Fidel Castro - Education

Cuba had one of the highest illiteracy rates in Latin America, and Castro wanted to fight this. There was a lack of schools and a lack of teachers, and Castro fought this by building more schools, and implemented a training programme for 271,000 teachers. Besides this, everyone who was already literate, had to volunteer as 'Brigadistas'. They would live with a rural illiterate family, and teach them. The campaign both lowered the illiteracy rate (to around 4%) and it opened the middle classes' eyes to the rural Cuban's lives and it made the illiterate peasants got another reason to support the revolution as they learned what it could do for them.

When Cuba, in 1961, shifted towards communism, all private schools were nationalised. A large scholarship programme for gifted and committed students was established, and the participants were selected by the government, who also often decided which subject area the student should specialise in. The students' free time, was to be used to do volunteer work. Teachers who did not support the revolution were fired, and the new ones who were to replace them would realise that the students acted as spies. Teachers who did support the regime were rewarded with training in the USSR and in Eastern Europe where communist values were reinforced. The teachers were given new textbooks focusing on the history of the revolution and the lives of the heroes (Fidel, Che and Camilo). Castro believed the aim of schools "is the ideological formation of revolutionaries, and then by means of the revolutionaries, the ideological formation of the rest of the people." Libraries were searched for inappropriate material, and Castro believed that Cuban culture had been marked by foreign influence, and he wanted to establish new organisations that would ensure art with the Cuban values.

(All information is from Pearsons 'History, 20th century world, Authoritarian and Single-Party States', 2010)