Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values

Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values
Author: Denise F. Blum
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2011-01-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0292722605

Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Havana's secondary schools, Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values is a remarkable ethnography, charting the government's attempts to transform a future generation of citizens. While Cuba's high literacy rate is often lauded, the little-known dropout rates among teenagers receive less scrutiny. In vivid, succinct reporting, educational anthropologist Denise Blum now shares her findings regarding this overlooked aspect of the Castro legacy. Despite the fact that primary-school enrollment rates exceed those of the United States, the reverse is true for the crucial years between elementary school and college. After providing a history of Fidel Castro's educational revolution begun in 1953, Denise Blum delivers a close examination of the effects of the program, which was designed to produce a society motivated by benevolence rather than materialism. Exploring pioneering pedagogy, the notion of civic education, and the rural components of the program, Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values brims with surprising findings about one of the most intriguing social experiments in recent history.

Youth and the Cuban Revolution

Youth and the Cuban Revolution
Author: Anne Luke
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2018-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1498532071

Youth and the Cuban Revolution: Youth Culture and Politics in 1960s Cuba is a new history of the first decade of the Cuban Revolution, exploring how youth came to play such an important role in the 1960s on this Caribbean island. Certainly, youth culture and politics worldwide were in the ascendant in that decade, but in this pioneering and thought-provoking work Anne Luke explains how the unique circumstances of the newly developing socialist revolution in Cuba created an ethos of youth which becomes one of the factors that explains how and why the Cuban Revolution survives to this day. By examining how youth was constructed and constituted within revolutionary discourse, policy, and the lived experience of young Cubans in the 1960s, Luke examines the conflicted (but ultimately successful) development of a revolutionary youth culture. She explores the fault lines along which the notion of youth was created—between the internal and the external, between discourse and the everyday, between politics and culture. Luke looks at how in the first decade of the Cuban Revolution a young leadership—Fidel, Raúl and Che—were complemented by a group of new protagonists from Cuba’s young generation. These could be literacy teachers, party members, militia members, teachers, singers, poets… all aiming to define and shape the Cuban Revolution. Together young Cubans took part in defining what it meant to be young, socialist and Cuban in this effervescent decade. The picture that emerges is one in which neither youth politics nor youth culture can alone help to explain the first decade of the Revolution; rather through the sometimes conflicted intersection of both there emerged a generation constantly to be renewed—a youth in Revolution.

Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values

Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values
Author: Denise F. Blum
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2011-01-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0292739524

Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Havana's secondary schools, Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values is a remarkable ethnography, charting the government's attempts to transform a future generation of citizens. While Cuba's high literacy rate is often lauded, the little-known dropout rates among teenagers receive less scrutiny. In vivid, succinct reporting, educational anthropologist Denise Blum now shares her findings regarding this overlooked aspect of the Castro legacy. Despite the fact that primary-school enrollment rates exceed those of the United States, the reverse is true for the crucial years between elementary school and college. After providing a history of Fidel Castro's educational revolution begun in 1953, Denise Blum delivers a close examination of the effects of the program, which was designed to produce a society motivated by benevolence rather than materialism. Exploring pioneering pedagogy, the notion of civic education, and the rural components of the program, Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values brims with surprising findings about one of the most intriguing social experiments in recent history.

The Revolution Is for the Children

The Revolution Is for the Children
Author: Anita Casavantes Bradford
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2014-04-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469611546

Since 1959, the Cuban revolutionary government has proudly proclaimed that "the revolution is for the children." Many Cuban Americans reject this claim, asserting that they chose exile in the United States to protect their children from the evils of "Castro-communism." Anita Casavantes Bradford's analysis of the pivotal years between the Revolution's triumph and the 1962 Missile Crisis uncovers how and when children were first pressed into political service by ideologically opposed Cuban communities on both sides of the Florida Straits. Casavantes Bradford argues that, in Havana, the Castro government deployed a morally charged "politics of childhood" to steer a nationalist and reformist revolution toward socialism. At the same time, Miami exile leaders put children at the heart of efforts to mobilize opposition to Castro's regime and to link the well-being of Cuban refugees to U.S. Cold War foreign policy objectives. Casavantes Bradford concludes that the 1999 Elian Gonzalez custody battle was the most notorious recent manifestation of the ongoing struggle to define and control Cuban childhood, revealing the persistent centrality of children to Cuban politics and national identity.

Inside the Cuban Revolution

Inside the Cuban Revolution
Author: Julia Sweig
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674044193

Sweig shatters the mythology surrounding the Cuban Revolution in a compelling revisionist history that reconsiders the revolutionary roles of Castro and Guevara and restores to a central position the leadership of the Llano. Granted unprecedented access to the classified records of Castro's 26th of July Movement's underground operatives--the only scholar inside or outside of Cuba allowed access to the complete collection in the Cuban Council of State's Office of Historic Affairs--she details the debates between Castro's mountain-based guerrilla movement and the urban revolutionaries in Havana, Santiago, and other cities.

Fidel in the Cuban Socialist Revolution

Fidel in the Cuban Socialist Revolution
Author: José Bell Lara
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2019-12-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004415734

The book makes accessible a selection of speeches and television appearances by Fidel Castro during the first two years of the Cuban Revolution, allowing for a fresh analysis of his ideological evolution towards socialism.

Cuba And The Revolutionary Myth

Cuba And The Revolutionary Myth
Author: C. Fred Judson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2021-11-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429716508

This volume provides is a look at the social function of myth during two distinct phases of the Cuban revolutionary process. The first period spanned the years of armed struggle, from 1953 through 1958, a time during which the rebel leadership prevailed. Moving onto the years between 1959 and 1963, the achievements during the revolutionary war, and particularly the deeds of the Rebel Army, in which sacrifice and measure of heroism whose function was to sustain morale and consciousness.