A six-year-old Cuban boy received a school assignment: to construct a sentence using the word "yanqui." Without his parents telling him what to write, the little boy submitted this phrase: "Yanquis are human." What followed is narrated by priest Alberto Reyes Pías in the 174th installment of his weekly column "I've Been Thinking," published on Facebook around the anniversary of September 11th.
"It is not difficult to imagine what came next: hysterical teachers, parent summons, 'ideological' analysis of the child," describes Reyes Pías. The problem, according to the priest, was obvious. "After months of school indoctrination, that child had not acquired a 'correct ideology,' meaning he had not learned to hate, he had not learned to condemn, and that was simply intolerable."
The starting point for this reflection is the anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2001. "September 11 has returned to the calendar, a day we will always remember as the diabolical conclusion of a process of fanatical ideologization," writes the pastor of Esmeralda, in Camagüey. According to Reyes, "the massacre of the Twin Towers did not stem from a nationality or religion, but rather from an ideology that divides the world into good and evil, where the 'evil' must be hated, punished, and eliminated."
From that premise, the priest draws a parallel with Nazism, referencing the Spanish writer and priest José Luis Martín Descalzo, who recounted how leading scientists served Hitler: they created gas chambers, experimented on human beings, and ruthlessly decided who should live and who should die. "They were intellectually brilliant, but they had lost their humanity, blinded by an ideology that convinced them not only of their superiority but also of their right over the lives of others," quotes Reyes Pías.
The conclusion drawn is that all totalitarian ideologies share the same logic. "It doesn't matter if it's Muslim fundamentalism, fascism, or communism; all ideologies create individuals who feel superior in their way of thinking and viewing the world, and who believe they have the right to decide the lives of others."
Cuba, it states, has not been an exception. The priest lists decades of systematic repression. “From the executions at La Cabaña to the UMAP, from the 'marches of the fighting people' to the acts of repudiation, from the arbitrary summons of State Security to the imprisonment of those who have gone out to demand their most legitimate rights.”
In all these cases, he points out, the criterion of power has been identical: "I decide what is right and what is wrong, I decide what 'the right path' is, and you have no right to think or act differently from what I have decided is the best way. And since I am the one who holds the power, your only option is to submit, or there will be consequences."
This logic explains, according to Reyes Pías, the arrogant treatment, the "warning notices," the dreaded "stain on the record," the ideological analyses, and the aggressive repression that characterize the Cuban system. Anti-imperialist indoctrination has an official curricular basis: documents from the Ministry of Education set as a goal that students "express a feeling of rejection towards capitalism and particularly towards Yankee imperialism." In 2026, there have been documented cases of children forced to chant political slogans in Havana schools and students used in "anti-imperialist tribunals" against the United States.
Reyes Pías, whose column has accumulated more than 170 installments and has become one of the most followed critical voices on the island, concludes his reflection with a direct appeal to Cuban parents: "It is not enough for your children to excel in science, literature, or biology. It is essential for your children to be good in humanity, in love, in forgiveness, in tolerance, in accepting others, so that their passion is never to dominate others but to build, together with everyone, a world of brotherhood."
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