Vol. 81/No. 32 August 28, 2017
(Books of the Month column)
1961 literacy drive key to advance of
Cuban Revolution
The following excerpt is from Cuba and the Coming American Revolution by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. The French edition is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for August. This selection explains how the 1961 literacy campaign helped transform Cuba’s workers and farmers in advancing their revolution, as well as the volunteers participating in this effort. Copyright © 2001 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
Today we are celebrating the fortieth anniversary of that historic conquest.
On April 15, 1961, when the Yankee-organized mercenaries announced their imminent invasion by simultaneously bombing three Cuban airfields, the revolutionary government mobilized the people’s militias and other military units. In the declaration announcing that state of alert, Fidel Castro called on all Cubans to “occupy their assigned posts, whether in a military unit or a workplace” — and he added, in the same sentence, “with no interruption in production, the literacy campaign, or a single revolutionary task.”
Four days later, when the counterrevolutionary forces had been defeated, the communiqué signed by Fidel reporting that victory to the Cuban people was demonstratively dated: “April 19, 1961, Year of Education.”
You can find both documents in the new Pathfinder book, Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs: Washington’s First Military Defeat in the Americas, whose publication in English and Spanish we are also celebrating here today.
Nineteen sixty-one in Cuba was the Year of Education in all the meanings of that word — the capacity to learn, to produce, to become a more disciplined revolutionary soldier, to create, to develop. The Year of Education meant making culture more accessible. It meant bravery in serving the highest human goals. It meant extending a hand of solidarity to anyone fighting against injustice and oppression anywhere in the world. It meant offering your life to achieve these goals.
Fidel Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara, and other leaders of the Cuban Revolution were very much aware that the greatest obstacle to the line of march of the toilers is the tendency, promoted and perpetuated by the exploiting classes, for working people to underestimate ourselves, to underestimate what we can accomplish, to doubt our own worth. That’s why revolutionists in Cuba were so proud that the literacy effort had continued with minimal disruption as the battle against the invaders — a battle for the very life of the revolution — was fought and won. “The literacy campaign has not stopped even during these days,” announced Fidel Castro in his April 23 report on the victory to the Cuban people.
Whatever any particular individual was doing over those three days, April 17–19 — whether deployed at the front, working in the fields or factories, or helping someone learn to read and write — the Cuban people felt the bond of a common battle waged by equals. A common bond that provided a basis for discipline, a basis for the shared joy of construction, the joy of creation, and the joy of victory in battle over those who sought to destroy everything their revolution was making possible.
What a moment for the people of Cuba to announce to the world the socialist character of the revolution!
A little more than a year later, Che Guevara told the congress of the Union of Young Communists (UJC) — in a speech you can find in Pathfinder’s Che Guevara Talks to Young People — that young communists had the responsibility to be “the first in work, the first in study, the first in defense of the country.” And he congratulated them for the three words they had put on the emblem of their organization — study, work, and rifle.
These are the emblems of all Cubans, Che said, permanent emblems, not just momentary ones.
The rifle, because no progress toward the liberation of toiling humanity is secure unless the exploiting classes know we are ready to defend those gains by any means necessary. That was the truth confirmed once again at Playa Girón and soon retested and reconfirmed during the October 1962 “Missile” Crisis.
Work, often depicted by a shovel or a machete, because the transformation of nature by human labor, social labor, is not only the source of all wealth but the foundation for all culture. Without the shovel and machete, there’s nothing for the rifle to defend.
And study, depicted by a pencil, a symbol of the literacy campaign, because the capacity to read and write gives access to the cumulative conquests of millennia of human endeavor and opens the doors to workers and farmers to participate as equals in every aspect of social and political life. It makes them better able to transform production and the conditions of life and work, better able to take control of their own destiny.
The literacy campaign was central to strengthening the worker-peasant alliance on which revolutionary Cuba was founded; it was central to narrowing the gulf between toilers in city and countryside. Peasants and their families in prerevolutionary Cuba had virtually no educational opportunities. This was especially true for women in rural areas. So the literacy campaign struck a mighty blow for the emancipation of women, too.
Related articles:
Workers, youth build Cuba ‘Che brigade,’ youth festival in Russia
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