New Directions in Cuban Social Work Education:

What Can We Learn?

By David Strug, PhD, and Walter Teague, MSW

Facing intractable social problems in the 1990s, Cuban leaders responded by creating new social work educational opportunities for both longer-term" comprehensive training at the graduate level as well as short-term, rapid schooling for youths known as emergentes-trained to respond to serious emergent social problems.

Why has Cuban President Fidel Castro become so interested in Cuban social work (Radio Havana Cuba, 2001)? Why did he address 500 young students at Cuba's new school of social work outside Havana? Why did Jimmy Carter also visit this same school during his wellpublicised trip to Cuba in May 2002? Most Cubans know about their country's advances in social work. Why is it now receiving so much attention, both from government officials and from thousands of academics, students, and program directors? We spoke with Cuban social work educators and professionals in Havana to find answers to these questions.

A history of hardship

There are a number of reasons for the advancement of social work education in Cuba and for the overall attention the social work profession is now receiving. Major socioeconomic problems developed in Cuba in the 1990s that require new and comprehensive solutions. Today, Cuba is involved in a number of key programs to overcome these problems, just as in 1961 when Cuba, created a comprehensive and innovative campaign to eradicate illiteracy. New approaches to social work education and training are among these programs.

Cuba's post revolutionary government did not initially recognize the need for a cadre of highly trained professional social workers to address social ills.

The collapse of the former Soviet Union and its subsequent withdrawal of economic assistance to Cuba following the dissolution of the eastern bloc (1989 to 1991), the tightening of the U.S. embargo, and Cuba's increased participation in the global economy contributed to growing social and economic crises throughout the 1990s (Cole, 2001). Income disparity worsened in some sectors due to the influx of foreign capital, tourism, and remittances from families abroad. Poverty and unemployment grew, social and economic class differences deepened, and social alienation increased among unemployed and disaffected youth. Housing and roads deteriorated, and Cuban cities became increasingly overcrowded. "[Socioeconomic] disparities were further exacerbated by historical factors and social inequalities that linger in society despite long-term efforts-to-achieve-equality-and-general-social-well-being, according to -Professor-Lourdes-Perez-' Montalvo, a professor at the University of Havana (2002). Those Cubans most effected by the worsening economic conditions, such as those with disabilities, prisoners and ex-prisoners, pregnant teenagers and single mothers, senior citizens, children, and the increasing numbers of out-of-school and unemployed youths, became the priority for outreach and development of new social welfare projects (2002).

Cuba's post revolutionary government did not initially recognize the need for a cadre of highly trained professional social workers to address social ills. Instead, social workers were trained by separate technical training institutions at facilities where they worked, such as at the Cuban Ministry of Public Health. There was no integrated social work profession. Social problems in the community were addressed primarily by other professionals, including doctors and nurses, psychologists, and educators, along with local political leaders and representatives of Cuba's "mass organizations" (eg, the Federation of Cuban Women and Committees for the Defense of the Revolution). Thus, social work did not emerge as a professional discipline with an identity of its own.

It was the emerging and intractable social problems in the 1990s that convinced leaders Cuba needed a more integrated social work profession. Highly trained and qualified social workers were needed who could join other professionals and government representatives in creating new programs to address the worsening problems of increased poverty, growing class difference, and lack of material resources. However, it was not until the late 1990s-when Cuba recovered from the worst of its economic crises-that it was in a position to dedicate material and human resources to support the social work education and training programs described below.

Cuba's Two-Pronged Social Work Initiative

Cuba developed a two-pronged social work initiative in response to the social ills related to economic hardship. This initiative comprised the creation of (1) a university-level program (UP) or educating more advanced social workers and (2) the formation of schools of social work (SSW) that offer rapid social work training programs for Cuban youth who return to their communities as social workers after finishing this training.

The first Cuban school of social work was established at the University of Havana in 1943. It was not a university degree program and ended when the university closed its doors in 1956 due to social turmoil leading up to the Cuban Revolution in 1959. In 1971, the Cuban government began to train social workers at technical training institutes (t6cnicos medios, or TMs), the first of which was located at the Cuban Ministry of Public Health. These TMs taught fundamental, focused social work and case management skills to a generation of workers who provided specialized social work services in Cuba's clinics and hospitals, in housing and social security offices, and in other social and healthcare service settings. A dozen such TMs exist today. Most of Cuba's technical social workers, including more than 2000 in healthcare, were trained at such TMs.

The University Social Work Program in Cuba

In the late 1990s, government leaders, educators, and social workers agreed that Cuba needed to advance the educational training of Cuban social workers beyond that offered by TMs. In 1997, the Cuban Ministry of Education asked the Sociology Department at the University of Havana to implement a degree program in sociology with a concentration in social work to provide more advanced training for Cuban social workers. The university's six-year degree program began at the University- of Havana-in-1998:-Two years-Iater,the-Bniversity-of-the-0riente-in-Santi~g(), Cuba, started a similar UP. Both offer the licenciatura degree (roughly equivalent to a master's degree in the United States) in sociology with a concentration in social work.

Licenciatura students must be high school graduates, and the majority are part-time students with full-time jobs as healthcare social workers. Every 21 days, they receive time off from their jobs to attend classes at the university and to study for exams. They receive their regular income while they are students. Currently, there are approximately 100 students enrolled in the University of Havana's UP alone, which is now in its fifth year of existence.

The UP's goal is to advance Cuban social work education and training by teaching students how to integrate social work practice skills with theory. The hope is that this will not only increase their practice skills, but also enhance their understanding of their role as change agents and elevate their professional status in the wider society.

The Sociology Department spent considerable time and effort developing a curriculum based on those of other Latin American countries and Spain, according to one of the up's organizers. The UP curriculum integrates sociological theory and social work practice. Two introductory courses in the first year are Introduction to Sociology and Theory and Practice in Social Work. First year students also take classes in philosophy, political economy, and the history of the Americas. They study demography, sociological methods, and statistics in their second year. In years three to five, students take Social Work I (community intervention), Social Work II (intervention with groups, organizations, and institutions), and Social Work III (interventions with individuals and families), which is similar to casework in U.S. schools of social work. Students also study the history of social work, political sociology, anthropology, sociology and health, and sociology and the family. Much of the sixth year is devoted to writing a professional thesis. Students attend a research workshop every semester starting in their first year in which they examine their on the-job practice. This workshop is an important source of supervision for these students because, at present, there are no social workers with advanced training to supervise them where they work.

Social Work Schools for Youth

In September 2000, the Cuban government opened its first school of social work in Cojimar on the outskirts of Havana for young people aged 16 to 22. Three other SSW now exist in Villa Clara, Holguin, and Santiago. Two thousand students attend each of these schools, with eight thousand social work students graduating last year. This social work educational initiative, like the UP in Havana and Santiago, represents an emergency response by the government to addressing social problems in Cuba. Students at the SSW are known as "emergentes" because they are trained to respond to serious emergent social problems.

The purpose of these social work training schools is to provide a short-term (initially six and increasing to 12 months next year), concentrated social work learning experience for these youths, combining classroom experience with field practice. "Cuba does not have the luxury of waiting to solve its economic problems. It is experiencing a difficult economic time, but the idea is to not leave young people behind and uneducated," according to one of the school's founding faculty members, Lourdes de Urrutia, a professor at the University of Havana: "The idea [of emergentes] is to educate young people who can then go out and help other young people," she says.

Many SSW faculty members are advanced social work students studying for their licenciatura in the sociology and social work degree program described earlier. They are not reimbursed for their-teaehing-because-they-are-on-paid-leave-from-their-regular-jobs-;- The-academic--program for emergentes integrates courses from various fields into a unified curriculum. In addition to studying sociology, social work, psychology, law, and other disciplines, emergentes also take courses in the historical development of social work in Cuba, the United States and elsewhere in the world, adolescence, the family, community social work, and social intervention techniques. To graduate, emergentes must pass exams in each disciplinary subspecialty. The required field work, directed by a multidisciplinary faculty team, involves interviewing youths from poor neighborhoods to determine the prevalence of problems among them and to assess their level of need for services. Emergentes also participate in government social projects, such as Cuba's campaign to eradicate the mosquito-carrying dengue fever, which was an important public health campaign in Cuba in 2002.

After their training is completed, emergentes are guaranteed social work jobs where they must live in the communities and work with youth and other groups at risk such as children and senior citizens. They receive a salary of 300 pesos a month, which is considered to be a good salary for young Cuban workers.

Emergentes also have the opportunity to study for their "licenciatura" (Ph) on a part-time basis in any of eight university degree programs, including the UP program in sociology, social work, social communication, psychology, and law. While currently, most SSW graduates do not choose social work, they are expected to remain with their community-based social work jobs if they decide to subsequently study on a part-time basis at one of these eight university degree programs.

Lessons from Cuban Social Work Education

The extent to which Cuba's social work initiative will be successful in the long run is unknown. The Cuban government's ability to sustain this program is an important factor in determining its future success. However, Cuba's effort to elevate social work education is noteworthy for many reasons, regardless of its long-term outcome, and deserves the attention and the support of the international social work community. Its innovative core curricula integrating social work practice skills with political sociology and political economy is a strong model for social work training in other developing countries to address social problems related to national economic difficulties.

The SSW model may be used for the quick training of large numbers of young social workers to participate in local and nationwide public health and educational campaigns, such as Honduras' ongoing effort to fight an outbreak of hemorrhagic dengue fever (The New York Times, 2002). The Cuban government's expectation that emergentes make a commitment to remain on their jobs for a 10-year period after graduation may seem unusual to members of the U.S. social work community. However, this expectation reflects a degree of professional sacrifice that the Cuban government has come to expect from its professionals in an effort to sustain the social ideals of the Cuban Revolution.

The international social work community can learn from what Cuba has already accomplished with limited resources and is encouraged to exchange information and human resources with Cuba to advance social work education and practice.

Because of the high travel costs and U.S.-imposed travel restrictions, it is difficult for members of the Cuban social work community to travel to the United States to attend conferences and exchange ideas with their counterparts. We recommend, therefore, that the National Association of-Social-Workers-advocate for-an easier -exchange of- Cuban and-North-American-social-work professionals. Cuban social work is of special relevance to the U.S. social work community because of Cuba's close proximity to the U.S. mainland and high numbers of Hispanic immigrants, including Cubans, who reside in the U.S. urban and suburban areas (Spuro, 2002). Additionally important are the lessons the U.S. social work community can learn from Cuba's social work education and training initiatives. Which of the Cuban strategies to increase its number of social workers could work to address the growing shortage of social workers in the United States, especially in under served impoverished urban settings? (Strug & Mason, in press).

Cuban social workers: a revolutionary solution

A very significant project is being undertaken in Cuba exemplified by the Abel Santamaria Social Workers training college in Santa Clara province. Those who graduate from the college will be, in Fidel Castro's words, part of an 'army [who] will be the great shield, supporter, brother and defender of the most needy and humble on the island'. Their role is not to care for those in need but to discover the people who need help and support. Abel Santamaria College had 1,200 students registered and similar schools are to be opened in Santiago de Cuba and Holguin with 2,000 students each. The intake to the college is 16 to 22 year olds who have completed school but not entered university. They study for ten months and have guaranteed employment at the end. They will study psychology, law, English, Spanish, computing and social communication. Their work will be concentrated on the elderly living alone, those with disabilities, and the young who have left school, are not working or studying and who need, in the words of Fidel Castro, 'a friend, a tutor, someone to help, protect, persuade and prepare them, otherwise they will revert to being the reserve prison population'.

At Abel Santamaria College there are 198 professors and 40 advisors, 48 classrooms with television sets and four computer labs, an internal television network with six channels, 23 collective dormitories, a kitchen with a capacity for more than 1,500 diners, a polyclinic, reading rooms and a library. Unlike social workers in Britain, the purpose of social workers in Cuba is not to try and patch over the inevitable social wounds of capitalist society. Social workers alone will not solve any problems. In Cuba the programme is part of the Revolution's 70 other development programmes in social and educational spheres. These include all primary schools having computers from January 2002, reducing class size to a maximum of 20 by September 2002, a third educational television channel starting in Havana province and evening classes for unemployed or educationally inactive 17-30 year olds. What is clearly demonstrated is that the Cuban Revolution is moving forward. Against all odds the Cubans continue to improve their society. Cuban social workers will help to highlight problems facing individuals and families and bring them to a collective solution. They have a vision of a just society and at a time of increasing imperialist barbarism around the world and the ongoing US blockade, they continue to implement revolutionary change. We look forward to following the development of the programme and take inspiration from the Cuban Revolution with their ideological and practical battle for socialism and a better life for everyone.

Cuban Social Workers Focusing on Youth Problems

The role of social workers in helping young people with behavioural problems was outlined in the-central-Guban-city-of-Gamaguey-by-the-top-official-of-that-province's-Party-during-an-analysis of social work activities performed by more than 2,000 people in Camaguey in 2005. It was stressed the importance of sociological assessments and analysis of individuals, starting with their home life. One of the main tasks of the social worker's program is to help get previously unmotivated youth to resume their education or obtain employment. In the upbringing of the new generation, social workers have a responsibility to help preventing the wasting of lives. Besides the work with youth, other prioritised tasks assigned to social workers in 2005 were assistance to people with disabilities and the elderly. The 200 delegates participating in the meeting agreed that youth leadership training should continue in Camaguey. In addition, increased efforts will be placed on improving the study habits and class attendance of 1,824 area young people studying at the university level.

A Nation Becoming a University by Cliff DuRand

Introduction

Since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959, this beautiful island in the Caribbean has aroused passions everywhere in the Americas. Since its inception, the revolution has had a profound impact on the popular classes throughout Latin America and haunted the political elites and wealthy classes in the United States and oligarchies elsewhere in the hemisphere. Admirers have often praised Cuba as the model for the future; its detractors have portrayed it as an oppressive regime. In reality, Cuba is neither heaven nor hell.

Instead, the revolution is a bold social experiment to find a way out of the underdevelopment that centuries of colonialism and neo-colonialism have imposed on Cuba, an effort to open a path toward a more just society than was possible under its pre-revolutionary domination by the United States. It is this quest that has brought on it the untiring enmity of U.S. governments for nearly a half-century now.

For forty-five years, ten U.S. administrations have sought to end the "threat" of a good example by subversion, sabotage, invasion, assassination, diplomatic isolation, economic embargo, propaganda, etc. The embargo -- which Cubans call a blockade because it also seeks to prevent other countries from trading with Cuba has cost the Cuban people well over $72 billion to date. The Bay of Pigs invasion and the numerous acts of terror, launched mostly from U.S. soil, have taken 3,478 lives, making this a kind of slow-motion 9/11 (the proportional impact of which, given Cuba's small population, exceeds that of U.S. casualties in both the Korean and Vietnam wars). This little country has paid a heavy price for its independence.

It is against this backdrop of the forty-five-year siege that we have to view the realities of Cuba - what the revolution has accomplished and what it has failed to do today.

And Cuba has accomplished a great deal. As Fidel Castro has said, "perhaps the most useful of our modest efforts in the struggle for a better world will be to demonstrate how much can be done with so little when all of society's human and material resources are placed at the service of the people." It is this theme doing so much with so little -- that I want to explore with specific reference to education and culture.

Education in Cuba

We are all familiar with the literacy program that was launched immediately after the triumph of the revolution. Young people were sent into the most remote comers of Cuba to teach basic literacy. Not only did this achieve universal literacy, it also raised the social consciousness of Cuba's youth:- They too were educated by-the experience: Cuba's-alphabetizacion program is still today held up as a model by the United Nations because it required little in the way of material resources, building instead on the untapped human resources abundant in even the poorest of societies.

From that beginning, Cuba has gone on to build a strong educational system. A 1998 UNESCO study of primary education throughout Latin America found that, in test scores, completion rates, and literacy levels, Cuban primary students are at or near the top of a list of peers from across Latin America. Indeed, the performance of Cuban third and fourth graders in math and language so dramatically outstripped that of other nations that the UN task force administering the test returned to Cuba and tested students again to verify the initial results:

"Cuba far and away led the region in third- and fourth-grade mathematics and language achievement," the panel said. "Even the lowest fourth of Cuban students performed above the

regional average." (Christopher Marquis, "Cuba Leads Latin America in Primary Education, Study Finds," New York Times, 14 December 2001)

Today Cuba boasts one primary school teacher per twenty students and one junior high school teacher per fifteen students, making possible a very individualized pedagogy. There are schools in even the most remote areas of the country, sometimes with a teacher serving a single student in a school powered by solar panels.

The high quality of education in Cuba has been witnessed by the U.S. students I have taken there in recent years. They have been "blown away" by the university students they have met with, whom they find better informed, more articulate, and better able to reason than their U.S. counterparts. That is not exactly what they had expected to find in an "underdeveloped" society.

There is free education through the university, graduate and professional levels. As a result, today Cuba has the most highly educated and technically trained population in Latin America. There are more than 700,000 professionals who have been educated by the revolution who work in Cuba today.

One area in which Cuba is in fact highly developed is medicine. One telling indicator of this is the fact that last year Cuba's infant mortality rate was only 5.8 deaths in the first year per 1,000 births -- lower than in the U.S. Cuba has more doctors per capata than any other country in the world -- in all, some 130,000 healthcare professionals -- and has been able to send its medical personnel to assist in many of the poorest regions of the world. There were 25,845 Cuban doctors and health technicians working on humane missions of solidarity in 66 countries. There are 450 doctors in Haiti, the poorest country in the hemisphere, and a larger and growing number working in the poorest neighborhoods of Venezuela. President Castro was even able to offer to send over 1.500 doctors to the U.S. in response to the hurricane Katrina emergency -- an offer spurned by the Bush administration, unwilling to recognize that Cuba is a medical superpower.

And now through its Latin American School of Medicine, it gives free medical educations to hundreds of poor youth from elsewhere in Latin America, Africa and even the U.S., with the sole stipulation that graduates return to those poor areas to practice medicine for the people. Cuba's medical education teaches not only the science and art of medicine, but also the social values of service to humanity. As Castro told the first graduating class of 1610 students this summer, "[H]uman capital is worth far more than the [mancial capital. Human capital involves not only knowledge, but also -- and this is essential -- conscience, ethics, solidarity, truly humane feelings, spirit of sacrifice, heroism, and the ability to make a little go a long way" ("At This Moment, Cuba Is Training More than 12,000 Doctors for the Third World," Granma, 23 August 2005).

BY removing-a-major-economic-barrier-to-higher-education,-access-has-become highly meritocratic. As a result, women are now heavily represented in all the professions in Cuba. Well over half of the country's doctors, technicians, philosophers and other professionals are women.

New Social Problems

However, in the decade of the 1990s, two new social problems emerged. The first of these problems concerns what social scientists call "class closure." For the first and second generations after the revolution, there was unprecedented opportunity for upward social mobility. Sons and daughters of cane cutters, laborers, prostitutes, and others at the bottom of the old society were able to get free educations and become doctors, engineers, professors, and leaders in their communities. They occupied positions vacated by the older professionals who had fled to Miami and new positions created by the economic development opened up by the revolution.

But by the 1990s, as a third generation came along, such opportunities for upward social mobility were diminishing. The children of the new professionals had a competitive advantage in gaining admission to the university, if only due to the higher cultural level of the home they had grown up in. And that meant that the children of other classes had reduced chances to move up in

society themselves. The ranks of the professional class were becoming filled by the children of professionals. Despite meritocratic selection criteria, by the third generation, class closure was setting in.

Added to this is a second problem: the severe economic depression Cuba suffered in the 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the regimes of Eastern Europe with which Cuba had had 85% of its trade, Cuba's economy shrank drastically overnight. The country suffered a decade-long economic depression at least as severe as the U.S. went through in the 1930s.

Although there were great shortages of everything, income levels were maintained for much of the population by continuing to pay workers even when their factories could no longer produce due to lack of materials or spare parts with which to repair machinery. Nevertheless, there were no new jobs being created for that third generation just coming into the workforce. The economy could no longer support the large professional class that the revolution had built up. Professionals took jobs in tourism where they could have access to dollars, as the Cuban peso dropped in value. Universities cut back enrollments as their budgets shrank. And as a result, at the bottom of the workforce, a growing body of unemployed youth began to accumulate -- a dangerous situation for Cuba's future social stability. Even the children of professionals could not feel secure in maintaining the status of their parents. And many of the children of the lower classes felt they had little opportunity at all.

How did Cuba's leadership respond to this looming crisis? In the late 1990s, it went to the nation's mass organization of youth, la Union de Jovenes Comunistas (UJC), asking for new ideas. What came out of problem-solving discussions were a series of new programs that some have called a second educational revolution. The UJC established schools of social work for unemployed youth, "Universidad para Todos" TV courses were initiated, universities established extension programs, computer use was expanded in schools throughout the country, and a Battle of Ideas was launched. In sum, there have been major efforts to raise further the cultural level of the Cuban people. Let me detail some of the programs a little.

Social Work for the People and by the People

The most striking program was the social work schools that were established throughout the country: "Today we have more than 28 000 social workers all over the country" (Humankind needs-soeial-workers,Juventud-Rebelde,1 O-SeptembeN0(5):-These-too1e-unemployed-youth who had not been admitted to a university and paid them to go to school for a year where they learned to become social workers in the poor communities they had come from. Ruben Zardoya, formerly Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and History at the University of Havana, headed up the School of Social Work for the Havana area. Upon completion of their training, not only were they employed as social workers, but they also had the opportunity to continue their education at the university. A previously idle group had been given a socially useful role in helping to deal with the problems of their communities. Fidel calls them "doctors of the sou1." As a result of these schools, the number of social workers in Cuba has gone from 795 in the year 2000, to 28.000 with the graduation of this year class. And the unemployment level has gone down to 2%. Now such programs have been extended to former sugar cane workers. As Cuba has closed half of its sugar mills because they are no longer economically viable, thousands of workers have become redundant. They too are being retrained for new employment and receive a salary for attending school. Indeed, study is becoming a form of paid employment in Cuba. Parenthetically, I should note that this has caused some resentment among regular university students who were admitted on meritocratic criteria and are not paid for their study, even though it is free.

University for All

In addition, university-level study has been opened up to the entire population through two new educational channels that have been established. Combined with Cubavision and Tele Rebelde, Cuba now broadcasts 394 hours of educational programming weekly. 63% of the total hours broadcast by Cuban television. This University for All, as it is called, makes available to the general population some of the nation's best teachers and thinkers. For example, I previewed some of the programs in a history of philosophy course prepared by Miguel Limia's research team at the Institute of Philosophy. Since going on the air on October 2, 2000, 43 courses have been offered, using the talents of 775 professors, making this the biggest university in the country.

Beyond this there has been a metropolitanizing of the university. This is what we call extension programs that take higher education into neighborhoods in community centers and other satellite facilities. The university is no longer an ivory tower removed from society.

Raising the cultural and educational level of the entire population has become a central focus of these and other programs. As philosopher Miguel Limia told us, "We're betting on a society of knowledge." Fidel remarked in a speech last year about this educational revolution: "what began as an unattainable dream -- to see a nation become a university -- is today a reality" (qtd. in Jose A. de la Osa, "Aggressions Have Become a Great School for Our People." Granma, 9 February 2004).

Conclusion

The Cuban nation has been under siege for nearly a half century now. Under such circumstances, we might ask Bob Dylan's question: "how many years can a people exist?" It is testimony to the courage of the Cuban people that they have endured in their struggle for so long. In fact, it has made them stronger and more united. But then, they have no real alternative except to become a subsidiary of Miami, with a return to all of the inequality and injustice they once knew before the revolution. And that is unacceptable to the nation that Cuba has become, tempered by over a century of hard struggle. At a time when the social supports that enrich people's lives are being curtailed by neo-liberal governments everywhere else, Cuba has not only held on to the achievements-of-the-revolution,in-the-area-of-educatio~xtended-them-further-to-the population. We ought to be learning from this "nation that is becoming a university" rather than trying to crush it.

Social Workers Helping Across Cuba

Important new information on the changes now unfolding in Cuba and on the role of the social workers in bring them about. For example, the social workers came to peoples' houses and exchanged incandescent bulbs for new compact flourescent one which provides less illumination and which uses much, much less electricity. Social workers all over the island are doing this, which should provide an immediate cut in electricity usage on the island.

On the other hand, everybody also knows that electricity bills are now going to go up, everywhere on the island. The amount was already announced. Because of that, many people are trying to update their older home electrical wiring systems which waste lots of electricity as well.. The simple fact is that Cubans have been very wasteful when it comes to electricity usage, as Fidel pointed out in that November 17th speech. They will be compelled to be more responsible in electricity usage.

Fidel welcomes in 2006 with social workers

PRESIDENT Fidel Castro welcomed in 2006 together with social workers and university students, and described as "very special" this January 1, as just as or more emotional than January 1 of 1959, because making a Revolution is more difficult than winning a war.

At almost midnight, Fidel arrived at the Tangana service station located right next to the Jose Marti Anti-Imperialist Square on the central Havana intersection of Linea and Malecon, to bid farewell to 2005 and celebrate the 47th anniversary of the triumph of the Revolution with the young people there.

"We enjoy seeing you, who are our hope," affirmed Fidel, expressing his joy and the reasons for this visit to one of the 597 gas stations throughout the country that stayed open that night, and where 10,444 social workers were reinforced by members of the University Social Work Brigades in the task of preventing theft and misappropriation of fuel.

"Today we are ahead and advancing quickly, and we will be able to do much more in the near future, thanks to the strength of the Revolution; to the experience of these 47 years and having resisted the blockade, the collapse of the socialist bloc and the disappearance of the USSR; and having survived the Special Period," he emphasised.