Reply #158: This looks like a good place for this info. not many have heard here [View All]

[Judi Lynn]

concerning the early moments of the Cuban campaign to get the Cuban people literate, so many of them being completely unable to read:

The country life
Jonothan Kozol, U.S. Educationalist and author of Children of the Revolution, described terror attacks aimed at destabilizing the Literacy Campaign: “The student volunteers were organized into a brigade named in honor of a Cuban youth, Conrado Benítez, killed earlier , three weeks prior to his eighteenth birthday, while he was working in a pilot literacy program in the hills. The young man, a black teenager who had recognized in Fidel’s revolution the first important chance for abolition of racism in the Caribbean, was seized by ex-supporters of Batista, tortured, suffocated by the gradual tightening of a rope around his neck, and later mutilated. He was only one of many volunteers who had been – or would soon be – martyred by the roving bands of anti-Castro forces. Another young man, Manuel Ascunce Domenech, viewed today as one of the greatest heroes of the Cuban revolution, had requested – with a persistence that begins to seem endemic in the Cuban youth – that he be sent to do his work in exactly the same region where Benitez had been killed. He was housed in the home of a poor man, Pedro Lantigua. When the counter-revolutionaries struck at Domenech, they also seized Lantigua – and took both the young man and the older man away to die.”
(snip)

http://www.oceanbooks.com.au/literacy/lit7.html

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In 1961 Cuba's President Fidel Castro told the United Nations: "Cuba will be the first country in the Americas to be able to decide to eliminate illiteracy in just a few months." Eleven months later 707,212 people had learned to read and had written letters to President Castro to prove it and say thank you. All these letters are bound and collected at the Museum of Literacy in Havana. Alphabetizing (which means both teaching someone to read and learning to read), we will win, was the main slogan.

The idea was that only with higher literacy and education levels would the revolution, now creating a new government and a new society, be able to solve Cuba's social problems. "No creer, leer!" was the message: don't just believe, read! More than 100,000 young people, mostly teens, some younger, formed the core of 268,000 literacy teachers. The youngest was 7, shown below in his uniform and in his literacy campaign ID card.

These young people went to live with families in order to teach them to read. The families were mostly poor peasants; the teachers, urbanites. The teachers learned as much as the students. The entire country was organized around the literacy effort, from building roads to devising and publishing textbooks, from public health to international relations. For instance: there was a sudden need for eye exams, and then eyeglasses. China supplied a lantern for each teacher, since the teaching took place after the day's work.

With the Bay of Pigs U.S. invasion that same year, several young teachers and their students were killed in acts of war and sabotage. There were many adjustments and additional people who joined in the campaign as it was not easy and the months were going by. But by December 1961 the campaign had succeeded, and a huge celebration was held in Revolution Square featuring many gigantic pencils waving in the air.
(snip/...)

http://www.communitytechnology.org/cuba/photos.html