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Argumentative Essay On The Cuban Revolution

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On October 11th, 1960, while denouncing the ideals of imperialism and colonialism at the United Nations General Assembly, Fidel Castro broadcasted his plan for Cuban reform, asserting education as one of his key focuses when stating “The Cuban Revolution is changing what was yesterday a land without hope, a land of poverty and illiteracy, into one of the most advanced and developed countries in this Continent.”. This speech foreshadows Castro’s upcoming campaign centralized on Cuban education. In 1959, the year Castro took power, 24% of Cubans were illiterate. Castro’s goal when creating his policies on education was boost the literacy rates in Cuba and spread his beliefs about the new Cuban culture after the revolution, a culture built …show more content…

As a result, the number of participants in the campaigns workforce increased, the main requirement needed to become a volunteer for the workforce was that participants had to have at least completed the sixth grade. The official workforce of the campaign included: 121,000 alfabetizores (volunteer teachers), 15,000 workers from the worker brigade, 35,000 professional school teachers, and 100,000 Colorado Benitez students, the literary workers were called “brigadistas”. With a growing workforce of literacy workers, there was an increasing requirement for more schools to be built. To build more schools, the Cuban government had to know which areas required more schooling. Their approach was to focus on the areas with the greatest number of illiterates and increase the amount of schools and teachers there. Illiteracy rates were greater in poorer areas of Cuba so many teachers were sent to those areas. In wealthier areas of Cuba literacy rates were around 9% whereas in the poorer areas of Cuban, illiteracy rates averaged around 31%. In the literacy campaign, problems began to rise as “the identification of illiterates was a problem because people tend to hide the fact that they cannot read or write.” With the help of mass organizations and census’, this problem was temporally solved but

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