ABSTRACT
The potential to promote self-sufficiency via educational migration is particularly significant in the Sahrawi context given infrastructural limitations in the Algerian-based refugee camps and the camps’ dependence upon externally provided humanitarian and political aid. In effect, many Polisario representatives and SADR diplomats around the world, as well as camp-based SADR ministers, were educated in Cuba; so too were those former students who have taken on roles of great responsibility in administering the Sahrawi refugee camps and attending to prominent Spanish-speaking politicians, journalists and activists during their visits to the camps. However, although it is now widely recognised that ‘refugees often see the education of their children as a principal way of ensuring a better future’ (Dryden-Peterson 2003: 1 – see Chapters 1 and 2), the means for providing such an education, and views of what precisely would amount to a ‘better future’, are less consistently expressed by the different actors involved in planning for and delivering schooling to refugee children around the world. While both Cuba and the Polisario Front have endorsed the Cuban educational migration programme as a means of promoting Sahrawi self-sufficiency and ‘preserving the group’s cultural, linguistic, and historical traditions’ (to quote Water and Leblanc 2005: 138), this chapter explores the multifaceted impacts and implications of the Cuban educational migration programme from the perspective of interviewees in the Sahrawi refugee camps themselves.
