ABSTRACT
The performance of the Cuban educational system offers valuable insight into the objectives, achievements, and difficulties of three decades of socialist development. While a paucity of scholarship on Cuban education after the 1970s justifies an examination of recent policies and outcomes, it is the widespread speculation about Cuba’s future in the dramatically altered international context of the 1990s that recommends why and where insight is indeed needed. The educational policies of the Cuban revolution increased women’s access to education in important ways. Women elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean made gains, too, as global trends between 1950 and 1980 included a marked regional movement toward gender equality in enrollments. Centralized state control of education characterizes the goals and structure of the system of formal education created in post-revolutionary Cuba. The period of reform in Cuba offers a different vantage for assessing education’s role in the transformation of gendered inequality.
