Anita's Revolution
From the Desk of Tamara Hansen
A fascinating, heart-warming novelization of how more than one million Cuban illiterates were taught to read and write in a seven-month campaign so that they could take part in the liberation of their country from dictator Batista and his thugs. When the call went out, more than one hundred thousand teenagers volunteered. Some were killed by counter-revolutionaries. This novel pays tribute to youthful enthusiasm and victory over adversity.
Victoria, Canada, Author Shirley Langer recounts her inspiration for Anita’s Revolution
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By Shirley Langer
July 18, 2012 ISBN: 9780981253817 |
Imagine you are the leader of a small, poor Caribbean country. You want to make a lot of changes, especially broad social changes. The country needs to educate the uneducated, provide public health to all, make workplace and land reforms and generally improve the standard of living — especially for the peasants who have been ignored by society and successive governments for hundreds of years.
But how can such big changes be achieved when a million adults, almost a quarter of the population of the country, are completely illiterate. This is the situation that Cuba faced when the revolutionary government, led by Fidel Castro, took over in 1959. Teaching those illiterate people to read and write, so they could participate in the changes, and the benefits from them, was fundamental, but how to do it?
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| Author Shirley Langer. |
I lived and worked in Cuba almost five years during the mid-sixties, a few years after Cuba’s National Literacy Campaign had accomplished its initial goal of basic literacy. Everywhere I went, I saw classes taking place ― in the lobbies of hotels, in workplace cafeterias, in apartment building vestibules — even in the open air of parks. Adults who had achieved basic literacy in 1961 were studying throughout the years I was there to achieve elementary and secondary school levels.
