By Gustavo Robreño Dolz on December 29, 2023
Historical, political and ideological significance of an unprecedented educational feat.
Apart from the educational or purely pedagogical considerations that can be made about the Literacy Campaign launched and successfully completed by the Revolutionary Government of Cuba throughout 1961, -the same year of the proclamation of the socialist character of the Revolution and the defeat of the mercenary invasion of Playa Giron, – the educational feat it represented has, above all other elements, a profound historical, political and ideological significance within the process of integral transformations carried out by the patriotic, democratic and socialist forces since the triumph of January 1, 1959.
The only thing comparable, in our opinion, was the process of creation and organization of the National Revolutionary Militias where the people were given arms, trained militarily and placed in their hands, as they do today, the armed defense of the revolutionary work against the Yankee imperialist enemy and the counterrevolution supported and financed by it. This was also an unprecedented feat: arming the people to defend their Revolution.
Arming the people simultaneously, in the arm and in the mind, was a palpable demonstration of popular support and confidence in the majorities, who were already benefiting from the initial measures of the Revolution, and showed their willingness to give their lives if necessary for the sake of the new society that was being built with so many sacrifices and efforts and in the midst of aggression and terrorism sponsored by the blindness, frustration and criminality of the Empire.
Making the population literate was, therefore, essential for the political and ideological strengthening of the Revolution, for the consolidation of unity and the eventual emergence of the unitary and vanguard political organization, of the mass organizations, of a system of government and People’s Power and for the fulfillment of the many tasks still pending in the economic, productive and social fields under the slogan wielded by Fidel Castro and which still endures: “We will not tell the people, believe; we will tell them, read”.
Fidel’s words summarizes the need and urgency of literacy in order to continue advancing with the revolutionary work and its defense. The literacy campaign was not a coincidence, it was a commitment and a necessity, an unpostponable task that continued during the mercenary invasion. It was not by chance that the mercenaries took prisoners and considered as enemies the young literacy workers, boys and girls, in the disembarkation zone.
The Literacy Campaign, personally headed by Fidel and the then Minister of Education Dr. Armando Hart Dávalos, was advised and designed by the most important and outstanding pedagogues of the country from the technical-pedagogical point of view and with demanding scientific rigor, to the extent of becoming the foundation of the successful Cuban method “Yo si Puedo” (Yes I Can), which today is used and recommended by UNESCO with universal scope. It was not the result of improvisation or a dislocated enthusiasm.
The Literacy Campaign was organized as an extraordinary mass movement down to the grassroots, with 100,000 young people in the “Conrado Benítez” brigades; 120,000 popular literacy educators, 14,000 “Fatherland or Death” brigadistas and 35,000 teachers at different levels of education. They were a total force of 300,000 educators who taught 700,000 people to read and write in one year, both in the cities and in the most remote rural areas, and reduced the illiteracy rate of Cuba to 3 percent or even less.
The Literacy campaign had its heroes and its martyrs. The imperialist enemy was not unaware of its significance and also sensed what would be its triumphal culmination for the Revolution and its future, deciding therefore to fight it with blood and fire by the most criminal methods. The counterrevolutionary gangs assassinated the popular literacy teacher Delfín Sen Cedré, hanged in Quemado de Guines, Las Villas and also the young brigadista Manuel Ascunce Domenech and his student, the peasant Pedro Lantigua, in a rural area of Trinidad, Las Villas.
On December 22, 1961, Cuba was declared an Illiteracy Free Territory and, in this way, the campaign emerged victorious, which from that very moment was the nourishing root of the colossal Scholarship Plan that covered hundreds of thousands of young people throughout the country and that at this moment is also expressed in the thousands of scientists, doctors, engineers, teachers, technicians of all kinds, men and women of science and thought who are the sustenance and ensure the future of the Revolution within the endless course of several generations.
Undoubtedly, literacy in Cuba was much more than primers, notebooks and pencils.
Source: Network in Defense of Humanity, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English