Cuba eradicated illiteracy in 1960s

LITERACY

By THOMAS HUKAHU
IN my last article, I shared with you the story of Prof Muhammad Yunus, the economist from Bangladesh, who started a poor people’s bank in his country to help the underprivileged access loans where the interest is very low and the term of repayment lengthened. Grameen Bank (Village Bank) is now serving the whole of Bangladesh and has spread throughout other parts of the world by following the microcredit model.
Many different microbanks that are reaching out to the unbanked lower income earners in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere are using the model that Yunus conceived back in the 1970s when he started Grameen Bank.
In this week’s article, I will share with you an interesting story about how a nation eradicated their illiteracy problem when a new political leader took over the regime.

Reading about the literacy campaign
The library is a good place to learn about new things, things that may not be covered by teachers or lecturers in your classes.
I have learned many things by reading library books, fiction as well as non-fiction.
I have said in some of my other articles that when I was 18 years old, I borrowed a book on astronomy from the school library. After reading the concepts of how stars and born and die and how their light takes years to travel through the great distances that separate them from us got me very interested in the subject.
It was logical that when I started university studies in science, my interest was already leaning towards the sciences that helped astronomers discover more about the big world above and around us.
When I was doing my education diploma at the University of Goroka almost 20 years ago, I also spent time to read library books and journals in my free time. As a result of that habit, I learned some very interesting things, things that were not taught me in classes.
One of those interesting stories was how the island nation of Cuba eradicated the problem of illiteracy in 1960. It is a success story which I have never heard educators, promoters of literacy or parliamentarians talk about.
If literacy is vital for a nation, then the story of how Cuba ran its literacy programme should be of interest to people who are trying to help the illiterate around us learn to read and write for the first time.

Castro’s regime initiates programme
It is recorded in books and journals that the Cuban revolution in January 1, 1959, was led by communist leader Fidel Castro to forcefully oust the US-backed regime of Fulgencio Batista.
When Castro took power, he realised that many people who disliked his new regime emigrated – that is, there was a brain drain.
On top of that, the nation had an illiteracy problem where only 60% of the population could read and write. School attendance was also very low.
Castro realised that if Cuba was to be united and people should understand what his plans were for the nation, he must help everyone learn to read and write, including the poor peasant farmers in the rural areas.
The great divide between the educated of the urban centres and the poor peasants farming the land had to be levelled. That would help unite the people.
Luisa Yara Campos, Cuban literacy museum director said: “Before 1959 it was the countryside versus the city. The literacy campaign united the country because, for the first time, people from the city understood how hard life was for people in rural areas before the revolution, that they survived on their own, and that as people they had much in common. This was very important for the new government. “
Some people argued that Castro’s wish to help people read and write was due to his motive of spreading his propaganda and communist ideals.
However, the fact is Cuba did run a literacy programme in 1960-61 that dramatically raised their literacy rate to nearly 100%. By 1962, Cuba’s literacy rate was 96%, one of the highest in the world. The effort to accomplish this gigantic task is now known to the world as the Cuban Literacy Campaign.
All students in the programme were tasked to write a letter to Castro at the end of the project telling him that they were now literate.
One of the letters on display at a museum simply read, “I never felt Cuban until I was taught how to read and write. Homeland or death – and we will win.”

Strategy to run the programme
Castro’s strategy to help the illiterate was first to teach the volunteers who will be teaching the students to read and write.
These volunteers were not just trained professionals, they included children in schools, those between the age of 10 and 19.
The programme trained the would-be instructors in late 1960 to prepare them for the literacy campaign in 1961. Apart from children instructors, factory workers also volunteered to teach illiterate people in urban centres where they lived.
Castro was also built new schools to promote literacy. In September 1960, Castro announced the campaign to the Assembly of the United Nations: “The Revolutionary Government, in only 20 months, has created ten thousand new schools – that is to say, in such a brief period of time, the number of new schools that had been built over 50 years has been doubled. And Cuba is today the first country in America that has already met its school needs, that has a teacher in every last nook of its mountains.”

Children teaching adults
Castro had done something that no other regime had done before. Apart from engaging trained professionals, he had trained children, 100,000 in all, to become instructors for illiterate peasants.
The Conrado Benitez Brigade, the young volunteers, included many town kids who were taught in a week-long session how to use a primer to teach. Then they were sent to rural areas to live and work.
When addressing literacy teachers in 1961, Castro said: “You will teach, and you will learn.”
The book I read at the Goroka university told of 10 year olds who were born and bred in the city going to live and work and teach poor peasants in the countryside. During the day, they worked with the peasants in farming the land.
At night, after dinner, they lit a kerosene lamp that they brought with them and sat beside their hosts and instructed them by using the primer that was given to them.
Many of those students told of the experiences they had in teaching the poor farmers. Some of them said they experienced the other side of Cuba that they had never seen, where people struggled on a daily basis and lived in a place where they had no knowledge of what was happening in Havana and the rest of the world.
The relationships they forged with the peasants grew strong as the literacy campaign ran from April 1961 to December 22, 1961.
Those who were children instructors at that time kept in touch with their peasant students after the campaign ended, writing letters and telling them on what was happening in their town or city. The now-literate peasants also wrote letters to tell their young instructors how they were getting on with their farm life. Some of the young instructors visited their adult students from time to time because of the bond they had formed in the days of the campaign.
Some of those young instructors later on in life went on to train as teachers and served their nation to help other young people learn. Wikipedia states that upon the completion of the literacy campaign, 707,212 adults learned to read and write, thus raising the literacy rate to 96%.
While preparing this article, I also learned that anti-Castro campaigners tried to derail the literacy programme. In a few cases, the young instructors in remote areas were harassed and threatened.

Gender-related barriers lowered
It has been noted too that the Cuban Literacy Campaign had a big group of young female volunteers, including those in the brigade.
Young women broke barriers of being under patriarch control and hence not venturing out into the world as independent citizens.
For Norma Guillard, going on the campaign at the age of 15 was an adventure. It was her first time away from home, and it gave her a feeling of freedom and independence.
Her tale is one of many that were told in the documentary film Maestras.
Maestra tells the story of that inspiring campaign through the memories of the women who served as literacy teachers—the maestras themselves.

Cuba setting the pace
While I was learning about the Cuban Literacy Campaign in 2000, I also learned that the United Nations General-Secretary then, Kofi Annan, had visited Cuba and was impressed by the nation’s progress.
He had commended them on their outstanding progress in education and health services, which were some of the best in the world.
The only thing he urged the regime to do was to give people more freedom to say what they had in mind. The outside world believed that Castro’s communist ideals may have suppressed the people from freely saying what was on their mind.

Today in Cuba
Cuba today is known today as a leader in literacy programmes and health. Cuban doctors are now working in many nations to assist governments in their health initiatives.
Cuba’s Yo Si Puedo (Yes, I Can) programme have been adopted by other countries to address their illiteracy problem. Cuban literacy educators have gone on to help other nations too in helping people to read and write.
The Yo Si Puedo programme was used by Venezuela’s president then, Hugo Chavez, to help his people read and write, where tens of thousands of people were educated. In 2005, UNESCO declared the country illiteracy-free.
Some of the outstanding results of the Cuban Literacy Campaign included it being accomplished in less than two years and it was free for everyone participating in it, not to mention the women and Afro-Cubans and other minorities benefiting greatly from the programme.
Next week: The inmate who learned to read and write

• Thomas Hukahu is a freelance writer.