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By
Gordon Bonin
Of the NEWS Staff
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The
first great educational initiative of Fidel Castro’s
regime was a literacy campaign. On the grounds of the island’s
main teacher-training college stands a small museum dedicated
to it.
In the fall of 1960, during a record-setting, five-hour
speech at the United Nations, Castro announced, ‘‘Cuba
will be the first country of America that, after a few months,
will be able to say it does not have one illiterate person.’’
At the time, about a quarter of Cuba’s population of
roughly 4 million was illiterate. Most of them lived in
the countryside.
A ‘‘great army’’ of instructors was
mobilized. Brigades of students bolstered the island’s
35,000 teachers. Nearly 270,000 teachers and students fanned
out across the country armed with two lesson books and a
lantern to teach by at night.
The literacy campaign took place during a time when counterrevolutionary
forces were at large in the countryside, and the island
felt itself besieged by the United States.
The 42 teachers who died during the campaign are considered
martyrs of the revolution. Nine were killed and 33 died
of sickness or accident.
One of those killed was Manuel Ascunce Domenech, a teen-ager
who was stabbed and hanged.
He was the cousin of Maria Lourdes Hernandez Domenech,
a retired teacher who now works at the National Literacy
Museum. During the campaign Hernandez, who was 20, oversaw
a group of seven teachers near the city of Santa Clara.
It was a time of pride, of feeling that one
was part of a great cause, she said. ‘‘All of
us learned something. The farmers learned to read and write.
And we learned about the farmers’ conditions.’’
This connection was something the organizers
of the campaign hoped would bridge the gulf between city
and country.
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In this first example of the socialist regime’s
effort to link learning to work, the lessons in the instruction
manuals were relevant to life and labor in the countryside.
They were also overtly political, including discussions of
land redistribution.
Lazara Martinez Noa, who was 14 at the time,
was sent to teach a farming family in Campechuela in the eastern
end of the island. She would rise in the mornings with the
family and work alongside them in the fields and around the
house during the day. At night she would teach them to read.
After the campaign Hernandez became a secondary
school history teacher; Martinez eventually became a secondary
school biology and civics teacher.
One of the ways people had to prove they were
able to read and write was by sending a letter to Castro.
The museum has more than 700,000 of these letters on hand.
Because they are not kept in temperature- and humidity-controlled
conditions some are fading, others crumbling.
Wenseslao Lara wrote: ‘‘Fidel, You do not know with
what happiness I am writing you, and the thanks I give you
for having given me the opportunity to learn to read and write.
Now no one will deceive me and I will know the truth. ...
Good Fidel, I promise you that I surely will study to show
my gratitude to my teacher and to you.’’
One 86-year-old farmer wrote simply, ‘‘Dr.
Fidel Castro, I love you much.’’ By the time the
campaign ended in November 1961, Cuba’s illiteracy rate
had been slashed from 20 percent at the start of the year
to just 4 percent.
Luisa Campo Gallardo, the museum’s director,
said complete literacy was unattainable because of 50,000
Jamaican and Haitian immigrants on the island, plus the fact
that some older Cubans, like her own grandmother, didn’t
want to learn to read and write.
Nonetheless, a literacy rate of 96 percent put
Cuba on par with such ‘‘highly developed countries’’
as Japan, France, the Soviet Union, Switzerland and Italy,
Campo said.
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highly emotional
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