Learning from Cuba

According to the April 8, 2019 edition of The Nation, U.S. college students who graduated in 2017 averaged $28,700 in student loan debt. According to this podcast, Cuban college students averaged 0. But that’s just the beginning of what we can learn from Cuba! Episode features highlights of my conversation with Yanna Cruzata Quintero, a sidebar on the jaw-dropping Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961, and lots of good music.

Next to this trail map near Trinidad, stocks once used for enslaved persons have been preserved. Cubans own their history in ways North Americans may find surprising.

Supplementary Materials

To me, one of the inherent triumphs of the Literacy Campaign of 1961 is providing an important means for 100,000 kids to understand themselves as citizens with something to contribute. Because most of us are not ready to organize a program to teach 700,000 people to read in less than a year, here are some smaller steps to take with kids in school.

A hero of mine long before I knew he wrote a book on exactly what came to captivate me during my recent trip to Cuba, Jonathan Kozol discusses Children of the Revolution: A Yankee Teacher in the Cuban Schools with the legendary Studs Terkel in 1978.