Julie Lamin revisits the Cuban National Literacy Campaign of 1961 at the National Literacy Museum, Havana, Cuba.
‘It is the most important thing I have ever done in my life,’ said Marta, now in her sixties, describing her role as a volunteer literacy teacher in Castro’s 1961 crusade to take a million Cubans to functional literacy.
Following the 1959 revolutionary victory which ousted the dictator Batista and freed Cuba from United States control, Fidel Castro asked for volunteers to teach literacy skills to over one million illiterate land and factory workers. 100,000 young people, half of them teenage girls, stepped forward to enrol. For girls like Marta, who was fourteen at the time, this huge adventure required the permission of reluctant parents, wary of letting their daughters travel to the countryside of the distant Eastern provinces from the relative safety of Havana. Once permission was secured, they were soon engaged as literacy teachers.
