Socialism and education in Cuba and Soviet Uzbekistan

Abstract

During the Cold War over half a million Asians, Africans and Latin Americans studied and graduated in the Soviet Union's universities and technical schools as part of this country's educational aid policies. Cuba was an intermediary player in the Cold War geopolitical contest between the United States and the Soviet Union, fuelled by the imposition of the US embargo on Cuba in 1961 and its subsequent alignment with the socialist bloc. Cuba was a recipient of educational aid from 1961 until 1990. Current studies about Soviet educational aid to less-developed countries generally, and the Cuban case in particular, are mainly based on the analysis of state policies and intercountry agreements. There is a lack of personal student recollections among this research. In this paper, the author uses an autoethnographic approach to reflect on her schooling in Cuba and university studies in 1980s socialist Uzbekistan. The reflections and analysis focus on three themes: universal access to education, comprehensive or integral education, and socialist political formation through education. The article critiques the rhetoric and practice of socialist education in these contexts, and shows how traditional pedagogy both supported and undermined official and broader educational objectives. It argues that the main aims of Soviet and Cuban educational programmes to train the new socialist technical elite for the Third World achieved mixed results, producing well-educated graduates with uneven ideological outcomes.

Keywords:

• socialism
• Cuba
• Soviet Union
• secondary education
• tertiary education
• Soviet development aid

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Barbara Kamler for her useful comments on an early draft of this article. My thanks also to the anonymous reviewers and the editors Tom Griffiths and Zsuzsa Millei for their help and support. This paper is dedicated to Xoce Raul Infante Alonso (1964–2011), a missed friend from the Cuban and Soviet adventurous times.

Notes

1. For Cubans, particularly those who grew up under the Cuban Revolution, its leader Fidel Castro is always referred to by the personal ‘Fidel’ rather than ‘Castro’.

2. IPVCE – Instituto Preuniversitario Vocacional de Ciencias Exactas.

3. While entry into the IPVCEs like ‘The Lenin’ commenced immediately after primary school, and so covered lower and upper (pre-university) secondary schooling, from 1984 these selective schools only provided schooling at the upper-secondary level (years 9–12).

4. See comments in the Lenin students’ section of the website: http://www.lalenin.com.

5. The Lenin school was divided into six unidades (units) or mini schools. Unidades one to three were for junior secondary including years 7–9 in each mini school. The swimming pools and the cultural facilities museum and movies divided physically the school landscape into two sections. On the other side were the unidades 4–6, of senior high school or pre-university that consisted of years 10 to 12. The school has roughly between 4500 and 5000 students.

6. URSS means USSR in Spanish: Unión de Repúblicas Socialistas Soviéticas.

7. I returned to Tashkent and saw her in 2002, where with pride and anguish she said: ‘I am still here, teaching with my other friends [well experienced Russian women lecturers]. I won't leave the Faculty until they force me to retire’. Locally born and bred ethnic Russians, like Nina Petrovna, are becoming a rarity in Tashkent, following the post-Soviet ‘Uzbekization’ process of everything in Tashkent that provoked the mass migration of non-Uzbek ethnic minorities. In 1989, 1,600,000 Russians lived in Uzbekistan; half of that population lived in the capital city Tashkent. By 1994, 277,500 Russians had emigrated from Uzbekistan. A decade later, their numbers had decreased to a million (Olcott 1996; Flynn 2007, 269).

8. The Law of Ideological Deviationism was a loose judicial decree that punished everything and everyone who did not follow the official Marxist-Leninist ideology. Some authors have called it the ‘law against the wrong thought’ (Kerrigan 1995, 507).

9. ESTI Equipo de Servicios de Traductores e Intérpretes (the Cuban government's translation and interpretation agency).