A Spanish institution digitizes more than 50 20th-century textbooks.
14ymedio, Havana, 16 March 2025 – The text books with which many generations of Cuban children were educated since 1901 can be found today in the Manes archives, a Spanish institute dedicated to the conservation and narration of South American educational thinking. The project, with more than 50 school manuals already digitised, allows us to take the pulse of changes in Cuban pedagogy and their relationship to the political propaganda of each historical era.
According to Manes’s website, the aim of the exhibition is to provide reflection on how teaching has evolved in the island since the end of Spanish dominance. Two German institutes – Leibniz, and Georg Eckert – financed the Cuban historians’ digitisation process.
The material, available free to download, are mostly books on Reading, History and Geography, as well as Morals and Citizenship (two subjects which were key to citizenship training during the Republic), Natural Sciences and Pedagogy. Each one of the original books are kept in the José Martí National Library in Havana.
The oldest records in the collection are those of ’Courses of Study, and Teaching Methods for Public Schools’, printed in 1901 in Havana by the Board of Superintendents of the nascent Republic. This manual attempted to lay the foundations for an education service in a country which, though only recently emerging from war, was ready to “achieve the progress desired” by those who had lost their lives in the wars of the nineteenth century.
The oldest records in the collection are those of ’Courses of Study, and Teaching Methods for Public Schools’
In its preamble, the text denounced the schooling situation in the country, and the “monstrous barbarisms” of the language. The authorities also wanted Cuban children to learn mathematics, so that “those who are able to work out for themselves their exact change (in a shop) won’t be vulnerable to being swindled”.
They also insisted on the study of agriculture – depending on the region – as well as arithmetic, needlework and civic instruction. In this latter subject the syllabus required the teaching of “the need for keeping promises, of always being punctual, of using courteous language, of never using bad language and always using moderate tones in speech”. And to “erase any superstitious behaviour”.
Because of the proximity of the USA to Cuba, children were also to be taught the history of that country, and they argued “the influence of Cuba in the independence of the United States”. In June 1900, whilst this manual was being written, 1000 Cuban teachers attended a Summer School at Harvard, to train in the most up to date pedagogical thinking.
During the following decades, the biggest names in teaching on the island, like Ramiro Guerra, were consolidated. A number of titles authored by Guerra, the most significant Cuban historian of the first quarter of the century, are among those digitised by Manes – titles having such significance that not even Fidel Castro could banish them completely from schools.
Such is the case of his ’Manual of Cuban History’ – a voluminous recounting, in more than 700 pages, of colonial history – which continues to be the text par excellence for the teaching of history on the island, including at university level.
But by 1968, when People & Education published ’My First Book’, by Josefina Díaz Entralgo, the context, just as much political as educative, had completely changed. The content, overseen by a series of education authorities – a fact which is flagged up in an initial note – was aimed at first grade children:
“One, two, three! Soldiers marching!” is one of the slogans that appear, along with a corresponding image, in the first pages of the book, mixed in with elements of daily life. “I’ll be a pioneer”, “The Sierra” – in capital letters, refers to the Sierra Maestra where Fidel Castro’s forces were based – “We are like soldiers with their rifles”, or, “No one must drop out of line”, are some of the other illustrations.
In a few lines, Entralgo sums up what a child of six should learn about the military
In a few lines, Entralgo sums up what a child of six should learn about the military: “Yesterday, a soldier from the Revolutionary Armed Forces came to talk to us in our classroom. He’s our friend. We met him in November when we visited his base… After he left, we children were thinking, ’How brave are those soldiers of the Revolutionary Armed Forces! They love Cuba very much and are always there to protect it”.
“Eusabio’s parents told him that before, life was very bad in the mountains. The people of the Sierra suffered a lot: the children didn’t have school”, says another passage. “But Fidel and the rebel soldiers fought there and now there are many new things in the Sierra. There are roads and hospitals and lots of schools. The Revolution changed life in the mountains. All the people there are happy now”.
The first edition alone of ’My First Book’ – still read in schools until recently – was printed 80,000 times. But beginning with the Congress of Education and Culture in 1971 – the starting shot for a period of repression in schools and cultural centres – school textbooks no longer even attempted to disguise their motive of indoctrination.
Although Manes, founded in 1992, doesn’t have those texts in their collection, other repositories, like that of the Ministry of Education itself do have them, and they facilitate confirmation of the high level of political, ideological and pro-military content that these school textbooks – still in use today – are filled with.
Translated by Ricardo Recluso
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