HAVANA, Cuba, Aug 18 (ACN) Over 3,400 university students, young professors and professionals from various sectors have joined the Youth Social Work Brigades (BJTS), an initiative of the Young Communist League (UJC) intended to pinpoint people’s concerns to make improvements in their neighborhoods, based on visiting households to learn about their main problems and family life.
UJC leaders have been to several communities in Havana where these young people work to ask about the BJTS’s work and talk with residents, whereas First Secretary Aylín Álvarez García met with young people in several neighborhoods.
University students engaged in this effort said that at first the neighbors had reservations because they were strangers to them, but they eventually understood that their goal is contribute to local development and welfare.
Among the problems in these communities, many of them dating back years, are water and gas shortages, social assistance to people who do not exist, poor housing conditions, lack of socio-cultural projects, subsidies not always granted to those who need them most, insensitivity of the authorities, and obstacles to the solutions for certain situations.
“We are already working to try and solve these difficulties and thinking about how the university’s social and cultural projects can help improve things, but our work cannot only be to identify problems: it is imperative that the authorities respond and make use of the existing mechanisms to give assistance,” one of the students said.
Álvarez García praised what they are doing and the connection they are developing with these neighborhoods, home to many vulnerable citizens in need of improving their quality of life.
She added that there may be a shortage of anything but faith and willingness to help others as part of the new mission assigned to their organization, in the name of the Revolution and of the ideas that Fidel defended so much about social work in our Homeland, which calls for high levels of humanism and responsibility for the sake of an absolutely fair society.