Estefania Carrera/ Mentor Mahmuti.
October 16, 2018.
Literacy Campaign.
ENG 121.
The Cuban literacy campaign has been the world’s most ambitious and successful literacy campaign because 707,212 adults were taught to read and write, raising the national literacy to 96% and most important it ended the segregation between social classes. As Fidel Castro put it in 1961 while addressing literacy teachers, “You will teach, and you will learn.” Volunteers from the city were often ignorant of the poor conditions of rural citizens until their experiences during this campaign. Besides literacy, the campaign aimed to create a collective identity of “unity, an attitude of combat, courage, intelligence, and a sense of history.” It is estimated that 1,000,000 Cubans were directly involved (as teachers or students) in the Literacy Campaign.
While developing this campaign Cuba was characterized by inequalities regarding access to resources and educational opportunities. During the Batista era of the 1950s, the country was divided into groups of haves and have-nots, and these class differences were clearly exemplified by the fact that wealthy Cubans usually sent their children to elite private schools or to study abroad, while children of the rural communities attended inferior public schools or lived too far from any school to attend at all. Children living in the country whose parents were agricultural laborers were five times less likely to finish primary school than were those who had parents with non-manual, salaried jobs. Because illiteracy was seen as a significant factor in the deepening of class differences, it was one of the earliest challenges to be addressed during the first months of the revolutionary government.
According to Abel Prieto in his journal article ’’Cuba’s National Literacy Campaign’’ this campaign was so successful because ’’The Revolutionary Government, in only twenty months, has created ten thousand new schools, that is to say, that in such period of time, the number of rural schools that have been built over fifty years has been doubled. And Cuba is today the first country in America that has already met all its school needs, that has a teacher in every last nook of its mountains. The Cuban people have become critical global citizens who will never again be easily subjugated by neo-liberalism or by any other nation.’’ This shows that not only did the campaign increased the number of schools, teachers and students in Cuba but it improved the overall citizen in a social, economic and political aspect.
The campaign was heavily rooted in the ideals of the Cuban Revolution In Denise F. Blum book, ’’Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values: Educating the New Socialist Citizen’’ she argues that the Cuban Literacy campaign was not only an “outstanding model for revolutionary pedagogy,” but also a stage-setter for educational equality and political unity. It was indeed a means by which Cubans brought about their own form of self-determined human development. The author also confirms that “the seeds of the Literacy Campaign were sewn by the Rebel Army which conducted literacy drives, initiated by Che Guevara,” and that “education and ideas became the primary weapons for defending the Revolution. This shows the importance of this campaign because the national illiteracy figure of approximately 23% prior to the campaign masked huge differences between urban and rural populations. The literacy campaign brought together Cubans from the city and the country, the young and the old, and from all social classes. Castro developed a program that was modeled on previous literacy campaigns in Argentina, Brazil and other parts of Latin America (Tulane University, 2016).
Today, more than 10 million people from over 30 countries have learned to read and write through Cuba Yo Si Puedo (Yes, I Can) program, which operates in countries ranging from Spain to Venezuela. The program provides free education to poor adults who lacked opportunities to learn to read and write as children.
By raising the country education up to 96%, this campaign was one of the biggest organized plans to be successful in the world. It raised the average wages for people from eleven pesos to one hundred and seventy-six pesos. Cuba’s average wage was way different to the surrounding countries, higher them most of them by almost triple the amount and the majority being double the amount. After more than thirty years from the revolution Cuba’s highest flag and achievement is their education system. In the end we believe that this campaign was very much needed for Cuba to advance in their literature and to give other countries an example of literacy campaign.
The thank-you letters to Fidel Castro, used by UNESCO to evaluate the success of the campaign in 1964, are kept with photographs and details of all 100,000 volunteers in a museum in La Ciudad Libertad (City of Liberty), in the western suburbs of Havana.
