ABSTRACT
In some ways, student generations in the United States have their opposites in Cuba. The Cuban counterpart of the silent fifties on American campuses was an activist generation in which most of the 20,000 people killed by Batista's army and secret police were students. Student activists were waging more than a verbal war on the Batista regime from the campus citadel. The revolution which divided the student generations also divided opinion about the university. One student was "separated" from the Youth Communist organization because she planned to take up art as well as the more useful vocation of medicine. "Preprofessional work" orients the student toward a vocation, and gives him a basis for "relevance" in his academic studies, just as the correspondence courses after graduation suggest the relevance of academic studies to his vocation. A student may be just getting the feel of the European news section when he is switched to sports, which he knows little about.
