July, 2022.- Free education and health, free and unprejudiced access to sports and culture, laws that benefit vulnerable people, respect for the rights of children, women, and motherhood are a reality for Cubans, something like an intrinsic right with which we are born and grow up.
However, we take all of these achievements for granted, to the point that sometimes we underestimate their importance.
But if we compare the Cuban reality to other people of the world, including those of the so-called first world, then we can realize how privileged we are.
For example, while 400 million minors live under conditions of slavery in countries such as Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, here child labor is prohibited; boys and girls go to school and do not have to face any of those difficulties.
And if today women from Nicaragua, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic are leading strikes to demand the right to a safe abortion; in Cuba this is an institutionalized health service that guarantees the well-being of women.
Gender and race equality in labor and social matters is also another of the greatest achievements, so that more than half of the Antillean Parliament is made up of Cuban women.
This panorama is not by chance, but the result of more than 60 years of policies designed to benefit the working people, the harvest of a social project made by the humble and for the humble, as the Apostle of Independence José Martí dreamed of it.
But something that should be clear is that the achievements cost the country millions of pesos everyday. Although the State does not demand anything from us in return, and it depends only on us, the main beneficiaries, to perpetuate over time these achievements that make us great as a nation.
