 Hi everyone, welcome to what the F is going on in Latin America. This is Code Pink's weekly webinar of 20 minutes of hot news out of Latin America and the Caribbean. We broadcast live on Facebook every Wednesday, 9 a.m. Pacific, 12 p.m. Eastern. Today we have a really fascinating guest and conversation for you. Our guest is Catherine Murphy. Some of you watching. Hi Catherine. Catherine is a good friend, a fantastic independent filmmaker and a fellow Latin American activist. Some of you may know her and her film Maestra. We are really fortunate to have Catherine join us today from California. We want to discuss the Cuba literacy program today, particularly on the heels of Bernie Sanders comment last week in support of Cuba eradicating illiteracy and the pushback that he got in mainstream U.S. media and among various presidential candidates for making that remark. So here we are, Catherine. I'm so thankful that you were able to join us. I know you've been traveling and you had to reschedule a few appointments, but the timing of this conversation is so crucial and you're a fantastic person to discuss this issue with us. So maybe you could tell our guests a little bit about yourself, your own relationship with Cuba and your film project Maestra, and then let's go into the successes of the program and how it's expanded. Yeah, good morning Terry and thanks a lot for having me. I definitely feel part of the Code Pink family and I'm really glad to be talking about the Cuban literacy campaign this morning with you all and the folks out there in the various networks that are zooming in or Facebook live again or whatever. So I am talking to you now from Northern California kind of near the university campus where I grew up where my mom was in school and one of the ways that my mom was able to go to school when I was, you know, my sister and I were really little was that my great aunt would be home every day when you know we'd walk home from school and the person would be at our house as my great aunt, my dad's aunt, my grandma's sister. So and that's related to all of this because she grew up in Cuba and she, my grandmother, my great aunt were daughters of a community of North Americans who lived in the middle of the island in Cuba that in the early years of well right after the Spanish-American War and several years of U.S. occupation of Cuba and what they call the birth of the Republic began a period from 1902 to 1959 in which politics and the economy of Cuba were largely dominated by corporations and people from the United States and there was a huge tsunami of U.S. you know Cuba fought really really hard long and hard to kick out the Spaniards and then the U.S. basically usurped their independence and there was a tsunami of U.S. citizens and corporations that went to Cuba and my great grandparents were part of that. So I was sort of raised on these stories about Cuba but Cuba from back then and so I just had anyway it was deep in my consciousness and so when I started as a young person to learn about what the Cuban Revolution was really all about I got really interested in went there in 92 and did part of my studies I was sort of interested in my own family history and then that larger history U.S.-Cuba relations and also the once I got there really I became more interested in the social development model that started in 1959 in Cuba and certainly the literacy campaign was a huge piece of that. So I spent the decade of the 90s there and did a degree there at the University of Havana and then you know as I was I was studying the urban farming sector I was looking at the Cuban sort of the Cuban model social development model as you know so many things they've done so differently and in spite of being having very scarce resources really have solved a lot of the pressing global problems of the day and so I know that the world and certainly the United States has a lot to learn from Cuba in many spheres but I was really focused on the urban farming program and how you know Havana is the largest city in the Caribbean and was dependent on external food exports and really looking at how they transformed their food system and became a food producing city of Havana and there's a great documentary about that called the greeting of Cuba by Jamie Kiven and there's another wonderful documentary related to that also called the power of community and it's called the power of community how Cuba survived peak oil and those are both really great docs and if anyone out there's interested I may wrote my master's thesis on it and it's you can it's a called Cultivating Havana it's on the food first website you download it as a PDF so I know we're going to do a lot of links and stuff resources so I can also send you that cultivating share all of these documents on the in the comment section of our face of our post Facebook broadcast yeah and you know this whole thing about like food urban food farming and national literacy campaigns have a lot in common because you know food for all and education for all are still you know are like these huge pressing global problems but that actually have pretty simple solutions if there's political will and good organizing and an equitable distribution of resources and so it's really interesting how Cuba in both instances provides an amazing global model so tell us how you got involved in so we were you studied agriculture but you have produced you just ended up by default I believe researching the Cuban literacy 1961 literacy campaign tell us how you fell into that work and and how you came to produce the film Maestra and share that with our audiences to this this statement that Fidel Castro made at the UN that Cuba post-revolution that Cuba would eradicate illiteracy in a year and in fact did and we still have not achieved that here in the United States so I was I found as I was studying there in the 90s and researching about the community gardens and starting to publish a little bit about it that it was very like almost impossible for people to believe because the figures were just so huge in terms of like 30 000 urban gardens all around the city and hundreds of thousands of people directly involved and they started producing you know at certain point they were producing after several years of building this project you know producing over half of the produce that was eaten in the city and so you know when you it's hard to at that time they know there wasn't really a lot of internet I mean here or there this was in the 90s so internet was not a daily thing in everyone's house it was sort of sparse and hard to remember that time is it but um so you know it was like anyway I just sort of found I was sort of grappling with a saying like what I was finding was think were things that were hard for people in the outside world to believe I mean outside of Cuba right so but I was looking at um this urban farming within the context of this whole social development model of Cuba you know notions of development what is it really how do we learn to think about it looking at UN sustainable development goals and looking at the social development model from Cuba and as I was doing this research it was on urban farming and agriculture but also in other areas and so I came to meet a number of amazing men and women Cuban men and women doing really interesting work in the Cuba of today and several of them along the way mentioned like I went you know met them you know got in touch with them because of what they were doing now but several of them mentioned along the way that they felt like actually the most beautiful thing they ever did despite what professions they may have gone into but they felt like the most beautiful thing they ever did was teach people how to read and write when they were teenagers and after like the third or fourth person said that to me it just sort of struck me and I thought you know there's a larger story here and so I started collecting stories and at first I was just taking notes but then it sort of begged to be an audiovisual story because it was you know the personal stories were so powerful and beautiful and that's what the Maestro film was built upon but also the macro story and what they really achieved and the figures and the indicators were just spectacular so it sort of begged to be a film and so you know it did but you know what I found although I again I started recording personal stories and focus on the stories of the youngest women teachers what and then for the young these these women were high school age high junior high school and some even younger the one when when the revolutionary government said we're gonna eradicate your literacy yes so they that you know the revolutionary government overthrew a US-backed dictator Fulhincia Batista there had been many years of you know really all throughout from from the Spanish-American war until the Cuban Revolution there had always been organized resistance to US domination and so in the 50s there was a lot of you know there was an insurrection and it went for several years and then they were able to kick out Batista and you know the 26th of July movement under leadership Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolution came to power on January 1st 1959 and they already had announced sort of a 10-point platform of which education was one key component and so they started right away you know doing major transformation of the country in all ways urban reform land reform housing reform reform in all these ways and certainly within education and in terms of literacy you know one in six adults in Cuba at the time were illiterate there were six million Cubans on the island at the time and one million of them were deemed illiterate by a census that happened in the 1950s that was not a Cuban revolution of figures so we could safely say that US corporate interests in Cuba had no interest in educating their workers yeah and that's the population that that the Castro government inherited absolutely absolutely absolutely so they inherited this country where one in six people could not read and write and they set out to bring everyone you know they set out to create a national education system that would be free and universal and the first big leap to that was being sure that everyone that had not had the opportunity to gain basic literacy could do it and also I think reframing the whole discussion in terms of not just seeing illiteracy as this individual problem where someone that didn't learn to read and write you know it was their own problem but actually it was everybody's problem there was a social problem those who'd had the opportunity to study and those who hadn't could actually come together and ally together to overcome this massive national problem and I think that is one of the most important things that we have to learn from it's is that that can also be applied to other issues so I was just building a better society as a whole a nation based on social inclusion and not social exclusion and a nation in which education and basic you know in healthcare and you can talk again about other things but you're in terms of come back to healthcare on another level but they say really saying education is for all education is for everyone and you can do it and it's possible and everyone has a role to play even you know really really young kids because what they'd learned by the time they're in third grade could still serve elders that had never been to school so they had this pilot program in 1960 of voluntary teachers that was strong enough and successful enough and starting to gratify the census you know take census up in the rural mountains and in urban shanty towns to the point where Fidel Castro in September of 1960 when he was speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in New York announced to the world that Cuba would become free of illiteracy in one year which is a seemingly impossible claim right I mean even today it seems hard at the time seemed hard so they made an open call for volunteer teachers and a quarter million people volunteered these are men and women old and young urban and rural you know workers the unions organized people the women's federation organized people every institution it was deemed to be the priority of the nation in 1961 and interestingly you know a ton a hundred over a hundred thousand of those volunteers that stepped forward were teenagers and high school age junior high school age and some of them may been younger in the maestro film one of the women we had the opportunity to interview and she's in the maestro film this amazing woman named Griselda Aguilera who has been to the U.S. a couple of she's met with almost all the code pink delegations that have gone to Cuba and you as well and so have I which I have how I met you in Havana right yeah like formally met you um yes but Griselda was seven in 1961 and her parents worked on the literacy campaign and she just insisted on going with them of course they didn't take her seriously they didn't want her to go but she insisted to the point where finally they agreed they let her take the minimal you know teacher test and she passed it because she was in first grade and she had a very advanced reading and writing level for her um age and so what she knew in first grade she was able to teach a man named Carlos Perez Isla who was 58 and was completely illiterate she taught him the alphabet she taught him how to write his name she taught him basic sentences and they had this incredible relationship teacher student relationship like over you know completely switched in terms of ages right so her story is I just a testament to what an incredible experience on a human level like every person that was involved you know how they were touched and transformed so their goal was to do it in a year they taught us over 700 000 people in a year and their goal was to get all these newly literate adults up to a first grade reading level so again it was this first hugely to what became a long-term process of building a national education system and they also had a long-term commitment to ongoing adult education so in 1961 all of these you know men and women across the country seven over 700 000 of them who didn't know how to read and write and got to the first grade reading level that year then after it was over from December the end of December 1961 of all these young teachers marching through Havana it's just like sea is you know a sea of young faces and they're carrying the big paper from a shea pencil the lanterns and the images are so powerful um and really speak to that moment and to that experience well they went on then they started what they called the you know they did a campaign for the third grade and then a campaign for the sixth grade and then a campaign for the ninth grade which was ending in the mid 80s so while the first thing was like this huge you know amazing experience over one year in 1961 it was the priority of the nation that year and every institution was involved in there you know and they and they took years and decades really to get up to ninth grade level through night schools and school um schools and factories and workplaces that were very decentralized and now you know ninth grade is the standard minimum for the country I also just want to say really quickly I don't want to not say that you know the midst of 1961 spring 1961 was when the Bay of Pigs invasion happened so there's an incredible historic Cuban documentary called history of a battle and it starts talking about you know this battle for bringing education to everyone but then they're invaded in the middle and he says that particular you know what would we have been able to do yes in the midst of a literacy campaign the you know Bay of Pigs invasion and they say well he said in the film you know the narrator says imagine what we could have done if we could have only focused on education but Catherine let do you have any idea for your research what let's just talk about the the initial campaign of 1961 just so um our viewers can get an idea of what is possible for a majority illiterate population through volunteerism and the and will of people across society but do you have any idea how what the actual financial cost of this program was I know this will be in 1961 dollars but my understanding is it wasn't like enormous which is a big right right right right right I mean they really I never studied the total cost and I don't even know if they have figures about that it was all probably you know but it was like everyone you know they decentralized was like you know say the the place that was making clothes made their uniforms you know how those they have those little like girl scout boy scout kind of uniforms you know everyone had a uniform the lanterns were donated by China the transportation ministry got people out you know the education ministry definitely dedicated themselves to that best that year the printing presses were printing the teacher guides they you know it's like every institution had a major role to play so they decentralized it and while they did make it so it was a like a priority for resources on the one hand but you know it's not resources that are stopping us from doing it for example you know resources I think it's it's also a testament to the fact that resources aren't you know yes it's great to put your resources there but success or not success in terms of having an education campaign or a literacy campaign resources are not the main thing that are going to make it or break it you know in the U.S. we spend so many resources on education projects that aren't successful and we haven't you know an ongoing one in five low literacy rate in the U.S. one in five and that and in Cuba prior to the revolution it was one in six so that's the statistic people should keep in mind one in five and one of the six that I mean to consider the well in Cuba they brought their literacy rate to 96 percent they said that year so it was like four you know they reduced it from you know 20 percent illiteracy or you know one in six is the figure right to you know four percent of the people and people weren't forced to participate I think that's important also to remember so there was a margin of rural people or urban people like if you didn't want to participate you didn't have to and there were a lot of skepticism at first but as the classes went on and people saw their neighbors like participating and really learning to read and write and these young teachers really were dedicated and the classes were you know bearing fruit more and more people enrolled over the year but they were not obliged to do it so there were people that chose not to and that they that was fine I think that's an important piece of the story is that both the teaching and the learning were voluntary so let's talk about how this project this model has been used elsewhere in the world by I don't know how many countries 30 40 yeah 30 30 countries yep have used a an adult teaching methodology that grew out of that original campaign so you know I think it's also important to say that many many of the young teachers just fell in love with the experience of teaching in that 1961 and many of them went on to be teachers or educators and dedicate their lives to education and teaching in different realms but a small group of them specifically spent their lives working on adult literacy and one of those people is a woman named Leonella release who unfortunately passed away a couple years ago but Leonella release was 14 years old in 1961 and she was one of the original teachers on the 1961 literacy campaign and she spent her entire life working on adult literacy and was the head person on a Cuban team that developed a methodology that is now known as means yes I can and that's been used in over 30 countries around the world one of the most successful applications of it was in Venezuela under the I mean the mission mission Robinson mission Robinson was the first adult literacy program and then they also had continuing like and this program again was introduced by a revolutionary government a government that inherited a significantly large percentage of society that was illiterate yeah and and you know that relate you know the mutually strengthening relationship between Cuba and Venezuela was important on so many levels but this collaboration around the literacy work was really important because Cuba had been so successful in overcoming illiteracy in a short period of time so they did the mission Robinson classes and I believe one million people in Venezuela went through mission Robinson graduated from mission Robinson and then they had a team sort of a Cuban Venezuelan team went to Bolivia and started applying it in Bolivia and I actually went to um and a graduation in Bolivia I think it was in 2007 and an indigenous community called El Alto that had been you know the campaign had been being run by Cubans and Venezuelans and then after their success in Bolivia they were including you know Bolivian people was sort of like snowballing you know and going around Latin America it's also used widely in Brazil and it's their main counterpart in Brazil is the landless movement the MST and the MST has settlements all over the countries that are land occupations and they said that they I was in Brazil last year talking a meeting with some some of them we might do some kind of a collaboration for a um audiovisual documentation of the MST adult literacy programs but they said they're starting to organize farmers and do political education do land occupations they realize that many many many of these farmers and rural families were illiterate so they started doing literacy work as a key component and they're using the yosipuedo so it's been used in Spanish in Spain Mexico Nicaragua the 1980 Nicaragua literacy campaign has a major incorporation of Cuban uh the Cuban literacy campaign methodology as well as like polypathy thinking and literacy teaching and essential american literacy tradition of their own but so it's used in Nicaragua 1980 in Angola um in Spanish speaking world I was talking about Mexico Spain um uh Colombia has used it certainly Venezuela in Bolivia they did spin indigenous languages which is something they've had a lot of commitment to Quechua, Aymada and other indigenous languages um it's been used in Haiti in Haitian Creole in um New Zealand especially in Maori communities and in Australia in Aboriginal communities in Australia and there's actually a website there's been those folks have been really really active and I can send some links around that um the Australian yosipuedo program and also in Canada some of the people that started the Maori community literacy uh projects in New Zealand are now applying it in Canada and First Nations communities in Canada so it's really robust it's really ongoing it's a different they they do a lot you know because of many communities where there are low rates of literacy or high rates of illiteracy also have a chronic lack of teachers so they've what they've done is start to um adapt the teaching content to every specific context and use nouns that are relevant and meaningful to people in their daily lives in every different context and they train facilitators and they use a lot of audio visual support materials um like training you know visual training videos and um some audio files as well as books and they train the facilitators um and they're able to teach basic literacy in a relatively short period of time with a lot of success and then you know people need to keep it up but they're able to get that you know basic level with remarkable success they won a big award from UNESCO um in 2006 in the Cuban program with yes the Cuban program yosipuedo because Venezuela uh was um deemed um free of illiteracy thank you was ready to say two two negatives it was deemed to have eradicated illiteracy by UNESCO I think yeah 2005 or so um so the program is enormously successful and it and it's a fantastic example of what is possible when there is interest and a will of this of society and of the government and so I will just say since Bernie Sanders carried your home state last night in super tuesday that um he clearly understands what's possible as far as reaching all levels of society and and the benefits of having an educated illiterate population and that is just the correct of our growth as a nation of all nations yeah I also you know if we could just it's really interesting to me and I wasn't aware of this to the extent that the the number of indigenous population that this project has reached and of course the indigenous populations across the planet right now are really on the front lines of climate change of environmental activism of anti-neoliberal activism you mentioned in Alto and Bolivia these are really really vulnerable and threatened populations and it's just fascinating to me that the illiteracy programs are reaching into their communities which is a whole which is a whole additional tool for empowerment and engagement yes for them right yeah and I think they've been asking the indigenous communities like did they want to do I'm sorry everyone I think we lost Catherine's wi-fi signal but we are on our 20 30 minute threshold for our our weekly web oh here you are I was just going to say sorry I just say you know this no sorry I just like popped out of my computer it all went for a second so but you know again this you know the the role of yosi puedo in furthering literacy in an indigenous language is a major global contribution it is so is there anything that we should mention before we let our viewers go until next week we you're so gracious in giving us this 30 minutes I mean it's morning for you there in California is there anything we should uh any final comments anything we should close with specifically I guess my my closing comments would be that you know illiteracy is still a major unsolved global problem and it's including the United States including the United States one in five adults is illiterate and there's no reason that we should have those figures in the United States and Cuba proves that it's can be different this is a huge testament to what is possible in terms of literacy in terms of education and in every you know facing every pressing global issue um so we need to drape bigger and we need to keep working to a world where everyone has access to education as well as housing healthcare and basic human services and needs and it's possible we can do it and um gotta work for it and we need we need a government interested in helping us do that starts with us people though it starts in the community is on the ground and then we need to create a government that can help us achieve that so thank you Catherine thank you Terry a great conversation I always so enjoy working with you and I look forward to doing it again and I want to tell our viewers that you can join us next Wednesday 9 a.m. pacific on code pink facebook live 12 p.m. eastern for another episode of what the f is going on in Latin America and tomorrow morning on code pink radio simulcast on wba i new york city wpf w washington dc we will be in conversation um with some us mexico uh border activists so we'll be able to uh to look at what ill how illiteracy contributes to as one of the root causes of migration and that will be the principal conversation tomorrow on code pink radio root causes of migration and so your conversation is a good warm up to that Catherine and we'll see all of you next week thank you again great thank you bye