Rebel Literacy: Cuba’s National Literacy Campaign and Critical Global Citizenship (review)

On my last trip to Cuba to attend a conference and visit family members in 2003, my conversations with academics, former freedom fighters, and young entrepreneurs were markedly different from each other. The academics and former guerillas spoke approvingly of the revolution and what it had accomplished, remarking on the U.S. blockade, the nation’s economy, and the need for economic reforms. The entrepreneurs just wanted out. One fellow, waving a thick wad of U.S. dollar bills in his hand, stated that those dollars represented the power of America and that was power he wanted and a place he wanted to be. Most of the other Cubans I met loved Cuba and were proud of their country and what it had accomplished in the shadow of the United States. Many were poor by U.S. standards, but they had homes, jobs, food, universal healthcare, and just about the best educational system in Latin America and the Caribbean. Music was heard everywhere, school children appeared happy, attentive, and well behaved, and street markets were filled with booksellers and buyers. Nonetheless, many of my conversations with Cubans began with their lament, “If not for the blockade. . . .”

Mark Abendroth’s Rebel Literacy: Cuba’s National Literacy Campaign and Critical Global Citizenship, with a foreword by Peter McLaren, does not seek a solution to Cuba’s current economic woes beyond ending the U.S. blockade, but he does have great praise for a major challenge the island nation faced after the revolution, and for the children and young adults who met that challenge. Beginning January 5, 1961, and concluding December 22, 1961, hundreds of thousands of literacy volunteers, one as young as 8, moved into the homes of hundreds of thousands of illiterate campesinos and taught them to read and write. The young teachers worked in the fields with their host families during the day to share in and better understand their lives, and then taught their students to read and write by lantern light at night. At the end of the campaign, a “Rally of Pencils,” an event to commemorate the successful completion of the campaign, took place outside Cuba’s National Library in the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana de Cuba. Two months later, Cuba initiated the Seguimiento or follow-up literacy program, the “Battle for the Sixth Grade,” to continue to improve the literacy of its adult population. This program resulted in 500,000 adults reaching sixth grade literacy by 1973.

Abendroth, an assistant professor of social studies literacy at SUNY Empire State College, examines Cuba’s 1961 Literacy Campaign and the critical global citizenship they developed in addressing an illiteracy rate of 23.6%. Clearly written and well laid out, at a slim but effective 148 pages, Rebel Literacy is a solid primer on the history of Cuba’s struggles for independence, against slavery, and against U.S. neo-colonialism. Moreover, as an analysis of the importance of education and critical thinking, Rebel Literacy would work well in both upper-level high school and lower level college courses. Abendroth competently outlines Cuba’s history, its major historical actors and heroes, and the challenges the nation faced on the eve of its revolution in an effort to better help the reader understand why the Literacy Campaign was so important to Cuba’s future and national sovereignty.

Abendroth begins his study by discussing three themes central to critical global citizenship: the civic engagement of the youth; popular education for the masses; and critical global education. Critical global citizenship, according to Abendroth, is the development of a global consciousness of the world’s challenges followed by the mobilization of people to directly address those challenges. Since the revolution, Cubans have organized many of their social programs according to these principles. Fifteen nations have adopted Cuba’s literacy program for their own nations, and Cuban doctors, health professionals, and teachers are regularly sent to developing nations; Cubans have...