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The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 32 August 28, 2017
(Books of the Month column)
1961 literacy drive key to advance of
Cuban Revolution
The following excerpt is from Cuba and the Coming American Revolution by
Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. The
French edition is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for August.
This selection explains how the 1961 literacy campaign helped transform
Cuba’s workers and farmers in advancing their revolution, as well as the
volunteers participating in this effort. Copyright © 2001 by Pathfinder
Press. Reprinted by permission.
BY JACK BARNES
In September 1960, addressing the United Nations General Assembly, Cuban
prime minister Fidel Castro announced to the world: “In the coming year,
our country intends to wage its great battle against illiteracy, with
the ambitious goal of teaching every single illiterate person in the
country” — one million Cubans, roughly one-third of the adult population
— “to read and write.” And that’s exactly what they did, as some 100,000
young people, most of them teenagers, went to the countryside and lived
and worked alongside peasant families.
Today we are celebrating the fortieth anniversary of that historic
conquest.
On April 15, 1961, when the Yankee-organized mercenaries announced their
imminent invasion by simultaneously bombing three Cuban airfields, the
revolutionary government mobilized the people’s militias and other
military units. In the declaration announcing that state of alert, Fidel
Castro called on all Cubans to “occupy their assigned posts, whether in
a military unit or a workplace” — and he added, in the same sentence,
“with no interruption in production, the literacy campaign, or a single
revolutionary task.”
Four days later, when the counterrevolutionary forces had been defeated,
the communiqué signed by Fidel reporting that victory to the Cuban
people was demonstratively dated: “April 19, 1961, Year of Education.”
You can find both documents in the new Pathfinder book, Playa Girón/Bay
of Pigs: Washington’s First Military Defeat in the Americas, whose
publication in English and Spanish we are also celebrating here today.
Nineteen sixty-one in Cuba was the Year of Education in all the meanings
of that word — the capacity to learn, to produce, to become a more
disciplined revolutionary soldier, to create, to develop. The Year of
Education meant making culture more accessible. It meant bravery in
serving the highest human goals. It meant extending a hand of solidarity
to anyone fighting against injustice and oppression anywhere in the
world. It meant offering your life to achieve these goals.
Fidel Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara, and other leaders of the Cuban
Revolution were very much aware that the greatest obstacle to the line
of march of the toilers is the tendency, promoted and perpetuated by the
exploiting classes, for working people to underestimate ourselves, to
underestimate what we can accomplish, to doubt our own worth. That’s why
revolutionists in Cuba were so proud that the literacy effort had
continued with minimal disruption as the battle against the invaders — a
battle for the very life of the revolution — was fought and won. “The
literacy campaign has not stopped even during these days,” announced
Fidel Castro in his April 23 report on the victory to the Cuban people.
Whatever any particular individual was doing over those three days,
April 17–19 — whether deployed at the front, working in the fields or
factories, or helping someone learn to read and write — the Cuban people
felt the bond of a common battle waged by equals. A common bond that
provided a basis for discipline, a basis for the shared joy of
construction, the joy of creation, and the joy of victory in battle over
those who sought to destroy everything their revolution was making
possible.
What a moment for the people of Cuba to announce to the world the
socialist character of the revolution!
A little more than a year later, Che Guevara told the congress of the
Union of Young Communists (UJC) — in a speech you can find in
Pathfinder’s Che Guevara Talks to Young People — that young communists
had the responsibility to be “the first in work, the first in study, the
first in defense of the country.” And he congratulated them for the
three words they had put on the emblem of their organization — study,
work, and rifle.
These are the emblems of all Cubans, Che said, permanent emblems, not
just momentary ones.
The rifle, because no progress toward the liberation of toiling humanity
is secure unless the exploiting classes know we are ready to defend
those gains by any means necessary. That was the truth confirmed once
again at Playa Girón and soon retested and reconfirmed during the
October 1962 “Missile” Crisis.
Work, often depicted by a shovel or a machete, because the
transformation of nature by human labor, social labor, is not only the
source of all wealth but the foundation for all culture. Without the
shovel and machete, there’s nothing for the rifle to defend.
And study, depicted by a pencil, a symbol of the literacy campaign,
because the capacity to read and write gives access to the cumulative
conquests of millennia of human endeavor and opens the doors to workers
and farmers to participate as equals in every aspect of social and
political life. It makes them better able to transform production and
the conditions of life and work, better able to take control of their
own destiny.
The literacy campaign was central to strengthening the worker-peasant
alliance on which revolutionary Cuba was founded; it was central to
narrowing the gulf between toilers in city and countryside. Peasants and
their families in prerevolutionary Cuba had virtually no educational
opportunities. This was especially true for women in rural areas. So the
literacy campaign struck a mighty blow for the emancipation of women, too.
Related articles:
Workers, youth build Cuba ‘Che brigade,’ youth festival in Russia
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