Ponce is one of three internationalist volunteers who have spent several months in New Zealand teaching reading and writing. She and her colleagues, Mercedes Zamora Collazo and Gloria Mendez Martinez, were invited by Te Wananga o Aotearoa, a college-level educational institution based in the small town of Te Awamutu, to help develop a program to improve literacy among the establishment’s mainly Maori students. Most of the 60,000 students study online, by correspondence, or at a number of satellite campuses around the country.

Government statistics indicate that 99 percent of New Zealanders are literate. A survey by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), however, found that 45 percent of New Zealand adults—100,000 of whom are employed—have literacy levels below what is “required to meet the demands of everyday life.” Functional illiteracy is disproportionately higher among Maori and Pacific Islanders. Unemployment among these oppressed peoples is way above the national official average of 5.4 percent—12 percent for Maoris and nearly 9 percent for Pacific Islanders.

Introducing the speakers, Rongo Wetere, the university’s chief executive officer, described how he went to Cuba to initiate the project “afraid he might be laughed at in [New Zealand] education circles.” He said he was impressed by what Cuba had achieved with the literacy campaign in the first years of the revolution, and the impact today of Cuba’s efforts to send volunteers to help eradicate illiteracy in Latin America. “We’re really indebted to Cuba for providing these three women to work together with us,” he said, noting that Cuba, “a poor country, is paying their salaries.”

In September 1960, a year and a half after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship and established a workers and farmers government, Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro addressed the United Nations General Assembly, announcing to the world: “In the coming year, our country intends to wage its great battle against illiteracy with the ambitious goal of teaching every single illiterate person in the country”—one million Cubans, roughly one-third of the adult population—“to read and write.” That’s what the Cuban government did, as some 100,000 young people, most of them teenagers, went to the countryside and lived and worked alongside peasant families, eliminating illiteracy by the following year and learning much in the process themselves.

Mercedes Zamora Collazo described her experience as a 13-year-old participating in the 1960-61 literacy campaign in Cuba. There were not enough teachers to meet the challenge at the time, she said, so high school students like her “didn’t study for a year” and volunteered to go to the countryside. “We realized that if people were not able to read and write, they could not aspire to further development,” she stated.

At the 1961 Rally of the Pencils Collazo attended in Havana to celebrate the successful conclusion of the campaign, the students asked, “Fidel, Fidel, tell us what else we have to do.” Castro replied, “Study, study, study.”

In response to a question, Ponce explained the pressures on the Cuban Revolution today and the campaign known as the Battle of Ideas. This is a political offensive to deepen the involvement of working people and youth in the revolution, central to which is broadening the educational and cultural opportunities available to the Cuban people. The goal of the campaign is to counter the imperialist ideological drive promoting capitalism as the future, and to address the social inequalities that have widened as Cuba has become more directly exposed to the capitalist world market since the collapse of preferential trade relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe more than a decade ago.

The difficulties the revolution faces that the Battle of Ideas aims to address include the demoralization among certain layers of youth who were not working, had dropped out of school, and, in some cases, had become involved in petty crime. Cuba’s revolutionary leadership launched a fight to win these youth back to productive participation in society and to build revolutionary consciousness among them by involving them in a number of educational campaigns. These initiatives comprise more than 100 programs, including a school for revolutionary social work, popular libraries, and video and computer clubs for those who live in the most remote and less developed areas of the country.

“The mass media abroad presents a Cuba that is not our Cuba,” Ponce said. “They say we have a dictatorship. They ask how long Fidel will be in power. We say ‘as long as we want,’ because in Cuba the people rule the country. Our people have a tradition of struggle. If they didn’t want Fidel, no army could keep him in power. The government of the U. S. hasn’t been able to create a break in the revolution to be able to destroy it.”

The speakers also urged the 45 participants in the meeting to back the campaign to win freedom for five Cuban revolutionaries serving draconian sentences in U.S. prisons under frame-up charges, including conspiracy to commit espionage for Havana.

The literacy program here, which uses audio and video technology to broaden its reach, is set to be launched in September.  
 
 
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