ABSTRACT
My personal experiences of the Cuban educational system, and as a recipient
of the Soviet educational aid programme, were formed in part by the official
policies implemented in those contexts. Research on education in both contexts
has largely overlooked the personal recollections of the people involved in
those processes, perhaps due to the political nature of this study. For example,
interpretations and analyses of the Cuban education system have tended to be
highly polarised. On one extreme, Alarcon’s brief historical evaluation of
*Email: Euridice.Charon-Cardona@newcastle.edu.au
Cuba’s educational achievements exemplifies an uncritically supportive outlook (Alarco´n de Quesada 2011). At the other extreme we could cite the Report to the President, elaborated by the US Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, which grossly underestimated the internationally recognised achievements of the Cuban education system (Johnstone 2008). In both cases, the narrow analysis of Cuba’s educational policies, their implementation and the system’s statistical outcomes overlook the people behind the system: educators, students and their parents. Having been educated in the socialist system from the early 1970s until the collapse of the Soviet Union, my perspective is that this was not just about statistical achievements and the political drilling of young students’ minds. It was also about hope for the future at the beginning, and an individual unwritten negotiation with the educational state policies and objectives at its later stage.
