The requirements of the UJC

I wasn’t alive yet, but they tell me that in the ‘70s getting into the Young Communist Union (UJC) was an achievement. You had to demonstrate an untainted revolutionary integrity, having participated in all the political or combative activity wafting about and having complied conscientiously with whatever task of the moment the commander dictated.

But the years passed and that organization that was first about being a good student and revolutionary, getting a good job, a good reference, lost the most important thing that gave meaning to its existence: ideology. As a comparison, we might say it is like the serious diagnosis a technician makes of a computer with a broken processor: it lost its heart.

And without its heart the UJC came to the nineties, years in which I’d supposedly be called on to inject my young blood into its already blocked veins. But in my day things were very different: without combativeness, without ever having participated in anything, including not completing various tasks, the call came to me when I was thirteen. I accepted and began a process that, fortunately, my mother decided to suspend as soon as she learned of it, because she believed that before the age of 18 one has neither the conscience nor the need to belong to a political organization. I will always be grateful to her, even though the proselytizing team of the UJC ignores those arguments, apparently they returned all my paperwork and I arrived at my technical high school thinking myself free, how naive!

They never called me to a meeting, never gave me anything to do, I apparently was not a member of the UJC. My four years of high school passed without anyone telling me that in my school records, stuck there on the last page, a handwritten sheet said that I was not only a member of the Young Communists Union, but that I had completed all the tasks assigned to me.