Editor’s Note: The analysis of Fidel Castro’s speech at UBA’s Faculty of Law raises questions about Cuba’s regime and educational system. Despite functionalist and critical perspectives, Cuban education emphasizes state-guaranteed access and professional skills development. Social inequality and ideological hegemony are examined, with insights into educational reforms and the importance of projecting Argentina’s educational future.
Analyzing Cuban Education and Social Inequality: Insights from Fidel Castro’s Speech and Argentina’s Educational Future
Introduction
The analysis proposed by the Chair of Pedagogy on the selection of Fidel Castro’s speech at the Faculty of Law of the UBA leads me to inquire about the Cuban regime and educational system.
I recall that a Literature professor from the school where I work traveled to Cuba very recently, so I went to consult her about certain aspects of life on the island, which I was completely unaware of. Fortunately, she had prepared a travel diary of great utility, along with picturesque photographs she took of towns and cities, to which she added some local newspapers from Havana.
All of this gave me a general overview, from a very particular and subjective perspective. To this, I later added factual and encyclopedic data about Cuba and its society, its history, its revolution, and its charismatic leader, Fidel Castro.
Development
Let’s look for a moment at how the education system in Cuba is characterized: it had a late start in formal education systems, often teaching sciences after the compulsory stage. It can easily be deduced, then, that this science education was based on the belief that scientific knowledge should not form part of the conceptual baggage necessary to face civic life.
However, the curricula of different careers are changing as the type of professional required by society varies. This leads to the idea of understanding the Cuban educational model as a functionalist model, where the State guarantees access for all to school, with equal opportunities. Functionalism posits that there are occupational hierarchies, where the positions each person occupies in society have to do with greater or lesser complexity. This is why the school must select the most capable, through “natural selection” and differentiation. These “capabilities” are distributed by chance, a clear policy of redistribution, with respect to the places each subject occupies in a stratified society.
The functionalist model assumes balance; when the most capable is in the place that corresponds to them socially (of greater complexity). Functionalism presents a social order; the same functioning adjusts the school to the function. However, situated in the conflict paradigm, we can think of Bourdieu: who sees this process as symbolic, a process that does no more than legitimize social inequality, a topic I will discuss later.
In Fidel’s discourse, social inequality is not translucent, but it is seen on a visit to the island; an example of this is that lawyers, doctors, and architects who would like to perform the profession they chose, for economic reasons cannot do so and are generally working in relation to tourism. Others seek the opportunity to leave the island, to see the world; the requirement is that they be extremely skilled in the work they choose and how they relate (for example, those who have certain skills can leave, as is the case with athletes).
Returning to the issue at hand, the quality of the Cuban professional is closely linked to solving professional problems with efficiency and competence. Do not confuse efficiency and competence, as we see it in the framework of capitalist logic. Providing solutions efficiently means recognizing the political, economic, and social conditions and their impact on the environment as part of the problem; as well as the important factor of science and technology.
It is intended, from Cuban training, to form a series of skills in “that” professional model, which with a certain degree of variation and introduction of conditionals, can be adapted to solve a range of problems common to the different spheres of action of the same. The professional “has to have generalized skills, which they can exploit, making use of methods to identify needs, assess them, reach functional and economic solutions, for existing problems.”
The presence of educational objectives is denoted in the curricular base, where reference is made to the general skills to be achieved in the subject, as well as the transcendental values that a professional must possess: creative, with economic conscience, watchful and bearer of the ethics of their profession.
Another aspect of importance, discipline, which for Cuban educators, plays an integrating role, responsible for forming most of the professional skills of the future graduate.
In education, many have been the efforts to create and promote programs, projects and actions that involve innovations and changes in different dimensions, such as management, content, materials, which in one way or another tended to respond to the challenge of quality/equity.
Many of them, however, have forgotten that improving the quality of education involves profound changes in pedagogical processes in the classroom, and therefore, in the training of teachers and in the ways in which they face the development of their work in the educational center.
The conception of teaching and learning has undergone significant changes in Cuba, with important consequences on how to understand how students learn and therefore how to teach.
Thus, the role of the Cuban teacher, which until recently was reduced, in most cases, to teaching classes, had to be replaced by the conception that the work of the current teaching model implies, associated with tasks of innovation and research.
Similarly, the traditional tasks of teachers have diversified, as increasingly teachers must pay attention to children, adolescents and young people with very different histories, trajectories, situations, abilities and expectations.
Today, the avant-garde Cuban pedagogical models conceive a design of the different programs, based on a pedagogical model that takes into consideration the improvement of the objectives and the system of professional skills, based on the precision of the “Modes of Action” with their essential logic, taking as a starting point the professional problems, the gnoseological, psychological and didactic characterization. With all this, they aspire to minimize the insufficient integration of the practical professional skills of future graduates to perform tasks specific to the profession.
In the enumeration of the skill system, the close relationship that exists between the elaboration of the objectives and these should be appreciated; so it can be deduced that if the objectives are elaborated as a series of actions, without specifying the aspirations that are desired at this level, lacking an integrating approach and do not express the general skills to be achieved in the subject, then the proposed skill system will not be effective either to contribute to the reaffirmation of the ways of acting.
Unfortunately, from our experience, we know that the discourse of order, represented by functionalism, consolidates and legitimizes hegemonic thought, over the rest of society, regardless of the ideological origin to which this hegemony responds and social inequality is reproduced. We can state that the paradigm of order conceives society as a harmonious system, where individuals participate in a common system of values and norms, which generate collective interests.
This appears deeply marked in Fidel Castro’s discourse, where his hegemony constitutes a whole body of practices and expectations in relation to the integrity of life in Cuba: the senses of its people, the capacity for discernment of its population, the defined perceptions they have of themselves and our world, are overwhelmed, with no room for self-criticism. It is in this sense that the regime becomes contradictory and ambiguous with the discourse.
We are facing a society that thinks about the world, life, men and their relationships in a particular way, saturated with symbolism. A way that conditions social practice and shapes the common sense of Cuban inhabitants.
There is a stark difference with radical critical theorists, who start from a conception of society divided into antagonistic classes: society is a conflictive whole in whose bosom social classes oppose each other, and this implies a relationship between classes. They characterize the school as ideological apparatuses of the State at the service of social, economic and cultural reproduction, exercising control over individual mobility, limited to members of the working and oppressed class. For Marxism, the State is an apparatus of control, a tool of domination, which, found with interests, will produce policies according to its dominant sectors. Consequently, class relations are power relations.
In contrast, the critical position of resistance considers subjects as products and producers of history. It provides the possibility of resisting the logic of domination, providing knowledge and social skills for transformative action. And through this transformative action achieve a democratic and just society.
Critical pedagogy proposes that individuals be in a position to investigate their reality and social circumstances, favoring self-critical reflection. It finds in social structures the explanation of the oppressive forms that classroom practices adopt. This approach starts from questioning the way of seeing and ordering reality. It problematizes and denaturalizes what we accept as normal, everyday, what is lived as evident, that is, reflection on our categories of thought.
In this sense, I can affirm that all the language used by Fidel in his speech in front of the University of Law, observes a direct relationship with the power he exercises, when he refers to his people. Language plays an important role since it introduces a certain type of social relationship. Therefore, language cannot be thought of in isolation from power. All discourses are carriers of power, but certain discourses dominate over others, and constitute the basis of what members of a society accept as true or false, legitimate or illegitimate.
It is very clear, then, how power builds hegemony through discourse. In a second reading, we can agree with Freire when he speaks of domination as the way in which the oppressed incorporate their own oppression. Many Cubans feel proud to have such a charismatic leader; the daily speeches, which are heard on TV and radio, or from Congress, are creating in them a form of thought, of order of reality, and these messages gradually, are incorporated as positive factors in their social practices.
Power, technology, and ideology come together, in this system, to produce goods and cultural forms that appear as vital needs for one’s own subsistence. Domination is internalized and experienced subjectively through internalization. Social practices are engendered in objective structures and through the production and reproduction of the same, they are internalized in a certain way. Each subjective structure is at the same time, generator of social practices and these in turn, give shape to new objective structures, in a dialectical movement.
But we can ask ourselves a question. If educating is imposing, if educating is dominating social classes, if through the functionalist current of the beginning of the century, ideological imposition is favored. Is there room for an alternative? In fact, there is, the alternative is defined as it is different from the dominant. If the dominant agrees with the existing order, the alternative is characterized by providing mechanisms of rupture, of discontinuity with that order.
It is in the minds and hearts of all Cubans, especially the youngest, the hope that a change in the regime will occur (Fidel’s death?). and with this, reach the possibility of opening up to the world, and getting to know it. But this message cannot, nor could it come to light, in public demonstrations, nor in the mass media, given that freedom of expression does not exist; in fact, journalism and its opinion are totally immersed in hegemonic domain; an example of this are the newspapers, Gramma, from the city of Havana, January 18, 19 and 20, 2001, where Fidel calls for a massive march against the Murderous Law. March that achieves full adherence of his people. We note that any type of reaction against the regime could end up drowned in blood.
After having analyzed, and theoretically substantiated the principles that govern Cuban education; after having received Fidel Castro’s message in Argentina, there is room for reflection, Cuba is not Fidel!, Cuba is more than Fidel!. Cuba does not end with Fidel’s life, and Fidel is just a man, who has taken his ideals and convictions to the limit, but… Why so many graduates at secondary and university level? The answer is simple: in addition to the education system being strictly compulsory, young people dedicate all their time to study and work, since they are not contaminated by globalization, there are no distractions, and in some opportunities, it is the only means of leaving the Island.
Also I think, What did he want to tell us with his message? What is he talking about when he proposes a better world to us? Who are we and what is our history? What education do we want for our country? What “better world is possible” for today’s Argentina?
Projecting means throwing, launching, dismissing, casting forward or far away. It implies planning, preparing, sketching, programming. It requires building the future in the sense of foreseeing it and wanting it to be one and not another.
This construction is built at the intersection between the past and the present, as well as in the framework of the real, the desired and the desirable. For this, it is necessary to rescue the images of the past and articulate them with the present; specify where we are and where what is proposed leads us. Consequently, it includes the description of the main lines and dimensions of analysis, as well as the components and processes involved.
From this perspective, the question is: How is Argentine education projected towards the future?, a question that induces us to a propositive and directional reflection, to the search for new alternatives.
Projecting education towards the future supposes, in the first instance, visualizing it, not as an abstract fact, but as a concrete social practice. For which it is necessary to demystify the social practices that have existed and exist in the dominant models of cultural policy and educational policy, especially in the criteria of schooling and teacher training.
In the second instance, it is necessary to review the assumptions and historical meanings of our educational process. Probably one of the most complex analysis processes consists of isolating the defining milestones of national pedagogical thought and our educational and teaching identity, identifying ideological tendencies, worldviews and positions, to then understand the repercussions they have actually had on educational systems.
Of course, the question must consist not only in knowing how to describe, analyze and value the past, to know it, or extrapolate it to the present. The past has left its mark, there is no total break with it, it is a condition, at least explanatory of the present and implicitly or explicitly conditions the future.
In the third instance, the relationships between culture, politics and pedagogy will have to be remade, the latter understood as a political and moral practice and not as a technique.
It is worth remembering what Giroux H. (1999) points out: “The basis for such a project is the assumption that Pedagogy is the result of various struggles and not simply an a priori discourse that must first be discovered and then mastered only as if it were a set of recipes to be executed… In this project Pedagogy becomes a form of social practice that arises from certain historical conditions, social contexts and cultural relations”.
Rooted in an ethical and political vision that seeks to take students beyond the world they already know, critical Pedagogy is concerned with the production of knowledge, values and social relations that help to adopt the necessary tasks to achieve critical citizenship and be able to negotiate and participate in the broader structures of power that shape public life”
In the fourth instance, it is required to propose alternatives, strategic visions of the future, that announce and enunciate the changes. This dynamic is undoubtedly risky, as is all anticipation, all prediction.
Giroux resorts to Max Weber’s concept of “exemplary prophecy”, to highlight the need for strategies of commitment and transformation, which must accompany criticism, “narrating the strategies of commitment and transformation”. Prophecies, for Weber, provide a coherent vision of the world, a kind of conscious attitude, of unitary sense, full in the face of life.
In the last instance, the project must be visible, all those involved must participate in it, teachers and students must intervene and act propositively, open to speculation and self-criticism.
Conclusion
Although this document aims to go beyond a mere analysis of the topics proposed by the chair, it seeks to elevate thought a little more, and try to incur in some axes of a possible project, why not? I’m going to try it, without making an inventory of concepts “as a magic recipe”, which could become an exercise not only useless, but also inconvenient, if in fact I bet on a participative projection and consensus. It seems appropriate then, to contribute by providing the debate with data and probable areas, but with the strong conviction that it is the educational community as a whole that has to participate, decide and commit.
The scenario of the late 20th century called into question the promise of modernity in relation to education. The 19th century certainty about education as the engine of progress; the optimism according to which scientific rationality and reason can be combined to provide a more just and better society, are the subject of debate. The juncture in which educational systems and universal schooling emerged as support for the modern State is critically analyzed, faced with the diminishing role of the State in education, which is being replaced by the market.
There is a climate of frustration with the irrelevance and unsatisfactory results of both national and international educational policies, framed in neoliberalism. Likewise, a strong contradiction is perceived, since on the one hand in all speeches the urgency of more and better education in knowledge societies is mentioned, and on the other hand, there is evidence of a decrease in hope about its real possibilities.
Yarzabal (1999) points out: “The millennium closes under the sign of insecurity, both for people and for the countries of the region. Insecurity that comes from the weaknesses of the rule of law, which fails to guarantee basic sustenance, education and health to the poor, nor equal opportunities. Widespread insecurity of populations in the face of justice systems that do not ensure that violators of the law are punished. Insecurity in the face of the ups and downs of speculative financial markets that in an instant can collapse the efforts of decades of millions of workers and in the face of the military power of a nation that is trying to consolidate its world hegemony through the globalization of capitalism”
Citations:
1.“Cuban Education System.” University of Havana, University of Havana. Accessed July 2024.
2.Kavaliauskienë, Galina, and Violeta Januleviènë. “Using the Lexical Approach for the Acquisition of ESP Vocabulary.” University of Lithuania. Accessed July 2024.
3. Lewis, Michael. The Lexical Approach: The State of ELT and a Way Forward. Boston: Heinle Cengage Learning, 1993.
4. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2000.
