmy, and save money for my parents, who although they might have failed me in some way, are my parents in the end.”
—What have you done during this year when you were under conditional freedom?
—Thanks to Anaisa Almaguer, the social worker who attended me for the Colon Project, I tried to fit into society again. I began to work in a funeral home but they paid me almost nothing and I changed to communal services like picking up solid waste.
“It felt very ashamed riding in the garbage truck but I now I have gotten rid of this complex. People don’t bother a person when they carry themselves well. When they truly don’t forgive you is when you are a delinquent. Although I will tell you the truth: I want to work in something that inspires me.
It’s hard to feel like a piece of garbage for so long and then end up working with garbage, knowing other things, which they taught you for a reason in the prison center.
—After leaving prison and reentering society, were you able to overcome the “mala cabeza (bad principals and judgement)” with which you went?
—About 95 percent. What I still need to improve on results from the life system people impose on me when they keep treating me as a criminal. There are bosses that don’t give good work because they always remember who went to prison and don’t take into account that one has fulfilled this debt and enough is enough.
“Even marrying a good woman is difficult after spending some time “playing the harp” (being a thief). There is rejection of “mala cabezas” (men of bad principals, lacking judgement). This is normal, perhaps it is the price that we have to pay.
“Just as we are finishing listening to his story, Cristian Maletá, one of the social workers who attends to prevention and reintegration in this Popular Council, approaches. My interlocutor shows her a back pack and clarifies that, to not sit on top of it, he held it while she was seen by Anaisa, the social worker that listens and attends to his problems.
He tries in every way to make it clear that he was only looking after Cristian’s backpack. We notice his embarrassment and in order to ease the situation we say that he is very lucky to have someone as sweet and beautiful as Anaisa to help him with his reintegration.
He looks at her and then showed us the only smile we had seen on his face since talking with him “She is my little sister. The other woman who worked with me was not like this. I had to bustle around her so that she would hear me. Now I am here so that Anaisa can throw me a line with the enforcement judge again. These workers have saved a bunch of people from going to jail.
Sonia Mesa, secretary of the Plaza de la Revolución Prevention and Social Attention Commission, explains that social workers are, under Direct Law 242, permanently invited to meetings on prevention. These meetings cover topics like prisoners and children with problems in school, among other subjects.
She points out that as they work in programs it’s a little difficult to get to the Popular Council but right now they are devising a strategy for each Council to have a social worker since that is where preventative work is really done. In the neighborhood is where the family lives with problems, prison, the undisciplined youth…
Angela Menéndez, employment director for Central Havana, talks about the command post that operates each Friday, tackeling factors pertaining to the segment of the population that currently neither work nor study.
She explains that at the Colón Popular Council there is a project dedicated to knocking on the doors of each constituent and bringing employment to the base population through an official from the employment system.
The civil servant clarified that they operate with 10 or 15 job positions that entities offer each day. What is the restraining factor? The unemployed personnel in Central Havana have a very low education level, up to 9th grade.
“Over the year, we have placed more than 4,100 people. There were plenty of unemployed people on our streets.”
Angela recognizes that many of them have criminal records. They have worked with more than 600 cases of people leaving prisons or in the court process. There are more than 1,000 job opening being offered to the public and these are not feasible for this segment of the population for many reasons. Among others they don’t have the adequate educational level, the necessary qualifications, or because they have criminal records.
Community Work
In the recently concluded 8th FMC Congress, the members assessed the previous year’s cooperative preventative work done by members with other institutions.
According to the facts offered, the voluntary service has maintained an elevated number of social workers from the FMC. At the end of the first semester, there were 81,907 women, at least one per delegation, doing community work.
Although the results are still not optimal and continued work in societal awareness is still needed, as was expressed at the Congress, the FMC has worked to improve the detection, proceedings, and direction of child support with important educational and preventative action.
Lisa García Gayoso, legal advisor for the Community Work sphere of the National FMC, assures that in the coordination with the Education Ministry, they attend to minors with social disadvantage, especially those that are not well looked after by their families.
The FMC has coordinated since 1997 the Work Group for the prevention and attention to domestic violence, composed by the Interior, Education, Health, and Justice Ministries. The Supreme Court, the Republics District Attorney’s Office, and CENESEX, among other institutions, also participate in this work group.
Lisa holds in high esteem the fact that the Cuban project is based on the respect for the rights of each human being and social justice but says that cases of families in which the principals advocated by our society – things like equality, respect, dignity, solidarity between all people - are not respected are not exceptional.
If there were only one family with these characteristics, it would not enough for it to constitute an object of preventative labor,” she specified.
A Vaccine against defeat
When speaking about the participation of the workers in prevention, Enrique Gómez Cabeza, responsible for the Social Worker Program, stated that the project forms part of decisions that are taken in the entire country.
“The studies on the social problems have always been taken into account, even from the very beginning when the program had just begun, and they indentified young people who had abandoned their studies after 9th grade and did not continue to improve themselves.”
He said that responses appeared almost immediately in the eastern part of the country, including The Course of Integral Training for Youth. It was the option of studying as work when problems were identified, such as mothers who had children with some disability which limited their ability to integrate themselves socially
According to Gómez Cabeza the job of Caretaker Mother was created and the salary was given to them. They did a study of the child population in the country and found 150,003 minors that needed attention and the results of these studies have been analyzed by each one of the ministries and with the presence of the highest authorities they have been taking measures, like the delivery of a food module from a medical analysis.
They give special diets for underweight children who, for their physical and genetic chrematistics, could suffer from anemia. The attention to certain material necessities has also been taken into account, which the social workers have sometimes reported as delayed.
“There is legal backing so that the Program, together with the director of Employment for the municipality, can approve in 48 hours temporary economic aid until the process is done and the total sum and the amount of time its needed for can be defined.”
The man responsible for the Social Worker Program added that they were analyzing how to encourage people to return to employment since the salary increases. He believes that generally many young people who don’t work don’t have the material necessity to do so.
He says that the social worker has to work to change the attitude of this person, as work is important for more than just resolving material problems. Work shapes consciousness, allows a person to participate in society, find solutions for collective problems and thus that is where our work must go.
Our labor, he assures, is many times with young people that tell you that they don’t want to work because they don’t have material necessities, however to be social they do need to participate.
Society needs them to incorporate themselves to resolve the problem that it has in the material order. The economy has to develop itself and this is the challenge. This is why we have changing attitudes among the priorities of our work.”
The training of Social Workers, Gómez Cabeza considers, is the challenge for the social work that currently has to be done. More than 30,000 young people dedicate themselves to this mission.
“Every year we have been doing diagnostics of the problem of the unemployed; what aspirations they have, where they are, their interests…Sometimes the solution to the problem is not easy, there are short-term solutions and others that are much more long term.”
However, he says, there is hope that it will get better because one has to reach into one’s soul and think of the new man and woman, including when we speak of people that have committed errors. We cannot just abandon those people as lost causes, we have to offer them opportunities and open doors,
“For the child with social disadvantage there is also the popular library, the Youth Club, the house of culture, but one will see that those who go to these places are not these children because maybe their family does not place priority on this activity, does not know what it could mean for them,” he pointed out.
Social prevention is not something that should be foreign to any Cuban. Sensibility and commitment are enough to help those whose personal compass needs to be realigned. To contribute to the bettering of other, one does not need a decree that makes you the heads of some stratum of society.
Linet and Lianet Rosales Amador are two sisters from Camaguey aged 10 and 11 years old, respectively. Three years ago they freed a man twice their age from alcoholism. Through the strength of perseverance and much love they pulled Nacho from a dead end that for many has no escape.
“This man lost everything, including his family because of his drunkenness. We knew his relatives and we tried to mediate between him and them. At first they didn’t listen to us but when they saw that we were looking after Nacho, they felt shamed right away and began to reincorporate him into the family again,” Lianet remembers.
Linet, the smallest of the sisters, said that Nacho began to sleep in doorways and that she and her sister brought him food and some cloth so that he could rest in a site with a little bit of hygiene until they spoke with their mother so that they could give him a place in the garage of the house on the pretext that he would watch after the construction materials.
“There are men like Nacho that can be saved. Wherever you look there are people that need others,” the young girl concluded.
Neglects
I live in a home for children without filial protection since I turned 14 years old when our family doctor saw me and discovered that I have condylomas (gential warts) because some of the men that my mother forced me to sleep with were sick. My mother is in jail for having done these things, she comes to the home to see me once in a while. I forgive her because she birthed me after all. Here I have everything I need, including work as a kitchen assistant in a place close to the home. My only worry is what my life will be like when I have to leave here. The only place I have to go to is a room at my uncle’s, which is falling down, and he’s a drunk. ****************************
I live with my grandmother now because my mother is on an international mission. I am in a School for Integral Training because I hung out with bad company. Then I started to commit criminal acts, like assault someone on the street. When I finish I do not want to continue doing what I have been until now. In this school I have learned things that I did not appreciate before, although my parents told them to me.
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My mother sent me to beg. I dressed in rags and walked around. Now they are taking good care of me in a center for rehabilitation of minors. I don’t want to return to that horrible life.
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I prostituted myself because I like nice things and my parents couldn’t give me them. In the center, I rehabilitated myself, although I am going to tell the truth: when I leave here I will keep fighting for the good life because I am accustomed to it and to leave this would take a lot of work.
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My mother hit me because I am a homosexual and I wanted to dress as a woman. She drove me into the wall so much that she didn’t let me sleep in the house. I ended up prostituting myself, and for this reason I am now rehabilitating myself in the center for integral training.
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My father is a man that other men respect and obey because he has “power.” He was almost never with us in the house and I took advantage of my mother’s weakness for my own benefit. One day I robbed his savings, which wasn’t just a small amount, and they denounced me. As I am a minor, I am now in an integral training center trying to rehabilitate myself. When I leave I don’t want to get involved in any more problems. My mother, although she reported me to the police, has come to see me, and so has my father, although he repeatedly tells me that I am the person that has most embarrassed him in his life.
“Everywhere there are people who need others is the philosophy of these children.” Foto: Roberto Suárez
Young people from Havana who neither work nor study. Photo: Roberto Morejón
The social worker has to work on changing attitudes. Foto: Roberto Morejón
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