Publisher's Synopsis
Since Cuba fell into the hands of the Castro brothers and Ché Guevara in 1959, the people of the island have been subjected to a constant and well-dosed manipulation by the government and its extensive brain-washing machinery of what the self-proclaimed "revolution" called "the new man." They wanted an obedient being without many moral and civic scruples, a being who blindly believed in the doctrines of their leaders. They dreamed of a youth willing to immolate for the ideals of those who, without having held a plebiscite, guided them along a narrow path, hating everything the capitalism, bourgeoisie meant and especially the supposed enemy of the poor and the humble: the "Yankee imperialism". The United States, being the obsession of that group, was from the first moment the perfect target to direct all its malevolence and to justify each of the failures the communist state faced. Making use of the most refined techniques of education and mass training, drawn from the most select of ancient and modern dictatorships and renowned autocratic regimes, they used their literatures of coercion to threaten and impose their doctrine, utilizing intimidation and social repression.Children, fundamentally, were besieged by many subtle methods of modeling and adaptation, of what until then traditional education and accepted ethical and social canons represented, to see them turned into materialistic entities -in the theological sense of the word-, stripped of all attitudes akin to any ideology other than the Marxist theory in a primitive and authoritarian Soviet style.That was a time of improvisation, of insane orders and counter-orders with less sense. Those were the years of wanting to change the course of an entire country without knowing how. Plan after plan malfunctioned and always manipulating the convenient "materialistic dialectic" they were replaced. The country was deteriorating and the standard of living of the Cuban decreasing, being taught - contradictorily - to eat, live and satisfy elemental needs, in a spiritual way.INDOCTRINATED is the true story of a boy submerged in those murky waters of the so-called "revolution" and who felt on his own back, the hard whip of communist training to try to convert him into that new man that the tyrant needed to rule at will and forever. This child, like almost three million beings, went into exile and survived to narrate his experiences. There was no viable alternative to fight. Many millions remain on the island without knowing what to do or whom to believe. They were cheated of all their dreams, grossly deceived for decades, yet even now, many of them refrain from admitting they were treacherously duped.Whoever was born in Cuba after the "ten million harvest" in 1970 or the wars in Africa, after the Mariel exodus and 1994 when the Maleconazo, does not know much about these stories and does not even suspect there is a different world than the one he has known until now, being the victim of a cruel censorship and unparalleled mutilation of his intelligence and his potential as a human being: having been, sadly and ignominiously, "INDOCTRINATED."
