An aggressive literacy campaign – La Campaña Nacional de Alfabetización en Cuba – was a centerpiece of the Cuban revolutionary government in 1961. The outreach was successful, raising the national literacy rate to that of a developed nation. If you want to read more,
The revolutionary government called attention to the campaign through marches dramatizing literacy.
Posters celebrated the campaign.
The Cuban government remembers the campaign proudly.
A literacy campaign museum. Can you imagine that – a literacy campaign museum!
Twenty years later, the revoutionary government of Nicaragua launched a similar literacy campaign.
Directed at speakers of indigenous languages
These were campaigns that were hard to criticize. The Nicaraguan government’s literacy campaign formed the backdrop for Jane Norling’s fence mural.
My friend has quite a collection of guitars. After looking at these photos, he took out his lovely Cuban tres.
A tres has six strings – three “courses” of two strings. He tunes his in the key of D Major, with courses tuned to A, D, and F#. He was inspired by these images to sing “Cuba, Que Linda es Cuba,” a song that Pedro Baird taught us in Salinas in 1974.
His Spanish is not great, but he really put his heart into it. I half expected him to answer me in Spanish when I asked what he thought of the images here. He didn’t. He answered in English:
