Cuba's youth growing restless

HAVANA --One thousand delirious young soldiers leaned from the deck of the Soviet ocean liner Leonid Simobiv as it slid into Havana's narrow harbor under a midday sun and the thundering salute of artillery shore batteries.

Cheering Cubans pressed to the water's edge, some with tears on their faces. Children raced along the sea wall to keep pace with the ship. Uniformed schoolgirls screamed, "Welcome home, victorious brothers!"

"Fidel! Fidel!" the soldiers chanted.

The first phase of the withdrawal of 50,000 Cuban troops from Angola under a peace accord stirred a proud homecoming early this month. The government celebrated its success in southern Africa as confirmation of the wisdom of Cuba's leader and the power, generosity and vitality of its revolution.

However, as with other stories in Cuba today, it was not difficult to find a minority opinion. Under the shade of a palm tree, a small group of people watched the arrival of the Leonid Simobiv with distant looks on their faces. They were not cheering.

"This whole thing is a facade," said one of the group, a 28-year-old teacher. "When are they going to tell us how many died over there? And where are these returned kids going to work? Where are they going to live?

"Soon enough, they'll see that to be young in Cuba is to become a facade yourself," he said.

At 30, the Cuban revolution is now older than most Cubans. Many of those returning from Angola are being reunited with a generation at home whose troubled search for a role in society is challenging traditional revolutionary values.

Cubans who have grown up on the island since Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 are, as a group, better fed, healthier, more literate and more politically committed than their contemporaries elsewhere in Latin America.

They are also growing restless. While citing the revolution's achievements, younger Cubans often say they are tired of an obsession with the past and frustrated by limits on their freedom to determine the future.

Minor challenges to the established order are commonplace. Informal organizations, ranging from chess clubs to those trading bootlegged recordings of rock music, have spread as alternatives to the study groups and formal outings sponsored by the Communist Youth and other official groups.

In Havana, hundreds of youths appear to earn money in an illegal black market, selling cigars or pesos to dollar-bearing tourists. More loiter on city streets day and night seeking "privacy," some admitting that they are cutting classes or government-supplied jobs that they find unrewarding.

Their attitudes often appear more the result of ennui than dissent. But Cuba's unwritten revolutionary code leaves little distinction between ennui and dissent. And dissent is unacceptable.

"This youth today, that is not hungry, that can read, that does not have to shine shoes or live with prostitution and repression, they don't know what we have now," said Victor Kautzman Torres, a lawyer and government adviser. ''They have lost some of the fervor. Something new must motivate them."

President Castro has addressed the young often recently, but he continues to dwell largely on the concrete accomplishments of their parents. He has exhorted the "new generation" to renounce material rewards in favor of a higher moral duty to the revolution and to prepare for a vaguely defined ''ideological battle" against Cuba's enemies, especially the United States.

"The imperialists calculate that the new generation will have less commitment to the revolution and will be easier to distort and confuse, that it will be easier to beguile them with models of consumer societies," Castro told students in a speech last month. "Those are their illusions."

Yet the most direct challenge to Castro's vision comes not from a hostile neighbor. Rather, the Soviet Union's movement toward perestroika and glasnost has become a banner for change, although rarely waved in public, despite Castro's opposition.

The link between economic progress and political candor is a potent one for young Cubans. In guarded conversations it is not uncommon to hear the lack of glasnost blamed for the severe housing shortage or for what some say are truncated professional options outside of government construction work.

"The attraction of the Soviet reforms, even if they are poorly understood, is in offering us a way of making our own contribution to society and to socialism while expressing the experiences of our generation," said a young Cuban painter.

"It allows us to build on what has been done but to recognize that we can move beyond the past."

For some, Castro himself is more closely tied to the past. He remains a tireless, ubiquitous, brilliant and overwhelming figure for young Cubans. Yet his constant cajoling no longer comes from a philosopher prince, 32 years old in 1959, but from a father figure, gray-haired and slightly hard of hearing.

Public irreverence toward revolutionary heroes is still so rare that exceptions acquire the status of myth. Havana intellectuals recount an incident in a packed cinema last fall when a young patron froze the audience by addressing a newsreel image of Castro as "you crazy old man."

In October, an exhibition in Havana by young painters included a naked portrait of Cuban independence leader Jose Marti. A portrait of revolutionary Ernesto (Che) Guevara was set on the floor and walked across as part of the showing. Authorities closed the exhibition.

"There must be space to make old images new. We are denied this," said the painter. "Limits on imagination should not have a place in the revolution."

Last fall, officials launched a campaign against "social indiscipline" that was largely aimed at smothering a wave of petty crime in Havana. Yet some Cubans said the crackdown was used by police as an excuse to harass youths.

"Being young is enough reason for the police to consider you suspicious," said Luis Aguilera, 24, a bicycle messenger. Aguilera, wearing a cast on his right hand, said a finger had been broken during a beating by a police officer.

"I was riding the wrong way down a one-way street when they stopped me," he said. "They said that I was disrespectful of authority. So they punched me and threw me in jail."

Some Communist Party officials, several with rebellious children of their own, describe the tension between youth and authority as a phenomenom not peculiar to Cuba. Yet they say that in Cuba its impact is exaggerated by the tendency to view even casual nonconformity as subversive.

Castro said in a speech last month that providing jobs and housing for veterans returning from Angola would be the government's "No. 1 priority." In a view shared by many diplomats, he scoffed at speculation that the burden of an additional work force would create political problems.

In fact, the arrival of young soldiers from southern Africa would appear to provide the government with an energetic and dedicated new pool of followers to balance the influence of their less politically disciplined contemporaries.

"If Castro is looking for his Red Guard, they're arriving today by boat," said a diplomat as the Leonid Simobiv docked at Havana's Haiphong Wharf.

About 300,000 Cubans have served in Angola since Cuba came to the aid of its Marxist government 14 years ago. Under a peace agreement in December signed under US mediation, Cuba agreed to withdraw its 50,000 troops by 1991 in exchange for the independence of neighboring Namibia from South Africa.

In several interviews, soldiers returning as part of the withdrawal said their combat experience in Africa and the feeling of participating in the birth of Namibia had left them deeply commited to their own revolution.

"I have fulfilled my international duty and my duty to Fidel Castro, and for this I am content," said Jesus Fuentes, 24, who returned in January. "I am today more truly a communist than when I left, and I am prepared to perform any task the revolution asks of me."

Fuentes was decorated three times, including for heroism, during a two-year tour in which he rose to become a political officer. He fought at Cuito Cuanavale, where Cuban and Angolan troops withstood a withering barrage by South African artillery. The battle is famous in Cuba as a turning point in the war.

"Coming home, I'm convinced that socialism is the ideal system and that our commander in chief has chosen the correct path," he said. "If it weren't for the revolution, I would be a poor black devil instead of who I am."

Fuentes, who worked in a steel mill before enlisting in the army, said he

plans now to pursue a university degree in social sciences. He says he will become more active in the Communist Youth.

"I feel a little doubtful of today's youth, but it's only a minority that worries me," he said. "There should be no antisocials here. They should be

sent to the United States if they think it's so wonderful there."

Fuentes' younger brother, Jose, has considered volunteering for service in Africa since Jesus' welcome home. Jose, who is 20, is tired of working in the steel mill. In his spare time, he collects foreign beer cans and tries to meet foreigners, even though doing so can bring a fine from police.

"I think of going so that I can get my card in the Communist Youth like my brother," he said. "That card is a passport that opens doors everywhere.

"But recently I'm a little worried about what happened to Jesus over there," he added. "He's changed. He hasn't smiled since he came back."