Education, Training and Salaries

‘To be educated is to be free’ — the words of Cuba’s hero of national independence, José Martí, were echoed as a battle cry in the struggle against dictatorship in 1950s Cuba. The Revolutionary Proclamation of the 26 July Movement (M26J) declared: ‘We believe that true democracy can be attained only with citizens who are free, equal, educated, and have dignifi ed and productive jobs.’ The Proclamation was intended to coincide with both the urban uprising in Santiago de Cuba and the arrival of the Granma boat carrying the nascent Rebel Army in November 1956. It was to announce the formation of a revolutionary government, headed by Fidel Castro, whose education policy promised literacy campaigns, adult education, subsidised libraries, museums and laboratories for scientifi c research, theatres, fi lms, music, dance and print shops.1 Che Guevara shared the view that education was part of the armoury of revolution and that educating the poor was a precondition for winning the struggle against imperialist domination, preparing them to seize power themselves. For Guevara, education was synonymous with culture — the assimilation of knowledge from art to science — and culture was to be part of what distinguished the ‘new man’ of socialism/communism from the proletariat under capitalism who, in Marx’s words: ‘live only so long as they fi nd work, and who fi nd work only so long as their labour increases capital’.2 Education was a constant and dynamic process in which the revolutionary had to engage daily as a means of self-improvement and, through that, social development.