HAMILTON, New Zealand—Cuban volunteer education workers at the Seventh World Indigenous Peoples’ Conference on Education, held here November 27-December 1. From left: Jesús Vasco, Lucy Nuñez, Fernando Casales, and Nancy Ortíz. They are part of a team of volunteers from Cuba assisting in the Greenlight literacy program run by Te Wananga o Aotearoa, a Maori-based educational institution that is hosting the conference. They are standing at a stall promoting the program, which was launched two years ago.

Cuban minister of education Luis Ignacio Gómez Gutiérrez was a keynote speaker at the conference opening ceremony on November 27. “Only education and culture can give you freedom,” he said, describing the 1960-61 mass literacy campaign that followed the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Ongoing popular efforts to raise the cultural level of the population mean that “each factory, each hospital has become a school,” he said.

The 2,000 delegates hailed from 22 countries, and several thousand attended overall. Zachary Wone, 16, who came with 15 others from the Ngamahl Goori Youth Group in Australia, said this showed that “Aboriginal people are not alone—other indigenous people around the world face the same problems of colonization.”

—PATRICK BROWN