Literacy: What the United States Can Learn from Cuba

2016 marks the 55th anniversary of Cuba’s historic campaign to end illiteracy, which began soon after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution. It was among the most successful literacy campaigns in the world and is memorialized in the Cuban National Literacy Museum. The museum was just one of the many stops on the educational tour of the country taken by students and families from the Maryland International Day School in Fort Washington, Maryland where the MIDS students would attend school with Cuban children. 

Museum director and pedagogy professor Luisa Yara Campos led our group through museum photos, letters, and other artifacts detailing the story of how Fidel Castro announced the country’s literacy efforts in his 1960 speech at the United Nations in New York City. She added an interesting sidebar about how Castro’s delegation was refused accommodations in downtown Manhattan, but was invited to stay at the historic Hotel Theresa in Harlem.

Campos told us of the more than 150,000 professional teachers and factory workers as well as 100,000 student volunteers that fanned out through the Cuban countryside to live and work amongst farming families under harsh conditions while teaching them to read and write in the evenings.

Most of the student volunteers (brigadistas) were teenaged girls who had spent little time away from home. In the patriarchal Cuba of the ‘60s, it was difficult for them to convince parents and other family members to allow them to join the campaign. The killing of several campaign workers and the United States’ Bay of Pigs invasion made things even more difficult, yet the girls and the literacy campaign pressed on, with many of the brigadistas not wanting to return home if it meant leaving their campesino families behind.

The campaign was of such importance to the Cuban government that the school year for all Cuban children was suspended in early 1961, starting up again in January 1962 after the campaign was declared successful.

closing march of cuba's Literacy campaign, December 22, 1961. PhotO: Liborio noval

Our group was lucky enough to meet with Griselda Aguilar, the youngest brigadista of the campaign who insisted on leaving home at 7 years old to teach 58-year old Carlos Perez to read and write. The experience had a profound effect on her life and teaching math became her life’s work. A few of the campaigners’ stories were captured in a moving film entitled Maestra, directed by Literacy Project founder Katherine Murphy, detailing some of the herculean efforts by the literacy campaigners that moved the literacy rate up 20 points - from less than 77 percent to nearly 97 percent - in a single year. UNESCO's Institute of Statistics reports that Cuba's adult literacy rate was 99.7 percent as of 2015.

Getting an accurate account of the literacy rate in the United States, however, is a bit trickier. The U.S. does not participate in UNESCO's annual literacy study. But the latest statistics from the U.S. Department of Education (compiled from 2003 data) state that only 86 percent of adults nationwide are able to read at a basic level. That percentage dives even lower when you look at individual cities, with literacy rates in the District only at or near 50 percent in wards 5, 7 and 8.

Perhaps the United States could use some help from Cuba in creating its own literacy revolution.