Cuba's Forgotten Decade by Emily J. Kirk Anna Clayfield Isabel Story & Anna Clayfield & Isabel Story

Author:Emily J. Kirk,Anna Clayfield,Isabel Story & Anna Clayfield & Isabel Story
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781498568746
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2018-07-05T13:52:52+00:00

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Chapter 9

The “Three Ps” (Perfecting, Professionalization, and Pragmatism) and their Limitations for Understanding Cuban Education in the 1970s

Rosi Smith

In spring 2000, a documentary video was shown to Cuban students in the tenth grade of high school. The video told of a crisis—a growing teacher shortage that amounted to a national educational emergency. It called upon the watching teenagers to step up, fill the vacant teaching posts and ensure that the country could maintain its hard-won commitment to universal education. The following September, emergency/emergent teachers, know as maestros emergentes, in elementary as well as general comprehensive teachers, known as profesores generales integrales (PGI) in junior high,1 represented the first of thousands of young people that took up their places at the front of Cuban classrooms. In many cases, they were only a couple of years older than their pupils. It was a bold project, and a controversial one, but not as novel in Cuba as it might have been elsewhere. They had seen this before.

The Revolution’s use of children and teenagers as teachers in literacy brigades during the 1961 Year of Education is well-documented and largely celebrated. There are parallels between the two epochs: both are viewed in periodizations of the Cuban Revolution as phases of radical idealism in policy, as opposed to institutionalized pragmatism; both used massive mobilizations of young people to address crises; and both had the additional aim of integrating into the revolutionary process young people who had spent their childhoods exposed to capitalist behaviors.

Less well-known, but more directly comparable to the experience in the 2000s, are the Manuel Ascunce Domenach Detachments (Destacamentos Manuel Ascunce Domenach). Named for a martyr of the Literacy Campaign and known commonly as the destacamentos, they were detachments of thousands of young teachers who taught in Cuban junior high schools 132throughout the 1970s. As in the 2000s, it was a speedily implemented response to a severe deficit of teachers. Tenth graders received the call in Fidel Castro’s closing speech of the Second Young Communist League (Unión de Jóvenes Comunistas) (UJC) Congress in April of 1972, and at the start of the 1972–1973 academic year the new teachers were already in place. The call for participants was ambitious. With the total number of students in tenth grade at this time standing at around 20,000, Fidel Castro’s call for 2,000 volunteers for the first year of the program meant that ten percent of those graduating from junior high would go directly into teaching, with more than double that figure expected to sign up in subsequent years (Castro Ruz 1972).

While hastily organized mass mobilizations in response to immediate crises may have been seen as characteristic of the 1960s and the 2000s, most accounts of the 1970s tell a very different story. Most useful periodizations of Cuban history since 1959, such as Antoni Kapcia’s recognition of “a series of defined and usually agreed phases” (Kapcia 2008) and Helen Yaffe’s “Guevarista pendulum” (Yaffe 2009), note recurrent shifts in policy and discourse in terms of the balance between moral

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