Castro, Affluence, Fun Vie for Youths’ Interest : Cuba: The far-flung concerns of people under 30-- who make up 60% of the population--bear a strong influence on the nation’s future.

HAVANA —  Three clean-cut young men in designer jeans, running shoes and crisply ironed T-shirts strolled proudly through a downtown Havana park, bandannas around their necks, like revolutionary Boy Scouts off to do good deeds for Fidel Castro.

A few yards away, a cluster of longhaired youths who looked like a blend of 1960s hippie and modern punk drew cigarettes from the pockets of dirty, brass-studded denim jackets and tossed contrived sneers at their neatly groomed contemporaries.

Promenading between the two groups, in Coppelia park on a recent balmy evening, were scores of other young people happily devouring ice cream cones and ignoring both the Freakies, as they call the unkempt social dropouts, and the squeaky-clean Communist youths.

According to foreign observers, and to a number of youths interviewed in Havana, these three categories of young people represent a fair cross section of the youth of Cuba. With 60% of the population under age 30, they constitute a potent if unmeasurable influence on the country’s future.

“Most kids you see here fall somewhere in between the two groups of zealots,” said a 17-year-old high school student named Yvan. “They aren’t opposed to the system, but they’re not fired up about it, either. They just want to have as good a time as they can and get on with their lives.”

The others, he said, have either dropped out--like the Freakies and a larger and more conventional group called the Rockers--or they have plunged wholeheartedly into the officially approved activities of the government’s Communist Youth organization, some out of sincere conviction but many simply because it offers the best means of getting ahead.

“The young people are largely indifferent to Fidel and the revolution,” said a Latin American diplomat who spends hours each week in casual conversation with youngsters on the streets. “A lot of them feel smothered by the tight controls of the system and irritated by the things they can’t have. They’re proud of Cuba’s advanced school system but fearful that they’ll never find jobs to match their level of training.”

He recalled with irony a recent Castro boast that the school system has 293,000 teachers and 20,000 in reserve and added: “The kids aren’t dumb. They know those 20,000 ‘in reserve’ have no place to go. There just aren’t enough jobs to match the skills the schools are producing.”

He said that everyone in the cradle-to-grave socialist society is guaranteed a job but that there is widespread underemployment, typically with half a dozen people crowding into a small office to do the work of one.

Some of them, like a black 24-year-old who said his troubles began when he resigned from the Communist Youth several years ago, have simply fallen off the system’s production line and can’t find a way to climb back on.

“I spent a year studying in Russia and am almost fluent in Russian, and I’ve become fluent in English on my own,” he said in English. “The government needs bilingual people to work in tourism, but they object to me leaving the party. They object to the color of my skin. All they offer me is jobs sweeping floors.”

The longings, and some of the rebelliousness, of the young have been picked up and reflected in the music of one of Cuba’s leading pop musicians, 37-year-old Pablo Menendez. His group, Mezcla (mixture), currently leads the weekly televised hit parade with a poetic protest song about a polluted river in Havana.

Menendez was born in Oakland, Calif., and came to Cuba at age 14. He said that he is loyal to the Castro regime and that most of the youths who listen to his music are, too. But he added that they “are bombarded with information from the American, European and Japanese films on Cuban TV.”

“They see people living with great access to all kinds of consumer goods that they don’t have here,” he said, “so their main question is, ‘Why don’t we have consumer goods like everyone else?’ It’s only human. Youth will always struggle for something better than they have now.”

Even the regime’s most prominent student loyalist, 25-year-old Felipe Perez Roque, who as head of the Federation of University Students is often at Castro’s side, concedes that many young people are disgruntled with the way the system works.

“There are a lot of things wrong,” he said. “Transportation is really bad. Food in the dorms is not as good as we would like. Recreational activities are lacking. But you don’t find favoritism for the kids of high officials, or kids without textbooks, or anyone who doesn’t have enough to eat.”

To ease the boredom that many youths complain about under Cuba’s all-work-no-play socialist lifestyle, the regime recently organized pop music fetes in Havana and a number of provincial cities, with bands like Menendez’s playing in public parks and plazas.

“Now there’s plenty to do,” said Joanne Jassa, 17, one of the youngsters eating ice cream in Coppelia park. “We’re concentrating on music and dancing and having fun.”

One of the Freakies, who identified himself as Jimmy, 23, said: “We don’t need drugs. In other countries they do drugs if they have problems with their families. Here a bottle will do it. All we live for is girls and music--heavy metal.”

One of the clean-cut youths dismissed any suggestion of discontent.

“We feel optimistic, and we don’t feel that we’re missing anything,” he said.