My Brigadista Year

Fidel, Fidel,

We’ll always do our duty.

We did it, we did it, we did it!

We triumphed, we triumphed, we triumphed!

Cuba told the world we would

And we accomplished it.

My brigadista year was the year that changed my life. This was true not only for me but, I daresay, for all of us who left our safe, loving homes to become brigadistas for literacy. I learned what I could be and do. I was no longer an isolated, spoiled little girl of the city. I was a member of a campesino family who loved me and taught me more than I could ever teach them.

I think it is best summed up in the words of a friend and fellow brigadista who said, “I taught the campesinos how to read and write, and they taught me how to be a person.”

As I had dreamed that day of José’s birth, I became, in time, a doctor. My husband, who had also been a brigadista, is a professor of Latin American literature, and he has always supported my ambitions and my career. He learned in 1961 not to underestimate us girls. We have three lovely children, all grown now, and are looking forward to grandchildren.

I try to go back every year to see the Santanas. Within two years, the government built a school on Luis’s old tobacco patch and the children had their own maestro. Rafael graduated from the Agricultural University in Havana and went home to help his father and other campesinos be more productive farmers. Emilia became an engineer, and little Isabel is a mathematics professor, if you can believe it. Luis and Veronica completed the educational program that the government established to follow up on the campaign of 1961. The only thing they ever want me to bring them from Havana is a new book.

And little José, you ask, what became of him? He taught for a while in Santiago de Cuba, but after the old folks died, and as his parents were aging, he brought his family back to the mountains. He is the local maestro in the school on the Santanas’ land, and Rafael Santana is his best friend.

Are you wondering why, after all these years, I wanted to share my diary of what happened to me in 1961? It was not to prove to you that my country is perfect. Not all the promises of the revolution have been fulfilled. We have yet to embody the ideal of liberty that José Martí dreamed of.

My country is not perfect, but, then, is yours? Perhaps, however, someone reading my story will better understand both me and the country I love. No, we are not perfect, but we do have a literate, educated population. We do have doctors.

There are not so many doctors in West Africa, and as I write this, many of those amazing doctors and nurses are dying as they care for victims of the dreaded Ebola virus.

Once again my government has called for volunteers — not to teach this time, but to heal. Even though I have never become a hero, do you understand why I choose to go?

When my friend Mary Leahy heard that I was planning a second trip to Cuba, she told me how envious she was. Her brother, Senator Patrick Leahy, had been there several times, seeking to mend relations between our two countries, but she herself had never been. Mary had a special re

ason for wanting to go. For many years she had been the director of Central Vermont Adult Basic Education. Early in her experience with CVABE, Mary told me, she had learned of the amazingly successful 1961 literacy campaign that turned Cuba into an illiteracy-free country. Although Mary was in Vermont, and not in revolutionary Cuba, she tried in a number of ways to incorporate ideas from the Cuban model, including enlisting volunteer teachers with the humility to know that they would be learning alongside their students.

Mary’s words sent me on a quest to learn about the campaign in which volunteers who could read and write went into the factories and countryside to teach their fellow Cubans what they knew. Although the statistics vary from source to source, it is clear that more than 250,000 Cubans volunteered, and more than half of these were women and girls, who up until this time had lived quite limited, sheltered lives. Of the volunteer force, more than 100,000 were between the ages of ten and nineteen. The youngest volunteer was actually a seven-year-old girl who was assigned to teach an elderly neighbor. The oldest student was a woman who was 106 years old.

The campaign was announced by Fidel Castro in a speech he made at the United Nations in 1960. It was officially opened on January 28, 1961, and concluded on December 22 of that year. During that time, more than 700,000 Cubans learned to read and write. Representatives from the United Nations, who came to Cuba to consult with the educational leadership and observe the carrying out of the campaign, declared, at the end of 1961, that Cuba had achieved “universal literacy.”

One of the most inspiring resources I encountered in my quest was the 2012 documentary Maestra, produced and directed by Catherine Murphy, which tells about the campaign through the stories of women who were Conrado Benítez Brigadistas as teenagers. All the women Murphy interviewed, now accomplished professionals in various fields, look back on the campaign of 1961 as the defining event of their lives. The companion book to the film, A Year Without Sundays, is a gold mine of detailed information, including quotations from many of the participants, the makeup of the campaign brigades, and even the words of the songs they sang. Many of the stories from the film and the book served as inspiration for Lora’s story.

Another source upon which this book is dependent is Jonathan Kozol’s Children of the Revolution: A Yankee Teacher in the Cuban Schools (New York: Delacorte, 1978). Kozol’s book gives many valuable details of the campaign, including contents from the teacher and student books used and the tests given, even a sample letter to Fidel Castro — a wealth of material. I am particularly grateful to these three sources, but I am responsible for any factual errors in my book, including my attempts at Spanish translation.

In addition to the sources mentioned above, I owe a debt to Mark Abendroth’s Rebel Literacy: Cuba’s National Literacy Campaign and Critical Global Citizenship (Duluth, MN: Litwin, 2009). I am also grateful to Ann E. Halbert-Brooks for posting her 2013 master’s thesis from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “Revolutionary Teachers: Women and Gender in the Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961.” I also gleaned much help from the Internet concerning Cuban history, geography, agriculture, flora, and fauna.

Thanks are also due to Leda Schubert, who, seeing my enthusiasm for the story, told me I should write about the campaign, and to Karen Lotz at Candlewick, who felt it was a story that young people in my own country would enjoy knowing. She is, as always, a gracious and perceptive editor. My friend Nancy Graff and my agent, Allison Cohen, read early drafts and gave me valuable suggestions and cheered me on. I hope they know how much I appreciate their help during those crucial stages. Also many thanks to my “special assistant,” Aidan Sammis, who researched the time line, read the manuscript for all those typos and grammatical errors I seem to miss, and was the kind of help every disorganized writer wishes for and few have. And special thanks to Hannah Mahoney, for her thoughtful and careful copyediting of dates and facts, and the suggestions from both Karen and Hannah that were invaluable help in the final shaping of the story. I additionally would like to thank designers Sherry Fatla and Matt Roeser; talented mapmaker Mike Reagan; and jacket artist Rafael López, for his stunning illustration.

And, finally, thanks to the real-life Emilia and Isabel, who are two of the many reasons I have fallen in love with Cuba and the Cuban people.

My Brigadista Year is by no means intended to be a full or balanced account of all events occurring in Cuba in the year 1961. Fidel Castro committed many evils against his enemies, some of whom originally fought on his side for freedom from Batista but felt betrayed by actions of the new government when small farms were seized and innocent families relocated or put in camps. From 1959 until his death, Castro presided over a repressive regime, jailing and executing political opponents and sometimes even those considered allies, and denying ordinary Cuban citizens freedoms we Americans take for granted. These freedoms include freedom of expression — widespread censorship, book banning, and even Bible burning have occurred in Cuba since Castro first assumed power. And the literacy campaign was not entirely staffed by idealistic volunteers like Lora. I understand that some families felt the pressure of potential reprisal for non-cooperation, and therefore, some young people might well have felt forced to join the campaign. As the year went on and the goal remained distant, schools were closed and teachers were also conscripted.

Yet it is true that Castro had a vision that basic literacy was important for a functioning society and for every Cuban citizen. Moreover, for decades Cubans have received universal free education and health care. It was an adventure for me as a writer to see the world through the eyes of a young person in a society quite different from my own. Through Lora’s eyes, the revolution was a new day for her family and for a country that had long suffered under the corrupt dictatorship of Batista. She was excited to be a part of that new day, and as I wrote about her, so was I.

Prehistory: According to archaeological remains, human habitation on the island now known as Cuba dates back to about 4000 BCE. The oldest known archaeological sites are the caves and rock shelters that were home to a people known as the Guanajatabey, who were hunter-gatherers, used stone tools, and made pictographs. Much later, by about 800 CE, they were also known to make pottery, probably as a result of interaction with other Caribbean peoples.

Probably around 400 BCE, the Arawak people began to spread out from Venezuela into the Caribbean. Among them were the Taíno, who arrived in Cuba around 300 CE. The Taíno brought agriculture with them and built villages centered around plazas, where ceremonies, festivals, and games were held. They grew cassava, which they ground into flour for bread, as well as cotton, tobacco, corn, and sweet potatoes. As Robert M. Poole has said, “If you have ever paddled a canoe, napped in a hammock, savored a barbecue, smoked tobacco or tracked a hurricane across Cuba, you have paid tribute to the Taíno” (Smithsonian, October 2011).

1492: Christopher Columbus claims Cuba for Spain.

1511: First Spanish settlements begin under the governorship of Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar. They are met by resistance from the indigenous Taíno leaders and people.