The leader Miguel Díaz-Canel chaired a meeting this Friday to assess the progress of the Community Youth Network, an initiative structured around seven projects that the regime launched in April to engage the new generations in neighborhoods and communities across the island.
During the meeting, the leader identified the most active youth on the network as a "talent pool of young people who can be worked with for higher purposes," noting that they show "leadership traits" and a growth in "preparation and training," and presented a report from official television.
The First Secretary of the National Committee of the Union of Communist Youth (UJC), Meyvis Estévez Echevarría, reported that the network is already operational in 1,263 of the 1,410 popular councils in the country and that efforts are underway to achieve full coverage.
Granma and Cienfuegos lead the results, while Las Tunas and Guantánamo are the provinces with the least progress.
Estévez also detailed that to date, 5,974 veterans have been visited and medical students are attending to 8,826 pregnant women, of which 3,182 are teenagers.
Despite describing the initiative as "innovative," Díaz-Canel warned that the levels of outreach and participation remain insufficient and are primarily concentrated among middle school students.
The president insisted that it is necessary to intensify systematic efforts to assist vulnerable sectors, beyond just specific activities.
The member of the Political Bureau and Secretary of Organization of the Central Committee, Roberto Morales Ojeda, was more explicit about the regime's expectations.
"Who better than young people for that popular control, to achieve that vanguard in facing all these phenomena? The problems we have with banking, the issues we face in food supply, in everything regarding the epidemiological situation with the complexities we currently have," he pointed out.
As the meeting concluded, the President noted that the main immediate challenge is the start of the new school year, which he attributed as playing a crucial role in the community work that remains to be done before the end of the year.
The Community Youth Network was officially launched in April under the motto Innovate, Create, Lead, and includes projects such as Safe Youth Zone, dedicated to infrastructure surveillance rounds, and Young Code, which activates "digital wasps' nests" to combat alleged fake news.
Díaz-Canel's call to recruit young people for "higher purposes" comes at a time of profound generational disaffection; the UJC lost more than 194,000 members between 2007 and 2024, decreasing from 609,000 to 415,000 affiliates, a 32% drop attributed to mass emigration and ideological disillusionment.
Independent surveys conducted this year indicate that 97.61% of Cubans aged 18 to 30 disapprove of the government's performance, and 93% say they would emigrate if they could.
A week before this evaluation, Díaz-Canel urged the youth "to take advantage of the situation they are experiencing to prepare for the defense of the Revolution in the future," during one of the sessions of National Defense Day.
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