Although the campaign helped adults become literate, it also provided the groundwork to establish primary and secondary schools in under-represented rural areas.
“The interests the revolution serves are those of the people. Those who win or lose by the revolution are the people, and it was the people who suffered the horrors of these years, the people who had to decide if in ten, fifteen or twenty years they and their children and their grandchildren would still by suffering from the horrors to which the people of Cuba were subjected under such dictatorships as those of Machado and Batista.” – Fidel Castro, Jan. 9, 1959
The Campaign for Socialism
On the 1st of January 1959, Fidel Castro replaced his government with a revolutionary socialist state as the official ideology of the Cuban Revolution. Castro made his mark by using the story of the children to campaign in the country the need for this change. This change Castro advocated for was the separation from the capitalist quasi-colonialism they struggled under and to initiate a new form of government in Cuba: socialism. He used the children as a means of exemplifying the harsh conditions capitalism had pressed onto Cuba, emphasizing that there were children who suffered a lack of education, healthcare, and nourishment under capitalism. Essentially, he described the image of the capitalist Cuban child as suffering under the political orientation enforced by the US prior to the revolution. The political discourse used was to intensify the figure of more vulnerable agents, in this case children, to gain further legitimacy through society’s eyes. A strategic reference that aided Castro’s legitimacy with Cuba, was the works of a renowned poet and Cuban martyr: José Martí.
From 1892 to 1895, Martí wrote of his vision of an ‘essentialized’ Cuba in poems and essays to spread ideological support for the fight for independence from Spain, which was eventually achieved in 1898. In his works he referred to the future generation – the children – applying a child-oriented discourse as a device to influence people, but his vision also encompassed an approach to education. A main recurring idea in Martí’s thought is that education would be the only means to save Cuba from slavery[1]. This ideal of Martí accompanied with a child-oriented discourse gave Castro further legitimacy to impose and expand this new government.
Because of the natural association between education and children, established in part by Martí, Castro found leverage for his ideological program by appealing to the nationalist sentiment through the implementation of a universal Cuban curriculum. Elena Jackson Albarrán argues for the value of a child-centered discourse for a new political regime in the chapter "El Niño Proletario: Jesús Sansón Flores and the New Revolutionary Redeemer, 1935-1938." This chapter theorizes the archetype of the Proletarian Child developed during the Mexican Revolution. This idealized child trope, much like revolutionary Cuba’s, was made real in the public sphere as a symbol of the injustices that inhibited the nation and as validation for the urgency of political change. This justification served as an important base of support to mold the new generation into the regime’s vision of the ideal future of the nation. Castro believed that a political curriculum was the best way that he could guarantee the loyalty and ideological alignment of the next generation of Cubans, ensuring the future of his Revolution. This is where a new regime’s symbolic and material factors of revolutionary discourse intersect.
The Significance of Education to Revolutionary Cuba
It became a crucial matter to reform the education of the children by the state to not only make the future of Cuba stronger, but to have the children of Cuba learn these new government ideals and eventually promote this politicized education. A major educational turning point in Cuba was the Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961. The goal of this initiative was to make all of Cuba literate for the benefit of the revolution, putting into practice, albeit in a new context, Martí’s educational philosophy. This was only the beginning of the development of education reform in revolutionary Cuba that affected children. “This was the year of education, the year to destroy illiteracy, the best ally of imperialism.” This ‘Year of Education,’ as Castro proclaimed it, ended with the Declaration of Cuba as a Territory Free of Illiteracy in Dec. 1961.
This moment was captured in the photograph above, which depicts children, young adults, and a few older adults are acting together in a staged ceremonial act commemorating the eradication of illiteracy, an enormous feat of the revolution and certainly a great publicity opportunity for Castro. the promotion of a state campaign. It depicts the official declaration of Cuba as a territory free of illiteracy: “Territorio Libre De Analfabetismo.” The purpose of this image was for propaganda, intended not just for the Cuban people, but also as a way to export the Cuban model abroad, especially as the Cold War divisions grew in the hemisphere. This was to make Cuba look strong and reestablished. The revolution’s childhood discourse placed Cuban children as the glue that holds the stability of the revolution. Castro molded the ideal Cuban revolutionary child citizen in time and space as a nation-maker, a participant in revolutionary performances, who embodied these political beliefs. This image is intentional as its representation is manipulated by the adult.
Patricia Holland, in Picturing Childhood: The Myth of the Child in Popular Imagery, argues that behind many attractive pictures of childhood lie the desire to use childhood to secure the status of adulthood, at the expense of children themselves. She argues that the use of public imagery is part of a continuous adult effort to gain control over childhood and its implications – both over actual children and over a personal childhood which adults must constantly mourn and reinvent. In this theoretical framework, the new Cuban government used children as the means for consolidating the revolution. The revolution introduced and developed a new childhood discourse to have them play the dynamic role of becoming indoctrinated, and then promoting this indoctrination to the people of Cuba through revolutionary performances in public forums, such as giving speeches and participating in parades holding signs advocating the revolution. The composition of the photo highlights that the children are at the front/bottom of the flagpole in clear view, a visual emphasis in the propaganda that they are important nation-makers in the ideology of the new regime. This documented achievement provided the nation with a collective identity, in unison, with a sense of history and intellect.
Although the Literacy Campaign primarily targeted adults, it had a big impact on the educational lives of Cuban children. The verifiable success of the Literacy Campaign and the “Year of Education” resulted in substantial changes to the primary and secondary school school system of Cuba. An estimated 280,000 Cubans worked to eliminate literacy, and because of this mobilization about 707,000 became literate (defined as anyone of at least fifteen years of age could now read). This spiked the literacy rate to 96%, one of the highest in the world. Since education was becoming more accessible, especially through the rural countryside, school enrollment of children increased significantly. Percentages pre-revolution were at 56% for ages six through twelve, which was approximately 625,700 children. Meanwhile after the “Year of Education,” this statistic rose to 98% estimating to over one million children. These results were aided by politicized educational materials to further the ideal of a collective identity. An example of this politicized material, is a Cuban children's album found in the Walter Havighurst Special Collections at Miami University, pictured below open to the page depicting the end of the Batista dictatorship:
The document is an interactive picture book through which the child learns the history of the revolution by pasting color-printed graphic novel-style scenes of the official history of the Revolution in sequential order. The end of the picture book places Fidel Castro as the hero in the end. This children’s picture book was published around 1962 at the end of the Literacy Campaign, which signifies the resulting change in historical educational material for Cuban children. This documentation shows the incorporation of children actively learning the new revolutionary political narrative.
The first years of the revolution marked the beginning of competing discourses in Cuba and its diaspora regarding the defining of childhoods. Anita Casavantes Bradford, a primary scholar of childhood in Cuba and author of The Revolution is for the Children: The Politics of Childhood in Havana and Miami, 1959-1962, eloquently labels these dividing discourses as the symbolic representation of the child vs. flesh-and-blood-boys and girls, who played an active role in the revolution as participants of revolutionary discourse. The flesh-and-blood boys and girls definition clashed with pre-revolution childhood discourse of capitalist Cuba influenced heavily by the U.S. Expectations of children, and the social spaces given to them, were changing in revolutionary Cuba, and differed from Western ideals of childhood. The mainstream idea of childhood that prevailed in the West was that it should be a time of protection. However, the breakthrough of this revolutionary child-oriented discourse redefined the social and cultural spaces of children, evolving the expectation of the child to be an active participant in the promotion of the revolution and set the example of the future of Cuba.
The Reforms to the Cuban Child’s Education
The education reform that truly placed children as the trope of the revolution and center focus was the new ideology of “El Hombre Nuevo” from Ernesto “Che” Guevara, a fellow revolutionary. The photographic subject of this analysis is more powerful when understood in the context of the broader ideology of Cuban revolutionary educational reform for children. Cuba's goal was to turn education from an enterprise for private capital into the provision of the creation of the "new man": youth who would be unselfish nation-makers and combatants in the effort for socialist reconstruction ("Preconditions for System-Wide Education Reform," 1973 p.15). The recurrent idea of this ideological intervention applied to the Cuban children was, in essence, to achieve human fulfillment. During revolutionary social reconstruction, the new government sought to equate the progression of education with the progression of revolution. Cuba would come to be, in Castro's words from his Rural Teacher Graduate speech of 1961, “one big school.” This is where profoundly modified socio-economic relations would be reinforced by large-scale educational efforts to teach the youth the behaviors and skills necessary to insure the survival of this revolutionary ideology. In efforts to establish these social values, Castro was committed to education as the critical element, which he demonstrated in his comments: “‘We will make revolution if we really win the battle of education,” and “[e]ducation is the country’s most important task after having made the revolution, for it will create the ideological framework for the new generation.”
Effective accomplishment of a new educational policy became a basic goal of the revolution, committed to egalitarian values and the dissemination of national resources. The success of this ideological framework of the ‘new socialist man’ was placed in the hands of the Cuban children, the new generation. The main concerns of education took a paradigm shift from equal access of schooling opportunities (Cuban Literacy Campaign) to the focus on this ‘correct’ ideological structure. The full transformation of education impressed upon the children of Cuba, represented an attempt to structure a national, consistent, and balanced school system imbued with this ideal. This shift drew heavily on the example given by Guevara. Schools bore the responsibility to mold ‘el hombre nuevo,’ a new socialist man, whose doings and achievements would enable “Castro’s Utopian call for a Marxist society in Cuba” ("Preconditions" 1973 p.15).
Cuban teachers sought to have children devoted to altruism, the fight against inequality and corruption, inventive productivity, and the protection of the revolution and Castro’s regime. From ages twelve to seventeen the students were removed from their urban lifestyles and home settings, and they were put into a militia-like setting called ‘Becas’. The Beca system was a great way of ensuring that the urban youth helped to perpetuate the revolutionary ideology among their peers, by bringing their ideological “purity” into the countryside and modeling collective action through mandatory agricultural collective labor, for a few weeks in the summer. Urban public school teachers rose from 17,355 to 24,443; rural public school teachers rose from 5,336 to 10,308 over doubling its size; and the implementation of over 10,000 new schools being built across Cuba.[2] The efforts utilized to seek these ends were turning and relocating most of the secondary schooling into coeducational rural boarding schools where the curriculum was joined with agricultural labor ("Cuban Rural Education,"1973 p.17). In this new lifestyle and learning framework the ideological transformation of the ‘new socialist man’ could be put to practical application. These changes added to the competing discourses surrounding the definitions of childhood. This “flesh-and-blood-boys’ and girls’” representation of the Cuban children was evolving and shifting away from the mainstream, Western definition of childhood. Here, the children were enforced to perform in revolutionary acts to help create a collective identity in Cuba. Through learning an education based on the ideals of socialism, this initiative benefited the stability of the revolution. Children were integral in the new value system emphasizing collective over individual identity for it to become woven into the social fabric and politics in socialist Cuba.
[1] Anita Casavantes Bradford, The Revolution Is for the Children: The Politics of Childhood in Havana and Miami, 1959-1962. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
[2] Abel Prieto, "Cuba's National Literacy Campaign," Journal of Reading 25, no. 3 (1981): 215-21.
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