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Vol. 81/No. 47 December 18, 2017
(special feature)
1961 literacy drive in Cuba ‘transformed working people’
BY NAOMI CRAINE
CHICAGO — “Without the literacy campaign, none of the success we’ve had
would have been possible. It’s the base of Cuba’s development,” Griselda
Aguilera Cabrera, a veteran of revolutionary Cuba’s mass literacy drive
in 1961 that taught workers and peasants across the island how to read
and write, told an audience of 65 at a meeting here Dec. 2. It was held
at the SEIU Healthcare union hall and sponsored by the Chicago Cuba
Coalition.
The event included a showing of the documentary “Maestra” (teacher) by
Catherine Murphy, which describes how a quarter of a million volunteers
worked with more than 700,000 fellow Cubans, wiping out illiteracy in
one year. Some 100,000 of these volunteers were under the age 18, the
majority female. The film interviews several women who participated in
this historic effort, including Aguilera, who at age 7 was the youngest
volunteer.
In January 1959 the workers and peasants of Cuba, led by the July 26
Movement headed by Fidel Castro, overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship
of Fulgencio Batista and began to reorganize society based on the needs
of the toiling majority — opening the road to the first socialist
revolution in the Americas. The literacy campaign was one of the major
steps in the transformation of Cuban working people, which enabled them
to run their own country.
“It was a very intense year, with the whole population involved in one
way or another,” Aguilera said. Many of the young literacy teachers went
to the countryside, living and working with peasant families and
teaching classes at night. Many rural workers lived in huts with dirt
floors and no electricity or running water, she said, a new experience
for youth from the urban areas.
“In the cities, classes were organized in existing schools, workplaces
and union halls,” Aguilera said. “My student was a street cleaner, 58
years old and completely illiterate. The themes of the lessons were
about the world, about the right to health care and to land. At the same
time students were learning to read, we were gaining consciousness about
our country and about the world.”
This accomplishment “required both action by the government and a desire
of the people to do it,” Aguilera said. “No one got a vacation that
year, but no one complained.
“We caught up our courses the next year,” she said.
In response to a question, she described how the Cuban government has
taken the initiative since 2001 to help expand literacy in other
countries, particularly in Latin America. “More than 10 million people
have learned to read with this program,” with the help of Cuban
volunteers in some 30 countries, Aguilera said. Washington “accuses Cuba
of trying to interfere in other countries,” she added, “but our only
goal is to allow people to help in the development of their own countries.”
The meeting included brief presentations on conditions facing working
people in Puerto Rico today. Miguel Alvelo Rivera of Chicago Boricua
Resistance described how the “Junta” — the fiscal control board imposed
by Washington on the island’s colonial government — is forcing the
closure of 184 schools in rural areas.
José López, executive director of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center,
talked about fundraising efforts to help people recover from Hurricane
Maria that devastated Puerto Rico in September. The social catastrophe
in the wake of that storm “brought to light the unnatural problem of
Puerto Rico” caused by U.S. colonial rule, López said.
What happened in Puerto Rico showed the “lack of preparation of people
to confront a natural phenomena,” Aguilera said. She described how the
government in Cuba leads in “creating the conditions and educating the
people” to face the inevitable hurricanes that hit the islands in the
Caribbean. “In every school students learn the plan, and in the
workplaces.”
The way the Cuban Revolution mobilizes working people to prepare for,
meet and rebuild after hurricanes like Maria and Irma and the literacy
campaign Aguilera described vividly in her talk are striking examples of
what difference a socialist revolution — the working class in power —
can make.
Related articles:
European Cuba solidarity conference held in Bulgaria
Hart: ‘We joined revolutionary movement led by Fidel Castro’
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