Cuban education minister Luis Ignacio Gómez opened the event with a presentation on “Cuba: A Revolution in Education.” He began by describing the situation in the world today, in which 860 million people are illiterate—including 40 million in Latin America—and social and economic conditions are worsening for hundreds of millions. Citing Cuban national hero José Martí, Gómez insisted, “No social equality is possible without equality of access to culture.”

Gómez explained that Cuba was able to wipe out illiteracy because the Cuban people had carried out a deep-going social revolution. After workers and farmers overthrew a U.S.-backed dictatorship and took political power in 1959, the revolutionary government mobilized 100,000 young people to go into the countryside in 1961 to teach basic reading and writing. The trade unions organized tens of thousands more into the literacy effort. Illiteracy was effectively eliminated in a one-year campaign. In the following years, with continuing educational efforts, a ninth-grade level of schooling for the population as a whole was attained.

Over the past half-decade, Gómez said, a far-reaching campaign has been launched to extend popular access to culture and education through the university level so that the new generations, above all, “understand today’s world…and be able to contribute to transforming it.” He outlined the wide scope of initiatives that are part of what is known here as the “Battle of Ideas.”

These wide-ranging efforts include reducing elementary school class sizes to 20 students, installing solar panels to bring electricity even to the most isolated rural schools, and establishing university-level schools in all 169 municipal districts across the island. Cuba is becoming “a giant university,” he said, noting the popularity of programs that pay a salary for enrollment in study programs and that have helped to substantially reduce unemployment.

The large participation of teachers and literacy campaign organizers from Venezuela marked the conference. Many were involved in efforts such as Mission Robinson, a mass literacy campaign that has involved thousands of volunteer teachers in rural areas and working-class neighborhoods across the country. The goal of the campaign is to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic to more than 1.5 million people: children who have dropped out of school and the 12 percent of adults who are illiterate. It is named after Simón Rodríguez, a nationalist poet and schoolteacher in Caracas who was nicknamed Robinson because of his fascination with the novel Robinson Crusoe. Rodríguez served as teacher to Simón Bolívar—Venezuela’s national hero and a leader of the struggles against Spanish colonialism in Latin America.

The Cuban government has sent advisors and many Cuban youth as well as television sets, videotaped educational programs, and other materials to assist Mission Robinson and other campaigns such as Mission Ribas, which many of the participants were involved in. Its goal is to teach mathematics, geography, grammar, and English as a second language to adults who have not graduated from high school. The aim is for everyone to get a high school diploma in half the time it takes at public schools.

Venezuelan delegates at the conference said government reports estimate that 1.37 million people in that country learned to read and write during the past two years.

Hilda Rivero Gómez told the Militant that until two years ago she was illiterate. She had been a housewife who got involved in literacy classes in 2003 and graduated. She has since become one of the Mission Robinson facilitators and is seeking to complete her high school education through Mission Ribas. Her goal is to study at the university. “I have changed completely,” she said. “When you know how to read and write you can better defend your rights and you have a broader perspective of yourself and the world.”

María del Valle Ruiz, who spoke at one of the several workshops at the conference that examined the experience of the literacy campaigns in Venezuela, explained that she had to go to work at an early age and could not attend school. “I have graduated from the initial phase of Mission Robinson and now I am continuing with my elementary education.” She added, “Robinson has opened a window through which I see the world differently. I am a different person. Three years ago I was unschooled and today I am in Cuba speaking to all of you.”

The literacy program developed in Cuba and applied in Venezuela is known as “Yo sí puedo” (Yes I can). Educational tools produced in Cuba, such as videos and other audiovisual materials, are used in a number of semicolonial countries confronting illiteracy. Cuban representatives reported at the conference that “Yo sí puedo” materials are currently being used in 13 countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, as well as in New Zealand in Maori communities; in some cases brigades of Cuban literacy volunteers have been participating. What has allowed the literacy campaign to make real progress in Venezuela, however, has been the widespread mobilization of youth and working people, who themselves are being transformed through their own efforts.  
 
Two counterposed class perspectives
A counterposed class perspective was presented to the above presentation at the Havana meeting by representatives of UNESCO, one of the sponsors of the world literacy congress. The United Nations agency has presented what is known as the “Dakar Plan,” whose goal is to eliminate world illiteracy by 2015—a date that became a standing joke of the conference. María Jauregui Mejía, a UNESCO Latin America regional specialist, defended the Dakar plan at a roundtable during the conference. While recognizing the success of the literacy campaign in Cuba and the advances in Venezuela, she said, “There are very interesting experiences in Brazil and Chile where the private sector is involved,” citing sponsorship for such programs by the Bank of Chile and corporations in Brazil. “We should consider this kind of approach,” Mejía argued.

Addressing the delegates at the closing session, Cuban president Fidel Castro highlighted the social gains in this country, including in education, which have been possible because working people here made a socialist revolution and continue to hold state power.

Castro said the UNESCO goal of 2015 was unattainable because of the imperialist exploitation and oppression of semicolonial countries. The amount of money spent on education is overshadowed by the payments that governments in Third World countries must make on their huge and every-growing debt to the imperialist powers. Despite all the talk about attacking illiteracy in these countries, “Where are the teachers, the resources? It takes political will, and the capitalists are not interested in education,” he said

Also speaking at the closing session of the conference was Enrique Ramos, president of the National Youth Institute in Venezuela, who described the impact of the literacy campaign in Venezuela.

Ramos reported on preparations for the upcoming 16th World Festival of Youth and Students, which will take place in Caracas in early August. He urged those present to attend and help build the festival, which he described as a broad affair to which they hoped to attract 15,000-20,000 young people from around the world.
 
 
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