FEEM: Pillar of the Revolution (+audio).
In December 1970 it was officially announced the emergence of a new student organization in the country, the Federación de Estudiantes de la Enseñanza Media or, simply by its acronym, FEEM.
Its antecedents, of course, are much older. As early as April 1959, in their First Free Provincial Congress, the high school students took the first steps towards an unprecedented experience that would mature over time into an organization of national character, which materialized in July of that same year.
Those young people belonging to the Rebel Youth Association became part of a new vanguard organization, the Young Communist League (UJC), under whose proposal was created, in 1962, the Union of Secondary Students (UES), an organization which could be joined by high school students and which later gave way to the Federation of High School Students (FEEM), direct daughter of the José Antonio Echeverría Student Brigades, which since 1967 had replaced the UES.
The idea that the new organization would replace the previous one was encouraged by the fact that it would be more autonomous in relation to the Young Communist League (UJC) and more democratic in its internal functioning.
The participation in the 1971 harvest of the student contingent from Havana, organized by the FEEM, in sugar cane fields in the province of Matanzas, was one of the first and most demanding tasks of the newly created student organization.
Since then and until today, its members have had an active participation in the construction and defense of the Cuban Revolution. Such is their importance, that Comandante Fidel Castro himself would express the confidence he had in those young people.
…ONLINE AUDIO
Today, the young people of the Federation of High School Students arrive at their 53rd anniversary with the same spirit they declared at their first congress: «To be worthy Cubans implies, in the first place, to carry in our hearts the doctrine of the sincere man from where the palm, our teacher, grows».
Written by Claudia Ortega Valido.
